2026 - 2027 Curriculum

Thematically, this course will focus on the historical, literary, artistic, and philosophical issues raised during The Long Nineteenth Century (1789-1914). Practically, it will concentrate on the skills and the information students will need to pursue MLA graduate work at Stanford: writing a critical, argumentative graduate paper; conducting library research; presenting a concise oral summary of work accomplished; actively participating in a seminar. Readings and assignments will include Austen, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Balzac, Douglass, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Lincoln, Darwin, Woolf, Hughes, as well as selected poetry and critical writings. The course will culminate in a research paper and a presentation of each students' findings.

This course will introduce students to select moments in San Francisco history through the analysis of primary sources, including maps, photographs, film and video, literature, and music. Much of our class time will be devoted to analyzing sources as a way to generate historical questions and begin finding answers. The class aims to offer students a taste of the city’s history, as well as an introduction to methods that can be used for historical inquiry as well as in a broad range of other disciplines. The final session will take place in the Barchas Room of Green Library, where students will have access to original materials relating to San Francisco history from Stanford’s Special Collections.

This course is One Unit, graded S/NC
Course is open to MLA students who have already completed MLA 102.

"Great is the power of memory, a fearful thing," St. Augustine wrote in The Confessions. "O my God, a deep and boundless manifoldness; and this things is the mind, and this I am myself." Who we are, Augustine seems to suggest, is the sum of what we remember. One of the reasons that a condition such as Alzheimer's disease is such a terrifying prospect for so many of us is that it appears to rob us not only of our future but also of our past, of our very selves. 

Yet as much as we cherish our memories, we also know that they are often unreliable. Different witnesses remember the same events differently. Memories change over time. We forget things and, perhaps more surprising, we sometimes remember things that did not occur, at least not in the way we imagine. We elide distinct events and (if research on the unreliability of "eyewitness" testimony is to be believed) we are also highly susceptible to suggestion. There is even research to suggest that the very act of recalling and recounting an event alters the substance of what we remember. 

The problems multiply when we move from the level of individual to the collective, to the ways in which social groups -- families, institutions, nations -- remember and recount their pasts. What are the dynamics of "collective memory." Why do certain historical events become part of our shared patrimony while others are marginalized and forgotten? Who decides? How do disputes over historical memory reflect and contribute to political conflicts in the present? (Think, for example, of recent battles in the United States over Confederate monuments, or the ongoing political assault on the independence of the Smithsonian Institution.) In short, what are the politics of historical memory? 

In recent years, these questions have animated a new subfield in the discipline of History, what one might call "historical memory studies." Historians working in this field are often less interested in determining "what actually happened" than in exploring the dynamics of historical memory, the ways in which particular events are remembered and recounted by different groups at different times. Perhaps not surprisingly, the field has had a particularly dramatic role to play in what one might call 'historically divided' societies, societies riven by racial and ethnic rivalries or living in the shadow of grievous crimes. 

In this course, we will explore the fast developing field of memory studies. We will use a case study method, examining not only different societies but also some of the different arenas in which collective memory is expressed and contested, including historic sites, monuments and memorials, historical textbooks, and museums. Students will identify cases of their own to study in detail.

We live in interesting times. International Order and Disorder invites students to explore the human quest for order in a disorderly world. Specifically, we will explore (1) the idea-foundations and institutions of political order; (2) the history of international order and disorder, particularly over the past two centuries; (3) the current unravelling of the Liberal International Order built under American leadership in the aftermaths of the Second World War and Cold War; and (4) scenarios for the future of world (dis)order. The seminar aims at a deep and textured historical, conceptual, and comparative examination of human attempts – successful and unsuccessful – to establish, maintain, and adapt international orders. Through shared engagement with texts drawn from political theory, international relations, security studies, and memoir, it seeks to explore different logics of order and to explain the history of international relations in the modern era. Attention will be paid to the dominant role played by European (and later American) conceptions of international relations, but also to nonterritorial, Sinocentric, and Islamic international societies that point to alternative modes of world politics. As such, the seminar seeks to equip MLA students with a unique set of tools with which to navigate our tumultuous era.