Professor Tamara Chaplin

Tues, 3:00PM - 4:50PM

“Theory”—love it or hate it, social theory provides the epistemological framework through which historians, sociologists and other scholars in the humanistic and social science disciplines conceptualize our world. But what is social theory? How does it relate to historical practices? Are history and social theory fundamentally incompatible? How might social theory bolster historical work? Our goal will be to develop a “theoretical toolbox” that is both available and useful to us as historians, scholars, and educators. We will examine canonical 19th and 20th century social theory, as well as postmodern, feminist, postcolonial and queer critical approaches. Our readings will draw on the scholarship of scholars like Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Freud, Gramsci, Adorno, Habermas, Geertz, Goffman, Bourdieu, Althusser, Kuhn, Foucault, Lyotard, Scott, Butler, Fanon, Bhaba, Halberstam and Ahmed. Work includes producing short critical responses, leading discussion, and writing one longer paper.