Time Travel: Pasts, Places, and Possibilities

Is the past dead or alive? Where do we find it? What possibilities emerge when we discover it? This course explores how people think and live with history in the present, how different places can harbor different times, and how movement between them can create the effect of time travel. We will read monographs that bring the historian's concern with chronology, historicity, and change into dialogue with the anthropological themes of ritual, myth, and kinship. By synthesizing anthropological and historical approaches to time, we will learn how to build temporally capacious perspectives that unsettle commonplace divisions such as medieval-modern, colonial-postcolonial, and imperial-national. Prerequisite: By consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.