This second year module 30 CAT offers an introduction to early moderm and modern European Jewish history. We will chart the development of both Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewry, noting the important social, religious, cultural, and political characteristics of each community. We will investigate how European Jewish communities responded to the demands of an ever-modernizing world. We will explore the Jewish experience from the middle ages to the rise of Hasidism, Haskallah (Jewish enlightenment), reform Judaism, Jewish nationalism, and the emergence of secular Judaism. We will also discuss the Shoah as one of the modern Jewish experiences, but not its endpoint. While the course explores Jewish history from the European perspective, the course will touch on postcolonial and global aspects of modern Jewish history.
Overview
Why do many European and American museums contain large collections of human skulls? Why are some diseases associated with particular ethnic groups? And why does facial recognition software perform significantly worse when trying to identify people of African descent?
In this 15 CAT second-year module, we explore these questions through the long history of the relationship between race and science. We begin in the sixteenth century, with colonisation of the Americas and the rise of Atlantic slavery, and move right through to the present. In the process, we explore the historical development of various racial sciences, from anatomy and psychology through to anthropology and genetics. Throughout the course, there is an emphasis on exploring the relationship between race and science as part of a global history. We cover the history of racial science, not just in Europe and the United States, but also in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific.
Reflecting recent developments in the field, this course emphasises the agency of colonised, enslaved, and indigenous people in resisting and reworking the relationship between science and race, both in the past and present. Finally, this course confronts the legacies of racial science, questioning how society could better respond to these histories today.
No prior knowledge of either the history of race or the history of science is required to take this module.
Module Convenor: Dr Rosie Doyle (R.Doyle.1@warwick.ac.uk)
Office Hours: Tuesdays 12:30-13:30 on Wednesdays 9:30-10:30 Microsoft Teams and/or in person.
In global histories of human rights Latin American nations and Latin Americans often appear as victims rather than possessors of a unique tradition of rights. Research suggests unique tradition of human rights took shape in Latin America from the 1940s at least, and some see the 1970s as the watershed moment for the emergence of human rights as we understand them today. Latin American governments and diplomats were central to the processes which established the international human rights system in the 1940s. The ideas about civil, political, social and economic rights that Latin Americans brought, and continue to bring, to the debating table were the result of a tradition developed through processes of revolution and reform since independence in the early nineteenth century. Some studies trace the tradition of rights in Latin America back to the colonial period and developments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
As current issues of rights to security, migrant rights and indigenous rights and rights to self- determination and autonomy take centre stage in Latin American political and social life, this 30 CATS final-year Advanced Option module analyses the development of rights in the region in historical perspective. It looks at the relationship between rights, colonialism, democracy, liberalism, imperialism, development, citizenship and sovereignty. It analyses the range of civil, political, socio-economic and cultural rights as imagined by national and international institutions as well as citizens and social movements and their interplay with notions of, race, class and gender. It does so through an exploration of the processes of colonisation, constitution-making, state-building, reform, revolution and resistance and Latin American states’ and citizens' involvement in the international human rights system and transnational movements of resistance and rights in the twentieth-century. It looks at the relationship between human rights and the alternatives of solidarity and social justice.
Students will analyse the current literature on rights, the historiography as well a broad range of primary sources. The module, takes a chronological approach starting with the colonial period but focusing particularly on the history of rights since Independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The module ends with a series of seminars discussing the themes associated with human rights and looking at the way rights have been looked at in the research.
Content Warning: This course contains material about violence and abuse. Please be aware that you and your peers may find some of the material disturbing and challenging.
There is 1, 2-hour seminar per week.