Bruce Calder, Encounters: The Tropical Atlantic World
Spain and Portugal played a pioneering role in the creation of the Atlantic world, with small European populations attempting to impose control over the Indian and African slave majority. Early Atlantic empires justified conquest and slavery as the expansion of the "true faith" over populations of heathens and infidels, drawing upon traditions of holy war, forced conversions, and religious violence in the Mediterranean. Spanish and Portuguese empires combined the promise of assimilation through conversion with distinctions of difference based on religion, culture, and descent. Even after the shift from religious classifications to ones based on evolutionary models and race, the legacy of imperial rule continued to shape the emerging nation-states of Latin America.
For the period after the 18th century, our attention will fall on American side of the tropical Atlantic world, where elite groups generally tried to preserve many of the characteristics of colonial life. Typical of the new Latin American nations and of the surviving colonial structures of the Caribbean area were hierarchical social structures, inequitable economic structures based on the elite's monopolization of land and other resources, exploitative labor systems, and political structures closed to all but the wealthy.   These exploitative systems, colonial, neo-colonial and modern, were continually challenged by subaltern groups. The class will focus on understanding imperial and elite structures and the efforts of individuals and groups that confronted and sometimes defeated or at least modified these structures. Readings will examine struggles centered on race, identity, elite and popular culture, class, and labor systems. An important and complicating element is the presence of foreign interlopers, ranging from colonial conquerors and rulers to more recent arrivals, including merchants and investors, immigrants, missionaries, and modern imperialists from Europe, Asia, the Middle East and especially North America.

Gosia Fidelis, Elspeth Carruthers and Richard Levy, Poles, Jews, and Germans. The Problems of Proximity?
Through the centuries, historic Polish lands were home to a large and diverse multi-national community. Before the idea of the homogenous nation-state took root in east-central Europe, many ethnic and religious groups lived side by side, interacted every day, and shared the territory and often the political loyalty to the Polish king. This course addresses encounters of three such groups, Poles, Jews, and Germans from the Middle Ages to the present. How did these three communities co-exist? How did they identify themselves prior to the rise of modern nationalism? How did these groups come to perceive themselves as distinct and profoundly different from one another? How did the Poles and Germans come to identify the Jews as “the other”? Why did some Jews identify with German rather than Polish culture? What are the main historiographical debates addressing the issues of Polish-Jewish-German relations?
Topics include early Slavic and Germanic settlements, Jewish and German migrations, territorial expansion of the Teutonic Order (and later Prussia), ethnic relations in German-dominated Poland in the 19th century, territorial disputes after World War I, the question of Jewish and German minorities in interwar Poland, Nazi imperialism and occupation of Poland, the Holocaust, the postwar expulsion of Germans from Poland, and issues of historical memory.

Kirk Hoppe, Colloquium on World History
This course is an introduction to the emerging field of the New World History. We will explore overlapping issues of theory and method while building a framework of content. World History is not the history of everything everywhere, but represents a number of contested approaches to history emphasizing global links and interactions, and historic ideas, processes or experiences important to or impacting on cultures globally, as opposed to histories of cultures in isolation.  While it is necessary to work with both content and theory simultaneously, this course will focus more on method and theory with the assumption that you will accumulate content through you own particular interests and broader research.
The New World History is thematically driven and this course is divided into thematic units such as meta-geography, world systems, frontiers and hybridity , imperialisms, and industrialization. Most units will address both theory and method in combinations that are not necessarily intrinsically connected, but provide coverage of important issues and approaches to teaching World History. Major questions we will address include: What is World History? What are the debates about directions the field is going in and should go in? What are strengths and weaknesses, pedagogically, methodologically and theoretically, to different approaches to World History? What kinds of primary and secondary sources are important to the field? How do categories of critical analysis such as class, race, gender, nation, and generation apply in a global context? This course is directed both to students interested in the teaching of World History, and to students interested in World History as a new field that is greatly influencing current research directions throughout the discipline.

Laura Hostetler, Imperial Cartographies
Designed to familiarize graduate students in history with the literature on imperial cartographies, this course provides an introduction to both the theoretical literature and to a range of studies on imperial cartographies in various parts of the world. Our focus is primarily on the early modern period, but reaches into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well.

