Graduate courses in Classics History

(Same as CLASSHIS 106.) Multidisciplinary, heuristic approach. How to piece together the worldview of life and death during the Eastern Han dynasty and subsequent Three Kingdoms period; the emergence of a new elite that would dominate the sociopolitical landscapes of medieval China and the birth of the Silk Road, the world's first international highway of commerce, culture, and religion. Sources include: materials and methods of archaeology, history, textual studies, and art history to interpret excavated evidence; and visual and interactive resources.

4-5 units, Win (Staff), given once only

CLASSHIS 237. Models of Democracy

(Same as CLASSHIS 137, COMM 212, COMM 312, POLISCI 237, POLISCI 337.) Ancient and modern varieties of democracy; debates about their normative and practical strengths and the pathologies to which each is subject. Focus is on participation, deliberation, representation, and elite competition, as values and political processes. Formal institutions, political rhetoric, technological change, and philosophical critique. Models tested by reference to long-term historical natural experiments such as Athens and Rome, recent large-scale political experiments such as the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly, and controlled experiments.

3-5 units, Spr (Fishkin, J; Ober, J; Luskin, R)

CLASSHIS 307. Introduction to Papyrology

Topics research methods, documentary and literary texts that survive and the history of their interpretation, paleography of Greek papyri, and interconnections between Greek and demotic source material.

3-5 units, offered occasionally

CLASSHIS 312. Big Ancient History

(Same as HISTORY 311G.) How the shift away from thinking about European history in terms of a western civilization model toward embedding it in stories of how global history affects research and teaching on ancient Greece and Rome. Conventional, evolutionary, and global history narratives of the past 5,000 to 15,000 years and some new ideas about how Greco-Roman history might fit into different storylines.

4-5 units, Spr (Morris, I)

CLASSHIS 332. High-Stakes Politics: Case Studies in Political Philosophy, Institutions, and Interests

(Same as POLISCI 331.) Normative political theory combined with positive political theory to better explain how major texts may have responded to and influenced changes in formal and informal institutions. Emphasis is on historical periods in which catastrophic institutional failure was a recent memory or a realistic possibility. Case studies include Greek city-states in the classical periodand the northern Atlantic community of the 17th and 18th centuries including upheavals in England and the American Revolutionary era.

4-5 units, Win (Ober, J; Weingast, B)

CLASSHIS 333. Classical Seminar: Origins of Political Thought

(Same as CLASSHIS 133, HUMNTIES 321, POLISCI 230A, POLISCI 330A.) Political philosophy in classical antiquity, focusing on canonical works of Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Historical background. Topics include: political obligation, citizenship, and leadership; origins and development of democracy; and law, civic strife, and constitutional change.

5 units, Win (Ober, J)

CLASSHIS 365. The First Great Divergence: Late Antique and Early Medieval Europe and China

Divergences in long-term trends in state formation in E. and W. Eurasia after the fall of the Roman and Han empires: contexts, causes, and consequences. Students attend presentations of the Mellon Sawyer seminar. See http://classics.stanford.edu/news/divergence.

4-5 units, not given this year

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Stanford Bulletin, Archive 2008-09

Stanford Bulletin, Archive 2008-09

Alphabetical Index

Bulletin Archive

Graduate courses in Classics History