This semester I am teaching three courses, two undergraduate and one graduate. “Global History of Christianity” is a new course which Mack Holt, John Turner, and I are team teaching in both history and religious studies. This course was Mack’s idea, and the team teaching this semester is a one-time deal, but I am very glad that it’s been approved for the catalog going forward. “The Digital Past” is taught by a number of people at Mason, but I’ve decided to organize mine around the theme of “Reconstruction and Redemption.” For the graduate students, I’ve taught a version of “Data and Visualization in Digital History” before, but this is the first time that I’m teaching it as one of the required courses in the PhD sequence instead of as an elective.

Here are the syllabi and course descriptions.

Global History of Christianity, syllabus

This course is organized around a comparative examination of the many forms of global Christianity over the past two thousand years. Chronologically, it begins with the ancient Jewish, Greek, and Roman contexts of early Christianity and continues through the present. Students will become familiar with many kinds of Christianity across the globe, including Asian, African, Latin American, European, and North American Christianities. In each geographic and chronological contexts, students will explore several themes: use of sacred texts and the experiences of a typical church service, the relationship between Christianity and politics, and cultural aspects such as marriage and sexuality. Students will also consider Christianity as a series of global systems organized around missions, migration, trade, and warfare.

The Digital Past: Reconstruction and Redemption, syllabus

In this class, you will to learn to do history using digital tools. The course—which satisfies the Mason Core IT requirement—teaches the fundamentals of information technology by applying them to practical problems in history. Throughout the semester, you will work individually and with classmates on a series of projects about American history during the period of Reconstruction. You will learn how to do research online, but also how to put those sources in the context of other scholarly work. You will gather data, learn how to question it, analyze it, summarize it, and interpret it. You will create visualizations of datasets, including maps. You will learn how to present visual and textual sources online in web exhibits, and you will learn how to write and publish effectively online. Through learning by doing, you will gain both digital skills and the skills of a historian. This combination will be useful to you throughout your university career and in your future work.

Data and Visualization in Digital History, syllabus

In this methods course you will be introduced to data analysis and visualization for historians. You will learn to work with historical data, including finding, gathering, manipulating, analyzing, visualizing, and arguing from data, with special attention to geospatial, textual, and network data. These methods will be taught primarily through scripting in the R programming language, using other command line tools as appropriate. You will also learn how to present history on the web with HTML and CSS. While historical methods can be applied to many topics and time periods, they cannot be understood separate from how the discipline forms meaningful questions and interpretations, nor divorced from the particularities of the sources and histories of some specific topic. Therefore, in this course we will examine the historiographical tradition to see how historians have used data and visualization to understand the past. And we will work together to apply these methods to a series of datasets in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, with a focus on religion.