LGTBQ World History

Catalog description

This course focuses on the history, contributions, and experiences of gender and sexually-diverse individuals throughout world history, with particular emphasis on nonwestern cultures. It broadly explores changes and debates within the field of history as a whole and the stakes of centering historical analysis on individuals often overlooked or erased by mainstream history writing. The course will balance big-picture discussions with case studies drawn from the instructor’s geographic expertise. These will include examples of precolonial LGBTQ history, how nonwestern cultures conceptualized gender and sexual diversity, the fraught imperial and colonial periods, and contemporary historians’ efforts to diversify curriculums and public knowledge. Students will research a related topic of their choice and develop a final project that can take the form of a research proposal, a teaching unit, or a presentation for the public (such as a film proposal, informative website, podcast series, etc).