This course explores the history of the categories of race, class, and gender, as well as the circumstances of their construction, in Europe since the late eighteenth century through the present, and the manner in which those socially- and historically-constructed categories have both enabled and circumscribed human actions and state policies. One could argue, then, that the course explores cultural understandings of race, class, and gender in Europe, and the manner in which those cultural understandings changed (or did not change) over time; changed within and between the national units that made up Europe; and changed as the result of the introduction of “new” peoples into Europe. The course will examine these categories from the point of view of Europeans, as well as from non-Europeans encountering, confronting, and often attempting to alter, the policies influenced by these categories.
Race, Class and Gender in Modern Europe