For first-year History and Classics Ph.D. students. This course explores ideas and debates that have animated historical discourse and shaped historiographical practice over the past half-century or so. The works we will be discussing raise fundamental questions about how historians imagine the past as they try to write about it, how they constitute it as a domain of study, how they can claim to know it, and how (and why) they argue about it.
5 units · Letter (ABCD/NP)
For first-year History and Classics Ph.D. students. This course explores ideas and debates that have animated historical discourse and shaped historiographical practice over the past half-century or so. The works we will be discussing raise fundamental questions about how historians imagine the past as they try to write about it, how they constitute it as a domain of study, how they can claim to know it, and how (and why) they argue about it.
Offered in Autumn 2026 at Stanford University.