Fall Quarter 2026

New and Topical Courses:

HISA 110. Modern India and South Asia (4 units)

This course is a survey of the history of India and South Asia since c. 1750. It provides the historical depth to understand contemporary South Asia through a historical inquiry into the making and multiple meanings of modernity. It explores the history, culture, and political economy of the subcontinent, which provides a fascinating laboratory to study such themes as colonialism, nationalism, partition, the modern state, economic development, religious identities, and center-region problems.

HISA 122. History and Literature in South Asia (4 units)

This course analyzes the history of South Asia through an engagement with the diverse pre-modern and modern literary traditions of the region. Reading translations from multiple South Asian languages across centuries, the course situates literary discourse in historical context, as well as trains students to study literature as historical sources.

Freshman Seminars:

Gunpowder, China, and the Rise of the West: We will read The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West (Princeton University Press, 2017), by historian Tonio Andrade, and some related material from Ming times (1368-1644). Andrade offers a new, fact-based answer to the old question of why Europe colonized parts of Asia rather than vice-versa, informed by primary sources from both sides.

Pandemics, Panics, and Plagues: Human Responses to Inhuman Catastrophes: An exploration of the role that pandemic and epidemic illness has played in human history, focusing on the different ways in which people have responded to their fears, their mortality, their uncertainty about the causes of contagion, and their disastrous losses. We will study contemporaneous accounts from the distant and recent past, coupled with historical analyses and fictional depictions, to understand the struggle to survive, control, and recover from the onslaught of deadly infections.

What Is Socialism? (And What Isn't): Socialism has recently become a very hot topic in American politics -- something that people are fighting for and fighting against. Conservatives, libertarians, and others on the political "right" continue their long tradition of rejecting as "socialism" a wide range of policies they do not like. But many progressives and others on the "left," inspired by Bernie Sanders and like-minded activists, have recently started to embrace this label (after running away from it in the past).