NEHC

An Ottoman Perception 1

This course will introduce students to a number of important topics in Eighteenth and nineteenth century Ottoman history, such as the nature of the great local notables, the growing importance of proteges, and the bureaucratic reform.

The Ottomans ruled in Anatolia, the Middle East, South East Europe and North Africa for over six hundred years. The objective of this course is to understand the society and culture of this bygone Empire whose legacy continues, in one way or another, in some twenty-five contemporary successor states from the Balkans to the Arabian Peninsula. The course is designed as an introduction to the Ottoman World with a focus on the cultural history of the Ottoman society. It explores identities and mentalities, customs and rituals, status of minorities, mystical orders and religious establishments, literacy and the use of the public sphere.

Why did the Islamic Revolution take place? What were its causes? Iran was the site of two of the most important revolutions in the Middle East in the 20th century: the Constitutional (1905-1911) and Islamic Revolutions (1979). What was the historical relationship between them? This course is intended to answer these questions by exploring the history of Iran from late Qajar period until the early 1980s. We will examine the complex socio-economic and religio-political developments such as the Tobacco Protest, oil nationalization and student movements. We will emphasize long-term changes with a particular attention to the diverse actors and influences of the revolutions (tribes, landowners, foreign governments, merchants, religious scholars, political dissidents, urban poor, intellectuals). We will use a wide swath of primary sources including films, comic books, posters, footages and poems. No prior background in the subject is required.

This course will explore how parts of the modern Middle East confronted questions and definitions of race and gender that were often first defined in the west. Organized thematically and covering a region that spans from North Africa to Iran, we will use the analytics of race and gender in an intersecting way to explore topics in the Middle East such as: colonialism, slavery, Arab Nationalism, Zionism, whiteness, racism, eugenics and scientific racism, and global solidarity movements. In so doing, our course will reveal that race is an operative category in the study of Middle East history, the historical racial logics operating in various Middle Eastern countries, and how race and gender intersect at the site of individual as well as the effects of this. This course is designed for anyone interested in race theory, gender theory, intersectionality, and Middle East history. By the end of this course, students will have the tools to think in a gendered and raced multidimensional way about aspects of Middle East history that do not often receive such an intersectional treatment. Additionally, they will develop the methodological tools to discern local race and gender logics that might be different than what they’re most familiar with. Finally, through coming to understand their relationship to the knowledge of our course, students will also be able to use the course as a springboard for continued learning in other courses that treat race, gender, and the Middle East.

Prior knowledge of the Middle East not required. This course aims to facilitate a general understanding of some key factors that have shaped life in this region, with primary emphasis on modern conditions and their background, and to provide exposure to some of the region's rich cultural diversity. This course can serve as a basis for the further study of the history, politics, and civilizations of the Middle East.

For most of the duration of the New Kingdom (1550-1069 BC), the ancient Egyptians were able to establish a vast empire and becoming one of the key powers within the Near East. This course will investigate in detail the development of Egyptian foreign policies and military expansion which affected parts of the Near East and Nubia. We will examine and discuss topics such as ideology, imperial identity, political struggle and motivation for conquest and control of wider regions surrounding the Egyptian state as well as the relationship with other powers and their perspective on Egyptian rulers as for example described in the Amarna letters.

This course employs English translations of ancient Egyptian literary texts to explore the genres, conventions and techniques of ancient Egyptian literature. Discussions of texts examine how the ancient Egyptians conceptualized and constructed their equivalent of literature, as well as the fuzzy boundaries and subtle interplay between autobiography, history, myth, and fiction.

This course surveys the political, social, and economic history of ancient Egypt from pre-dynastic times (ca. 3400 B.C.) until the advent of Islam in the seventh century of our era.

This course introduces the main paradigms of social thought and their philosophical basis and examines their impact on archaeology and historical studies. Theoretical views, whether acknowledged or merely implicit, strongly affect scholarly interpretations of empirical data. The data do not speak for themselves but are interpreted quite differently depending on the theoretical paradigm at work in the interpretation. In this course, we will focus on the ways in which various social theories have shaped scholarly views of social and economic life in the ancient Near East, in particular.