Sarkar Awarded Grant for New History and Policy Course
Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently awarded a Curriculum Development Grant from BU’s Summer Term Academic Advisory Board to develop the new course, “History, Policy, and Statecraft” for Pardee School students at 400 and 600 levels. The course will potentially be offered in 2019-20.
“History, Policy, and Statecraft” will connect history with current policy problems to make sense of national strategies and grand strategies of states in the international system, leaders’ policy choices, and group dynamics at play in past events. It will integrate a conceptual analysis of the past with hands-on training in conducting archival research, oral history interviews and analyzing large corpus of textual data manually and through appropriate software. This course will conclude with a visit to John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, MA for a hands-on training in historical research.
The description of this future course is as follows:
What can we learn from our recent past? How can we use history to understand the past, contemplate the present, and anticipate the future? How effective is historical analysis to resolve contemporary policy problems? What is counterfactual reasoning? Are counterfactuals useful to understand strategies adopted by states and their leaders? How to effectively employ historical analogies to understand the present? How can we effectively use primary sources obtained through archival research for policy analysis and research? What is oral history and how can we effectively conduct oral history interviews for research? How is an onsite archival repository different from (and similar to) a library, and how to ace archival research? These are some of the questions that this course will collectively examine and seek to answer. No background in historical research and/or history is required to take this course.
This is the second grant obtained by Prof. Sarkar for course/curriculum development. She had earlier obtained the Stanton Foundation Course Development Grant to develop the new undergraduate course, “Nuclear Governance,” which was offered in spring 2018, and will be offered again in fall 2018.
Jayita Sarkar, an historian by training, is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. Her expertise is in the history of U.S. foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, the global Cold War, South Asia and Western Europe. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Cold War History, International History Review, and elsewhere. Dr. Sarkar has held fellowships at MIT, Harvard, Columbia and Yale universities, and obtained a doctorate in International History from the Graduate Institute Geneva in Switzerland.