This graduate seminar is intended as an introduction to key issues, debates, and themes in the historiography of women and gender in the global south. With an emphasis on Africa, we will mostly focus on recent publications that aim to make new theoretical and empirical interventions into what has been an experimental sub-field, especially in terms of methodology. We will also, however, consider older, now more canonical texts that still underline the terms of interesting debates.

The seminar will be a space for intellectual exploration and learning, for the forming and sharpening of ideas, and for discovery about some of the ways women and gender historians (and our colleagues from related disciplines such as historical anthropologists) have been making histories, working in a variety of fields and archives, defining and theorizing problems and using evidence-based research.

The requirements are designed to give students great flexibility in developing work that will be most useful to their various personal research interests and needs.