NEHC

Have you ever wondered what men looked like, how they lived and loved in the pre-modern Middle East? In this class, we will encounter cuckolded husbands, muscular heroes, angry kings, mad lovers, and chivalrous bandits – all fictional. We will analyze how masculinities are constructed in selected passages of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literature in translation, and evaluate normative expectations, caricatures, and anxieties about masculinities in the cultural consciousness of the pre-modern Middle East.
In this course, you will become familiar with theoretical principles of the study of masculinities as well as acquire tools for literary analysis and close reading. Case studies will be drawn from a variety of literary sources, such as the Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa-layla), the Persian Book of Kings (Shāhnāmeh), the love story of Laylā and Majnūn, as well as other texts.

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 introduces students to the Hittite Empire of ancient Anatolia. In existence from roughly 1750-1200 BCE, and spanning across modern Turkey and beyond, the Hittite Empire is one of the oldest and largest empires of the ancient world. We will be examining their history and their political and cultural accomplishments through analysis of their written records – composed in Hittite, the world’s first recorded Indo-European language – and their archaeological remains. In the process, we will also be examining the concept of “empire” itself: What is an empire, and how do anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians study this unique kind of political formation?

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.

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.

The class looks at images of, and narratives about, hell, from depictions of hell in the Quran to depictions of contemporary refugee camps as modern infernos. We will also study the construction of the image of Satan (Iblis) and of demons (jins) in various Islamic texts. The class will focus on reading of primary sources in translation (The Quran, Ibn 'Arabi, Abu al-'Ala al-Ma'ari, Nagib Mahfouz, Ghassan Kanfani) and the text book "Locating Hell in Islamic Traditions" , edited by Christian Lange (Brill, 2015, open online access)

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.

Despite the genocide, Armenians have known thriving political, sociocultural, ideological, and ecclesiastical centers in the twentieth century. The seminar Beyond Genocide & Diaspora: Armenians in the Middle East focuses on such centers: in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Iran, and Turkey, amongst others. This will not be a journey of loss or simple rebirth, perspectives omnipresent in writings on modern Armenian history. Rather, we will be analyzing the history of power: on how Armenians experienced the everyday and the ordinary in the Middle East,  making these places their own, and how they manipulated and managed loss and renewal. At the same time, this seminar asks: what can we learn about these spaces, and the region more broadly, by looking at it through the lens of everyday Armenian sociopolitics? This analysis of Armenians does not only contribute to the study of Armenians, then. Rather, it shows how Armenians in the Middle East experienced politics everyday, and what those experiences can teach us about interlinked national and global events. This course also examines changing aspects of belonging, and explores how these concepts travel over time and space.

Stretching from Pakistan to Egypt and Greece, the Achaemenid Persian Empire dominated the Middle East for over 200 years (559-330 BCE) and was the first world empire in history. The Persian Empire brought diverse cultures, such as those of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece, under a single rule, and witnessed transformations in the economies, religions, and political structures of the ancient world. In this course, we will trace the rise and fall of the Persian Empire and its afterlife, as the history of the Persian Empire continues to affect how we conceive of the Middle East today.