Teaching
Image: King of the Opium Ring, 1899 (Library of Congress, //hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/var.1126)
The Informal — Economics, Politics, and Social Ties in the City
Graduate Colloquium
This course engages the paradox of the informal; the range of political practices, social ties, and economic modalities seemingly in but not of ‘formal’ institutions, norms, and sectors. We engage foundational debates on the informal, debates that challenge the neat separation between the formal and informal, and which sharpen the conceptual differences between the ‘informal,’ the ‘illicit,’ and the ‘underground.’ Readings consist of theory, a handful of primary sources, and mostly secondary readings on cities that cut across different political economic contexts, and chronological and geographical boundaries. Themes include urban space, race, gender, borders, intimacy, policing, and regulation. Along the way we’ll consider the problem of the archive (its silences and elisions), as well as the normative judgments that frame historical interpretations of the informal.
Image: “Picking, in the Land of King Cotton,”. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1898-1931. (//digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-a0ef-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99)
The Old History of Capitalism
Undergraduate Lecture
Spanning the colonization of North America to the era of mass incarceration, this lecture revisits a body of scholarship penned by people of Afro-descent who probed the intimacy between race and capitalism. Topics include the slave trade, indigenous dispossession, antebellum slavery, the Mexican-American War, “new imperialism,” the racial welfare state, and the war on drugs. This class neither presumes a background in economics, nor previous coursework in history. Open to 1st-3rd year students.
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The Politics of Housing
Third-Year Colloquium for History Major
This course examines the struggle of Americans to find and access housing from the first Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century to the Gilded Age of the present. Beginning from the idea that housing is more than a place where people live, we address the ways in which shelter is bound up with race, gender, labor, law, consumption, and immigration.
We spend half our time discussing such topics as company towns, suburbanization, and gentrification. The remainder is devoted to discussing historiographical approaches and research techniques. We will also engage with a variety of historical documents. Students will be expected to conduct original research and produce a fifteen to twenty page research paper.
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Image: “Backyard of Negro Dwelling,” 1935 (http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8a00134)
Image: Liberty Bond Campaign, 1917 (Wikicommons)
Governance through Debt
Graduate Colloquium
This course explores how government debt, whether that repudiated during Reconstruction, used to finance municipal infrastructure, or issued by the World Bank to stimulate development across the globe, shaped matters of governance, sovereignty, and inequality. Readings consist of some theory, a handful of primary sources, and mostly secondary readings that cut across chronological, geographical, and political boundaries.
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Histories of Racial Capitalism
Undergraduate/Graduate Colloquium
This seminar takes as its starting point the insistence that the movement, settlement, and hierarchical arrangements of people of African descent is inseparable from regimes of capital accumulation. It builds on the concept of “racial capitalism,” which rejects treatments of race as external to a purely economic project and counters the idea that racism is an externality, cultural overflow, or aberration from the so-called real workings of capitalism. This course will cover topics such as racial slavery, banking in the Caribbean, black capitalism in Miami, the under-development of Africa, and the profitability of mass incarceration.
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Image: “Little Africa on Fire,” June 1921 (Wikicommons)
Image: “Old King Coal’s Crown in Danger,” September 1902 (//hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.25671)
America in World Civilizations III: The Twentieth Century
Civilization Core
What conditions have shaped inclusion and exclusion from the category “American” in the twentieth century? Is political equality the same as social equality? Who has claimed citizenship, and under what conditions were such claims realized and negated? The third quarter of America in World Civilization focuses on multiple definitions of Americanism in a period characterized by empire, transnational formations, and America's role in the world. We explore the construction of social order in a multicultural society; culture in the shadow of war; the politics of race, ethnicity, and gender; the rise and fall of new social movements on the left and the right; the emergence of the carceral state; the seemingly endless wars on crime, drugs, and terror; and the role of climate breakdown in shaping imagined futures.