This field studies colonialism and its lasting after effects around the world. In contrast to earlier schools of scholarship that focused on European metropolitan powers and their impact on the colonial periphery, colonial studies examines the diversity of colonial histories, the varied responses of the colonized, and their role in shaping the metropolitan powers and the modern world. Building on revisionist histories of European and United States imperialism, in recent years the field has broadened to encompass the universal study of colonial relations, including the Russian, Japanese and Ottoman empires. Courses offered in the field emphasize comparative and interdisciplinary approaches. Examples of concepts that guide discussion include: racialization, orientalism, colonialism and gender, contact zones, environmental issues, plantation economies, slave societies, borderlands, popular culture, the "middle ground", networks of knowledge, transnationalism, diasporas, hegemony, resistance, cultural modernism, informal empire, colonial forms of knowledge, and imperialist nostalgia. Colonial and post-colonial studies embraces several historical approaches, ranging from cultural studies and comparative social history to analysis of the means of domination and resistance. Select courses: Gender and Colonialism, History and Post-Colonial Studies, Plantation Societies in the Americas, Problems in Comparative History: Environmental History, History of Travel, Pan-Chinese Cinemas: In Search of Modernity, and Globalization The Cultures of Nature and the Nature of Culture.