HIST 061. Mapping Rivers: The Indus and the Ganges in Global History

Starting and ending with the Indus and the Ganges, this course will explore global history through the lens of river history and the history of knowledge. Drawing on a wealth of new scholarship on river persons and the worlds they made through their interaction with human and non-human actors in Africa, Asia and the Americas, we will locate river maps of South Asia in an unfinished history of traveling knowledge systems - theology, geology, geography, cartography, hydrology, archaeology, engineering - produced by humans in their unfinished quest to understand and interpret the historical actions of river persons in all these places.
Eligible for: ASIA, ENVS, GLBL-paired. Concentration: Science, Medicine, and Environment.
Social sciences.
1 credit.
Eligible for ASIA, ENVS and GLBL-Paired. Concentrations: Science, Medicine, and Environment.
Spring 2026. Azfar.
Fall 2026. Azfar.
Catalog chapter: History
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/history

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