79-703 Proseminar in Transnational History

12 units, Carnegie Mellon University

This seminar will critically examine scholarship that attempts to write through and across boundaries of nationstates, geographical regions, and empires in the context of the Americas ca. 1750 to the present. We will read works that use transboundary frameworks and methodologies in the areas of cultural, environmental, labor, and geopolitical histories. We will consider how historians and other scholars using such frameworks shed new light or not on the movements of people, goods, ideas, capital, and nonhumans across boundaries and the historical significance of these movements. In addition to reading notable works in transy history, we will engage with scholarly debates regarding the scope, scale, methods and politics involved with doing bordercrossing historical research. The seminar will be structured to provide opportunities for participants to practice articulating their ideas in both oral and written forms, formal and less formal. The seminar is intended to be useful to anyone interested in exploring paradigms for transnational research, in history or other disciplines.

Prerequisites: none listed

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