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Constantin Fasolt

The University of Chicago



Teaching
 

Photo by Dan
                  Dry

 
 

Ph.D. Columbia University, 1981

Karl J. Weintraub Professor
Department of History and the College
The University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Phone (773) 702-7935
Fax (773) 702-7550
Email icon@uchicago.edu


On this page I have posted a few syllabi and other documents reflecting my teaching. They are representative of the courses I have taught in the last few years. I have put all of them in pdf format. For other information go to my home page.

GRADUATE TEACHING

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.

Finally, you will find here a syllabus that reflects my current interests more closely. It is for a course entitled Philosophical Introduction to the Study of History that I taught for the first time in the winter of 2007. The purpose of this course is to build on the insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein in order to confront students with the metaphysical assumptions underlying the modern study of history. (More recently I taught an undergraduate course focused exclusively on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.) The purpose of this course is explicitly not to introduce students to the philosophy of history. Most of the writings that can be classified under the heading "philosophy of history" share the very assumptions—or at least some of them—that I would like students to examine with a skeptical eye, for example, the belief that there is some such thing as a past that has gone from the present; that knowledge of the past accordingly requires reconstructing or representing the past; that reconstructions and representations of the past must be founded on the systematic study of evidence; and that the systematic study of evidence ought to trace past economic, social, and cultural conditions ("social science") and/or enter into the minds of past people in order to understand them in their own terms ("hermeneutics").

In addition to the syllabi, there are a few guides to further reading that I have put together over the years in order to help students find their way through the amazingly rich literature on the various subjects that show up in my teaching. One of them is an annotated guide to secondary literature on medieval European social and political thought. This is written in a narrative style in order to give you a sense of the reasons which books I think are good and why. I compiled a similar guide to the literature on early modern political thought, but that is much briefer, for various reasons, chiefly lack of time and the fact that much of this would duplicate what I've already included in the guide to the PhD exam. Finally, I drafted a list of some of the most important books available for the study of early modern European legal thought. This is subdivided into sections listing reference tools, surveys, sources, and major interpretive works, but it has no annotations.

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.



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Last updated 25 March 2012
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