Greg Kosc

At OSU I've taught a range of classes that mainly center on the modern United States and its empire. Instead of defining my interests based on region or period, as historians are forced to do by our discipline, I tend to conceive of my interests more broadly as economic and cultural. When approaching any class, my primary concern is that students understand the major economic contexts that will shape peoples' experiences in the timeframe or region we are investigating. Understanding economic relationships is fundamental to appreciating how power is wielded in the modern world. Since my doctoral training also emphasized transnational history (and I find it invaluable to thinking about the U.S. empire), a major emphasis of my teaching is to highlight the manifold interconnections that shape the modern, "post-imperial" world. For instance, in my Modern West class, we interrogate the ways in which western films and west coast rap have been used and repurposed by different groups around the world in the 20th and 21st centuries. Not only does this get students thinking about the ways that culture travels, but they can also begin to explore the malleable nature of cultural expression. So, while the students don't necessarily read Stuart Hall or reception theorists, hopefully they will begin to understand how dynamic culture is once it is released into the world and the power of recipients to refigure things to meet their psychic or physical needs. In a very broad sense these are unifying themes in all of my classes.