NEHC

This sequence surveys the main trends in the political history of the Islamic world, with some attention to economic, social, and intellectual history. This course covers the period from ca. 1100 to 1750, including the arrival of the steppe peoples (Turks and Mongols), the Mongol successor states, and the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria. We also study the foundation of the great Islamic regional empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Moghuls.

Central Asia Past and Present serves as a multi-disciplinary course, spanning anthropology, history and political science. This course introduces students to the fluid, political-geographic concept of Central Asia as well as to the historical and cultural dimensions of this particular and oft-redefined world.  My understanding of Central Asia comes from studies of ex-Soviet Central Asia, which includes five independent countries (since 1991) within central Eurasia--the former U.S.S.R. Thus the course encompasses Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in addition to parts of northern Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and western China (Xinjiang/Sinkiang).  Students will familiarize themselves with universal and divergent factors among the Central Asian peoples based on phenomena such as human migrations, cross-cultural influences, historical events, and the economic organization of peoples based on local ecology and natural boundaries. Working together and as individuals, we will study maps and atlases to gain a fuller understanding of historical movements and settlements of the Central Asian peoples.  In addition to lectures and book discussions, I will present photographs, slides, and video from fieldwork in Central Asia as well as professional documentary and art films about the societies of this area. 

The interests by Europeans in Egypt extends back to famous scholars such as Athanasius Kircher in the 17th century and was fueled by the mysteries of the Orient and seeking to understand the birth of civilization. While the beginnings of exploring the land of the Nile can be traced as least as far back as the Renaissance, it is within the context of the age of Enlightenment that Europeans sponsored research expeditions into this so far little known territory. By the late 18th century interests in Egypt, particularly by the French and British, had evolved considerably and were motivated by a diverse number of factors (political, colonial, economic, scientific). However, it was Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign to Egypt in 1798 that took the first initiative to explore this distant land from a scientific point of view through the involvement of a group of leading French scientists (savants) who were tasked to document and analyze all aspects of this fascinating country and its past. This went beyond the recording of ancient monuments but also included the natural environment, extensive cartography as well observations of modern life of Muslim society. The results of this albeit failed military expedition featured in the famous multi-volume work ‘La Déscription de l’Égypte’ which became incredibly popular among European scientists but also the general public. It awakened a never before seen fascination with Egypt, which had dire consequences for the removal and plundering of artifacts and monuments in the long run, but also saw the birth of a scientific Institute, l’Institut d’Égypte, in Cairo (recently severely damaged during the revolution).

This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. This sequence introduces three great empires of the ancient world. Each course in the sequence focuses on one empire, with attention to the similarities and differences among the empires being considered. By exploring the rich legacy of documents and monuments that these empires produced, students are introduced to ways of understanding imperialism and its cultural and societal effects—both on the imperial elites and on those they conquered.

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 introduces students to the history of ancient Anatolia and its neighbors from the first historical texts around 2000 BCE to the arrival of Alexander the Great. Some of the famous ancient Near Eastern civilizations that we encounter include the Assyrians, Hittites, Phrygians, Lydians, Persians, and Israelites. We will focus on the information provided by inscriptions - especially political and socioeconomic history - as well as the relevant archaeological and art historical records. No prior knowledge of Anatolian or Near Eastern history is required.

This course takes gender as a critical analytical tool in the study of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican Armenian history. It offers a close reading of a range of original Armenian texts in English translation (mostly from the manuscript of Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology by Melissa Bilal and Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, forthcoming 2019). These texts are primary sources in the form of literary works and political essays written by Armenian women in their native Ottoman capital and in its diaspora. They document a century of Armenian feminist thinking and activism. They provide us with precious resources to examine the ways in which Armenian women of the period defined and tackled feminism, equality, womanhood, manhood, freedom, justice, solidarity, awakening, enlightenment, modernity, progress, power, oppression, society, nation, community, state, homeland, and related concepts. The course situates their fight for emancipation both as Armenians and as women within the global beginnings of women’s liberation cause. It also historicizes women’s writings within the contemporary Armenian social, political, and intellectual life and the late Ottoman and early republican politics of sex and ethnic/national/racial difference. Throughout the term, we will be contextualizing women’s responses and interventions to the patriarchal family, moral double standards regulating female sexuality, male dominance in communal decision-making bodies, and the overall politics of modern Armenian nationhood. Secondary sources will help us better frame Armenian women’s 2 interventions to the public opinion and discourses on the relationship between the sexes and between communities in periods of social change and transformation. They will also enable us raise critical questions about gender and production of knowledge, about historical consciousness, and about politics of memory. We will situate the history of Armenian feminism within the scholarship on feminist historiography of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey and will address the formative silences in historical narratives.

The focus of this class is on the social and political history of Central Eurasia from the end of the Timurid era to the present day, and will consider themes such as gender, ethnicity, religion, nation-building, nationalism, modernity discourse, language, and literature. Central Eurasia as a region is notoriously difficult to define, but in this course the geographic focus will span regions, which today comprise Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, the former Soviet Republics, and will touch upon neighboring areas, including Anatolia, Iran, Siberia, and India. As a course developed to engage students with the historiographical themes within a specific regional context, we will be able to analyze the historical and cultural developments of a region crucial to Islamic history. There is no prerequisite to enroll in this course.

In this course, we will read a variety of texts that imagine or represent the Arab experience of exile to and diaspora within the United States, focusing on the ways that these texts re-construct and imagine the key dialectic of home/diasporic space, specifically within the framework of the complicated and dynamic relationship between the Arab world and the United States. Throughout the quarter, the readings would enable us to engage with several key concepts related to the Arab (and broader) immigrant experience in the US, including race, memory and nostalgia, language, and second-generational post-memory, as well as the role of the immigrant community in forming the ‘homeland’s’ vision of itself. We would begin with a historical overview of emigration from the Arabic-speaking world, beginning with the vast emigration of Lebanese and Syrians from Mount Lebanon and Syria in the mid-nineteenth century, but will pay particular attention to moments in which this identity has been or become particularly fraught, for example, following such events as the 1967 war, the 9/11 attacks, or the recent Executive Order by the Trump Administration (1/2017).

This course explores the rituals, oral literature, and music associated with the nomadic cultures of Central Eurasia. It is a continuation of the course titled "Intriduction to the Musical Folklore of Central Asia", offered on odd-numbered years in the Spring Quarter. The course covers the traditional musical performances, oral literature, and other oral performance genres of the Kazakhs, Kirghiz, Turkmens, Siberian peoples, and Mongols, and examines topics in Central Eurasian animist/shamanist/Tengriist cultural practices.