The University of Chicago
Teaching
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Constantin Fasolt
The University of Chicago
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First of all, there are some very elementary pieces of advice
about things to do and things to avoid if you want to succeed in
graduate school—things like meeting deadlines, keeping a
bibliography, and taking notes—a very brief introduction to the
historiography of early modern Europe, and a schematic roadmap through the PhD program in early
modern European history, which explains what you need to do
in which year and in which quarter in order to avoid wasting any
time and effort while maximizing your chances of success.
Next, I have put together a Guide to the Study of Early Modern
European History for Students Preparing their Oral Examination.
This guide explains how I view the purpose and scope of the oral
examination and what I usually expect students to be able to do.
It also includes some basic advice on how to prepare yourself
effectively and a list of books that have shaped my understanding
of European history in one fundamental way or another. The bulk
consists of lists of books and articles that will guide you to the
more advanced literature in the various subfields of early modern
European history (intellectual, social, economic, military, and so
on) and to some of the basic tools of research (encyclopedias,
handbooks, dictionaries, journals, paleography, chronology, and so
on).
Next, there are three syllabi of
graduate seminars I have taught or am currently teaching (and in
one case co-taught with my colleague Tamar Herzog). One of those
seminars is devoted to the history of
early modern European legal and political thought, another
to the Protestant Reformation, and
the third to the structures underlying early
modern European society. The one on the Protestant
Reformation is the most recent and the most detailed.
These seminars are mainly designed
for graduate students in their first or second year of the
program, but more advanced students as well as students in our
Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS) can take
them as well. The purpose of the seminars is both to introduce
graduate students to a particular field of study and to guide them
towards the completion of a major research project. They are
taught in two consecutive quarters. During the autumn quarter the
emphasis is on gaining familiarity with the field and developing a
subject suitable for research; during the winter quarter the
emphasis is on completing the research and on writing the paper or
thesis, which involves a good bit of drafting, revising, and
constructive criticism from participants in the seminar. In the
case of first year students and MAPSS students the seminar usually
culminates in the writing of an M.A. thesis. Graduate students who
have already completed their M.A. thesis and their second-year
seminar as well as graduate students whose main interests lie
outside of early modern European history commonly take only the
first quarter of the seminar, as a graduate colloquium.
Besides the seminar syllabi, you
will find here syllabi for three
courses I organized for a mix of beginning graduate students and
advanced undergraduates. All three courses are intended to offer a
combination of broad coverage with at least some detailed
investigation, but they do so in rather different ways. The first
is a survey of early modern European
history from 1450-1650 that I taught in the winter of 2003.
The second is a colloquium on the
Protestant Reformation in Germany that I last taught in the
winter of 2008. Like the graduate seminar I teach on the same
subject, it takes the form of a systematic review of classic
writings about the Reformation from Hegel to Lucien Febvre,
followed by an introduction to the views taken by professional
historians in the last fifty years or so. The third is a year-long
course on European social and political thought from the early
Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. I first taught this course in
two quarters at the University of Chicago, and then in an improved
version in two semesters in 1999-2000 during a year I spent as a
visiting professor at the University of Virginia in
Charlottesville. The first semester of
this course covered the period from the early Middle Ages
till about 1300; the second semester of
this course covered the period from the later Middle Ages to
the beginning of the Enlightenment. Since the University of
Chicago functions on a quarter system, I would not be able to
cover the same amount of material as I did in Virginia, or else I
would have to divide the course into three quarters. But neither
the subject matter nor the intellectual approach would change.
UNDERGRADUATE TEACHING
Most of my undergraduate teaching
consists of courses in the University of Chicago's vaunted Core
Curriculum. I used to teach the "History of Western Civilization"
sequence from antiquity to the present. For several years I also
taught in the social sciences sequence known as "Classics of
Social and Political Thought," where students read Plato's Republic,
Aristotle's Politics, St. Augustine's City of God,
Machiavelli's Prince, Hobbes's Leviathan, Locke's
Second Treatise of Government, Rousseau's Social
Contract, and later works of comparable stature. When the
Western Civilization sequence was reformed by a group of faculty
concerned about declining undergraduate enrollments, I returned to
teaching in the civilization sequence. It is now called History of European Civilization. The
standard version of that course begins in the early Middle Ages,
but I like to start in antiquity, with some readings selected from
ancient Greeks, Romans, and the Bible. In my view, the purpose of
this course is not so much to make students familiar with the
rough outlines of the history of European civilization (though
that is its purpose, too), but rather to teach students what
historical change is, why it matters, and how it can be
understood.
History is a very powerful way of
explaining the world. But it is not the only way and it has itself
had a long history. In fact, the study of history is not so much a
source of information about European
civilization
as it is one of the most characteristic features of
European civilization. In order to understand what that means, you
have to be able to see through the secondary literature, see
through the textbooks, learn what it means to know something about
the past and how we come by such knowledge. We aim to do this by
giving pride of place to reading original documents (in English
translation) from the history of European civilization. Reading
original documents and drawing lessons about the past from them is
no easy task. In order to make that task as clear as I can, I have
put together a guide for students of the
history of european civilization in which I try to explain
what I consider to be the elementary assumptions behind this
course, and what exactly I expect the students who are taking it
to accomplish in my class. It's written for undergraduates. But I
have a sense that many graduate students could benefit from it as
well.
Not all of my undergraduate
teaching is in the core curriculum. Some of it consists of the
mixed graduate/undergraduate courses about early modern Europe, the Protestant Reformation, and the history
of medieval European social and
political thought and early
modern European social and political thought that I
mentioned above. I have also taught
courses that were entirely reserved for undergraduate students.
They dealt with subjects like Martin Luther, early modern
political thought, and the history of early modern Germany as
viewed from the perspective of a single city, namely, Leipzig. One
such course was devoted to Calvin's Institutes.
Students read the whole of the 1559 edition of the Institutes,
about 1,500 pages. You may think: how interesting can such a
course be? Isn't that theology? Well, I can assure you it was one
of the most interesting and enjoyable courses I have ever taught,
and from what I heard from the students, I think they liked it
just as much. The other course was devoted to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, a book far
more important for a decent understanding of history, not to
mention a whole host of other matters, than is generally
understood. The purpose of the course was simply to make the Philosophical Investigations
intellectually accessible to undergraduates without any special
training in philosophy. I don't believe I have ever taught a
course that turned out to be more interesting than this.
University of Chicago History Department | University of Chicago College
Last updated 25 March 2012
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