How to Register
To register for HIST 498, email the instructor for permission (email addresses are indicated below for the instructor for each section). The instructor can then give permission by email to the academic advisor, Paloma Boykin boykin1@arizona.edu, to enroll you in the course.
Capstone Options for Fall 2025
HIST 498: "Culinary Travelers of the World"
Prof. Ryan Kashanipour (rykash@arizona.edu)
In Person: TH, 2-4:30pm
Cuisine is far more than the foods we eat. It is a uniquely human enterprise filled with meaning. To borrow from the French theorist Claude Levi-Strauss, food is a language of the past that is experienced in the present. In this capstone course, we will explore the culinary circulation of food around the world. We will consider the cultural ideas and systems imbedded in foodways and consider how particular foods moved and evolved in global contexts. Using travel accounts, this research seminar will examine food as key lens on globalization, from the ancient to early modern to contemporary world.
HIST 498: "Toilets are Primary Sources, Too: Using Material Artefacts to Write History"
Prof. John Senseney (jsenseney@arizona.edu)
In Person: MW, 11-12:15pm
The pursuit of history relies not only on evidence in the form of textual documents, but also toilets, albumin photographic prints, highways, condiments, bridges, bicycle sheds, car engines, wine goblets, films, statues, and space junk. Such tangible artifacts – which we can see, hold, smell, taste, and move through – both reflected and shaped the historical contexts for which they were made. Even textual documents are themselves material artefacts laboriously chiseled into monumental stone, seals impressed into wet clay and fired into heavy bricks, and fading ink pressed with a stylus onto brittle parchment into patterns that are indecipherable without paleographic training. Simply put, the pursuit of history hinges not simply on evaluating documents translated into English and converted to clean, modern typeface. In this capstone course, we explore and critically reflect upon the materiality of evidence, opportunities to integrate non-textual material sources, and even to make concrete objects from the past the objects of our scholarly inquiries. In addition to enriching our training as historians, this course thereby allows us to pursue research topics from any culture or period, and therefore – if one wishes to do so – expand upon projects already developed in previous coursework by breaking new ground through an engagement with material culture.
HIST 498: Global Perspectives on Local Histories
Prof. Kevin Gosner (kgosner@arizona.edu)
The Capstone Seminar enables you to develop a research project on a topic of your own choosing. The theme in this class, Global Perspectives on Local Histories, invites you to explore big questions, key concepts, and diverse methodologies that have engaged scholars of World and Global History. You’ll draw on this literature to design a study framed by local and regional histories—in any time-period and in any place on the globe.
Weekly assignments and online discussions will explore historical scholarship and the craft of writing, including exercises in self-reflection, assessments of historiography, and discussions of secondary readings. You’ll have common readings early in the semester, before turning your attention to your own research.