Human rights and humanitarianism are fundamental to modern political ethics. Yet the moral consensus surrounding these terms obscures an often disturbing history. This course is an introduction to human rights and humanitarianism as frameworks for understanding European, imperial, and global history from the enlightenment to the present day. Rather than uncritically accepting a triumphalist narrative, we will explore how these concepts were constructed over time, asking how they were used in practice, whose interests they served, and how they enabled inequality and exclusion along axes of race, gender, class, and nationality even as they promised a more just world.... Read more about Human Rights and Humanitarianism in the Modern World

In this course, we will explore the political and politicized lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer peoples living in the United States since World War II. Centering both an intersectional analysis and historical critique of “progress,” we will focus our attention on the interrelationship between protest (how LGBTQ people have organized themselves and expressed their demands in the face of systemic oppression), politics (how LGBTQ people have navigated the “culture wars”), and policy (how LGBTQ people have shaped and been shaped by laws and legislation) across the Homophile Generation (1940s and 1950s), Stonewall Generation (1960s and 1970s), AIDS Generation (1980s and 1990s), and Marriage Generation (2000s to present).... Read more about Queer Nation: LGBTQ Protest, Politics, and Policy in the United States