George Huppert, European Encounters with a Wider World
The chronological framework of this seminar is the early modern period in European and World history. The focus will be on first encounters, mostly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with African, American and Asian societies, as observed and recorded by Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and Italian travelers, merchants and captains in command of sea-borne expeditions. The Hakluyt Society's massive program of publications assembles many of the key sources in English or in English translation. These volumes can be found in the UIC Library. However the chief resource in the United States for research in this field is the Ayer Collection at the Newberry Library.

James Searing, Colonies and Empires: European Overseas Empires in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, 1700-1960
This reading course for “Encounters” explores the relations between colonies and empires over the course of two distinct periods: the Atlantic empires from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries;, and the “second” empires of France and Great Britain in Asia and Africa from 1830 to the era of decolonization. The course is divided into three sections: Atlantic empires, the French empire in Africa , and the British Empire in India and Africa. Key interlinked themes of the course are creolization and nationalism, slavery and emancipation, and the distinction between citizens and subjects in European empires. As a result the course is designed for students who are interested in the topic of nationalism; the role of race, culture and religion in defining imperial “citizens” and “subjects”; and the political history of imperialism and decolonization.
The Atlantic period is crucial for understanding the history of modern Empires. The colonies of settlement founded by European states unexpectedly led to the emergence of new independent nation-states during the age of revolution (1770s-1840s). The first “decolonization” was fueled by the emergence of new “creole” identities, by imperial war and rivalries, by conflicts over “citizenship,” all of which were intensified by fundamental role of slavery and race in the Atlantic colonies.
The second empires created by Great Britain and France in Africa and Asia tried to avoid the fate of the earlier Atlantic colonies of settlement by granting overseas Europeans political rights and privileges based on race and civilization, while denying the same rights to imperial subjects largely formed from conquered “native” populations. The new empires proclaimed a “civilizing mission” while systematically using race, religion, and ethnicity as markers of difference for their imperial subjects. Imperial administration and systems of law systematically defined and manipulated the “native identities” that justified the subjugation of imperial subjects while upholding British or French Civilization as a universal ideal. These imperial policies shaped the ideology of the “nationalist” movements that spearheaded the process of decolonization after World War II. The course ends with an examination of the violent upheavals that put an end to empire in the period from 1945-1960 in Algeria, India, and Kenya.

Javier Villa-Flores, Memory, Power and the Archive in Latin American History

Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Encounters Research Seminar on Empires
Empires are of course central to Encounters and this research seminar provides students with the opportunity to research and write a substantial paper (25-30pp) on a topic related to imperialism. This is understood in the broadest sense, relating to any empire anywhere at any time, and also incorporates topics such as imperial decline, liberation struggles or postcolonial legacies. Students will be able to define their own research topics, but should take on board the implications of ‘encounters’ between different peoples, cultures, and continents in the context of imperialism. We will begin by reading a few classic texts such as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Edward Said’s Orientalism as well as recent work on postcolonialism and race theory.

Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, The British Empire from the 17th Century
In 1939, Great Britain claimed sovereignty over approximately a quarter of the world's land area and population, with outposts on every inhabited continent on the globe. From small beginnings in the seventeenth century, the empire grew to become the dominant power in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, with a major share of the transatlantic slave trade. Before the abolition of the trade in 1807, the British carried more slaves across the Atlantic than all the other European empires combined. The American Revolution resulted in the loss of the thirteen American colonies and in the nineteenth century India became Britain 's most highly prized possession, the so-called jewel in the crown. Britain reshaped India 's economy and politics, and left a legacy across South Asia, the Caribbean, Africa and Australia. With further territories acquired after the First World War, the British had possessions in nearly all the time zones of the world at the outbreak of the Second World War – quite literally, the sun never set on them. Nonetheless, in the two decades following the end of the war, the empire collapsed with only a few tiny remnants left at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Empires are of course central to ‘Encounters' and this course surveys the history of the biggest of the European empires from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Drawing on a variety of methodologies and perspectives, the course will explore what the empire, and its rapid disintegration, meant to the British. It will also trace the history of the colonies focusing on the complex relationship between the British and the diverse peoples they claimed to govern.