Course Evolution
An upper-division seminar on the rise, expansion, and dissolution of the British Empire — and the course closest to my own research.
I want my students to understand the benefits and pitfalls of AI-assisted research. I am currently planning a two- or three-week module where we discuss the importance of prompting, how a simple change in vocabulary can yield vastly different results, and prompt them to think about what we miss if we only use AI to find resources. This gives me a great way to think about silences/gaps in the archives, the pros and cons of digitization efforts, and the value in still doing some research the old-fashioned way.
The first time I taught this class, I chose reliable, older works foundational to the historiography. It worked, but I found it unsatisfying. students got the perspective of the British Empire from over a decade ago. The next time I teach this course, I want to focus on postcolonial and subaltern perspectives. After teaching this course, I now have a policy of not assigning work more than 10 years old.
In general, I have started moving away from the lecture-intensive format for teaching survey courses. I want to experiment with a format where student pairs "own" a specific colonial case study (e.g., India, Kenya, Hong Kong) and lead a seminar session using primary sources they've selected. This shifts the dynamic from lecture-and-discuss to genuinely student-driven inquiry. It also gives them a sense of agency and aligns with my goals of rich primary-source analysis, research, and critical thinking.
Each entry marks a semester I taught this course, what changed, and why.
This was my first attempt at teaching the British Empire. I struggled with how to cover ~500 years of British Imperial history, while exposing my students to the most important historiographical debates.