Students enjoying Professor Conger's class, Fall 2018
Students enjoying Professor Conger's class, Fall 2018
The seminar assesses the twentieth and twenty-first century evolution of national and transnational identities and their impact on society and culture. We review and assess constructed memories and competing narratives with a focus on the lands and peoples of the former USSR and Eastern and Central Europe. These social and cultural transformations are also evaluated through a study of realities of everyday life and values.
Many of our great historical texts involve travel in some way. From Herodotus to ibn-Battuta, al-Biruni to Richard Burton, the traveler’s gaze has opened new worlds, introduced new peoples, and structured the way we view large parts of the globe. Travel literature remains an important method for accessing the past and present of other cultures. In this seminar, we will explore the role of travel and travel writing in history. We will read classic traveler’s accounts, modern travel narratives, and contemporary tourist guides to examine how travel and tourism both create and become implicated in the historical and cultural representations of societies around the world. As a seminar, this course will also provide students the opportunity to produce a major research paper of their own design and implementation. The paper will be a minimum of 25 pages, involve in-depth primary and secondary source analysis, and critical historiography.