HST 301.003 Prof. GADDIS
Final Paper:
6-8 pages, typed and doublespaced.
Final due date: Tuesday Dec. 19 by 4:00 pm. Turn it in at the History Dept. Office, 145 Eggers Hall, before 4pm. Be sure to hand it directly to the secretaries: don’t send it through interoffice mail, slip it under the door, or trust your roommate to get it there for you. I will also, as before, accept papers by e-mail attachment, but make sure you check your e-mail frequently after sending it so that I can get in touch with you if the file hasn’t gone through.
Please take note: I have given you the latest possible due date (the last day of exams) for this paper. This means that I cannot accept late papers, as I will have only one week to read them all before I have to report final grades.
As before, I heartily encourage you to form your own opinion, even (especially!) if it disagrees with what you’ve heard from me or seen in the readings – but you must back that opinion up with specific facts and with citations from the sources. I would like you to make reference both to ancient sources (where possible) and also to modern scholarship. The paper requires you to have read Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, in addition to the readings assigned during the last month of class. Anderson is about 200 pages, so I recommend getting a couple weeks’ head start on it.
Please write on the following theme:
This essay invites you to use Benedict Anderson’s paradigm of "imagined communties" to interrogate and illuminate notions of identity and community that we have explored throughout this course. I would like you to focus particularly on religion (the final third of the course) as a means of constructing group identity, although you may also draw material from earlier readings if you wish. Do Anderson’s ideas about modern nationalism offer any analogies to the formation of religious communities in the Greco-Roman and late antique periods? Does the formation of such "imagined communities" in turn require the designation of an "other?"
This is a deliberately broad topic, and there are a number of ways you could go about it. Use Anderson as a starting point to reflect back on the themes we’ve been discussing throughout the course; try to tie it all together and make sense of it all in whatever way seems best to you. The specific sub-questions I list above are suggestions, not requirements. I am open to alternate topics, but if you do wish to write on another theme, you must discuss it with me no later than the last week of class.