This course is a deep exploration of one of the central concepts and materials shaping the work of the historian: time. The course will explore a number of key questions: How does time inhere in materials and material experience? How do material and conceptual technologies and our relations with them produce and constrain our experiences of time? How do particular conceptions of time determine particular kinds of historical experience? How do they constrain us into particular kinds of historical practice? How might thinking time differently create opportunities for us to experience time differently, and thus to expand our craft as historians?
Each week, we will constellate some combination of classic and recent works in the historiography of temporality, shorter conceptual and theoretical readings on time studies, and exemplary historical works that play with temporality in the fabric and form of the text. In the course of the semester, we will move through several kinds of time that have each shaped historical work and assumptions in important ways, including vegetal, sedimentary, fluid, subterranean/submarine, Messianic, evolutionary, sonic, evolutionary, insomniac, nonlinear, and ghostly time. Assignments will include: (1) Weekly reflections on (or occasionally writing-constraint assignments based on) the reading materials; (2) Co-leading the discussion during the term; and (3) A final writing assignment based on some part of a major graduate research project.