Eli Nathans

Teaching Philosophy

Historical study offers the opportunity to move beyond the limits of one's own time and place, to analyze foreign societies and individual lives that may differ greatly from our own. It enables students to examine patterns that are larger than an individual life or even several lives. It explores the ways in which contemporary societies are the product of past experiences and choices, or perhaps break with their pasts. 

My classes explore all these aspects of the past, as well as a range of other more focused questions. In my classes on modern Europe students answer questions such as:  Why did anti-democratic ideologies like Nazism and Communism prove attractive to some?  What forms of hierarchy have existed in modern societies?  How have these hierarchies influenced life chances and choices?  Why, in the course of the past several decades, have parliamentary forms of government in Europe come under attack, especially from the political right?

I teach the Department’s first year twentieth century European history survey, upper year undergraduate courses on German history and the Holocaust, and a graduate course on post-1945 Europe.  I also teach two third year undergraduate seminars on classic works of Western culture.  In the first course in this sequence students read and discuss Homer’s Odyssey and selections from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Genesis, and St. Augustine’s Confessions.  The second course in the sequence focuses on a range of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers, from Montesquieu, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, and Burke to Hegel, Tocqueville, Frederick Douglas, and John Stuart Mill. 

I assign a range of original sources, including memoirs, private letters, philosophical and religious works, and government documents. This diversity of sources offers many different perspectives and speaks to many different questions. I seek to develop students' ability to read critically and carefully, and to express themselves clearly and succinctly in discussions and in essays.

I welcome inquiries from students pursuing the M.A. in modern continental European, and especially modern German, history. My foreign languages are French and German, and I feel most competent to serve as a supervisor where research in primary and secondary sources would be conducted largely in either or both of those languages.  The principal focus of my own work has been on political, intellectual, and cultural history.