NEHC

This course introduces students to the Achaemenid Empire, also known as the First Persian Empire (ca. 550-330 BCE). We will be examining the political history and cultural accomplishments of the Achaemenids who, from their homeland in modern-day Iran, quickly rose to become one of the largest empires of the ancient world, ruling from North Africa to North India at their height. We will also be examining the history of Greek-Persian encounters and the image of the Achaemenids in Greek and Biblical literature. The students will visit the Oriental Institutes’ archive and object collection to learn more about the University of Chicago’s unique position in the exploration, excavation, and restoration of the Persian Empire’s royal architecture and administrative system through the Persian Expedition carried out in the 1930s.

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 gives an overview of the richness of Mesopotamian Literature (modern Iraq) written in the 3rd-1st millennium BC. We will read myths and epics written on clay tablets in the Sumerian and Akkadian language in English translation and discuss content and style, but also the religious, cultural and historic implications. Particular focus will be on the development of stories over time, the historical context of the literature and mythological figures. The texts treated cover not only the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, but also various legends of Sumerian and Akkadian kings, stories about Creation and World Order, and destruction. The topics covered range from the quest for immortality, epic heroes and monsters, sexuality and love.

This course examines the intersections of culture, politics, and biomedicine in the Middle East from a variety of theoretical and scholarly approaches. Students will study different conceptualizations of health, healing, the body, and personhood in the region, with a strong emphasis on biomedicine and contemporary state and governmental processes. Key topics covered in class include but are not limited to: the rise of western biomedicine in the region; religious perspectives of the body; Islam and organ trafficking and transplantation; racialized bodies in medical science; war and medicine, sex, gender, and reproductive technologies, and the impact of COVID-19 across the region.

This anthropology course centers on ethnographic research conducted in and about the Middle East, but it also trains students in the practice of ethnographic field research methods. Ethnography is at the heart of the discipline of cultural anthropology. In this course, we will study what ethnography is, where ethnographic fieldwork has been conducted in the Middle East, and why, and what political and social conditions have shaped knowledge of the region. We will ultimately discover the ways in which ethnography is a complex embodied human practice.
This class has two primary learning objectives. First, to teach students how to do ethnographic fieldwork about the Middle East through assignments that mobilize various techniques, including participant observation, mapping a field-site, interviews, “deep hanging out,” gathering documents, producing genealogies and writing up field-notes. Over the course of the semester students will draw on these short assignments to produce a final ethnographic research paper on some aspect of social life. Second, alongside short fieldwork assignments, students will study the history and theoretical debates of ethnography in the Middle East, such as discussions about the politics of representation, the construction of ‘otherness’ in knowledge, colonialism and its relationship to the social sciences, gender and race theory, and the ethics of conducting research among different vulnerable groups.

How did the Qur’an, Islam’s holy text, articulate what it meant to be a Muslim by constructing the confessional other? How did the social, cultural, and political context of the Qur’an’s interpreters influence their conceptions of gender or ethnicity? This course explores identities and identity formation in the Qur’an and its interpretation by asking how identity was articulated through the construction of the religious, ethnic, or gendered “other.” You will read English translations from the Qur’an, literature associated with its interpretation (exegesis tafsir, biography sira, sayings of the Prophet hadith, and “occasions of revelation” asbab al-nuzul), as well as relevant secondary literature. By the end of the course, you will be familiar with the structure and content of the Qur’an, its history as a text, the early Islamic community, and Qur’anic revelations’ relationship to other Abrahamic faiths (Christianity and Judaism). No prior knowledge of Middle Eastern history or languages is required, but if you have interests in the study of the Middle East, the Qur’an, or identity, you are strongly encouraged to incorporate your own experiences, research, or projects into the course.

This course will examine the concept and definition of empire and the practices of imperial control through a case study of Mesopotamia’s best-known empire, the Neo-Assyrian (first half of the 1st millennium BCE). At its peak, the Assyrians ruled a vast area covering most of modern Iraq and Syria, plus parts of Iran, Turkey and the Levant, with aspirations to control Egypt. The gradual expansion of this empire from late 2nd millennium BCE beginnings and its extremely rapid collapse in ca. 612 BCE provide an excellent example of the tensions within trajectories of empire. The course themes include warfare and political strategies, identity and ethnicity, imperial bureaucracy, and the practical and ideological purposes of infrastructure building. Evidence examined will include texts (in translation) and the archaeological record at various scales, from settlements through artworks. We will also examine paradoxes, such as the contrast between textual claims of hegemony and limited archaeological evidence for this, and the power of visual propaganda versus its select audience.

In usual historiography, Alexander’s campaigns from 336 to 323 BCE ushered in an age of intense cultural exchange between Hellenism and various eastern cultures that lasted until late antiquity. Applying the concept of the “Silk Road,” this course will explore cultural exchanges between the Greco-Roman world and the East from the 4th century BCE to the 3rd century CE as well as how contemporary East Asian media products represent this age. Primary sources originally written in Greek, Latin, Iranian, Babylonian, and Chinese will be read in English translations.

In usual historiography, Alexander’s campaigns from 336 to 323 BCE ushered in an age of intense cultural exchange between Hellenism and various eastern cultures that lasted until late antiquity. Applying the concept of the “Silk Road,” this course will explore cultural exchanges between the Greco-Roman world and the East from the 4th century BCE to the 3rd century CE as well as how contemporary East Asian media products represent this age. Primary sources originally written in Greek, Latin, Iranian, Babylonian, and Chinese will be read in English translations.

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.

This course covers the period from ca. 1750 to the present, focusing on Western military, economic, and ideological encroachment; the impact of such ideas as nationalism and liberalism; efforts at reform in the Islamic states; the emergence of the "modern" Middle East after World War I; the struggle for liberation from Western colonial and imperial control; the Middle Eastern states in the cold war era; and local and regional conflicts.