2020-2021

The first quarter of Intermediate Arabic

This sequence concentrates on the acquisition of speaking, reading, and aural skills in modern formal Arabic.

This sequence concentrates on the acquisition of speaking, reading, and aural skills in modern formal Arabic.

This sequence concentrates on the acquisition of speaking, reading, and aural skills in modern formal Arabic.

This advanced course entails reading Egyptian religious and magical compositions from the Pyramid Texts through Coptic magical incantations, including diachronic study of funerary literature, hymns and ritual texts. Knowledge of all stages of Egyptian is recommended.

This advanced course examines grammar, scripts and texts typically called "Ptolemaic," but employed in formal, priestly inscriptions of both the Ptolemaic and Roman eras. Texts to be examined include, among others, synod decrees and inscriptions from Dendera, Philae, Edfu, and Esna.

What does it mean to be “Armenian”? Despite centuries of dispersion and displacement, there has remained, in the Armenian diaspora, a sense of Armenian-ness—a sense, in other words, of being Armenian. This course will serve as an interrogation of and meditation on what that sense of being has looked like across time and space, as seen through the lens of pivotal musical and other artistic works from the post-genocide diaspora. Through in-depth analyses of these works and the discourses surrounding them, this course will trace the emergence, articulation, and negotiation of Armenian diasporic subjectivities and the ways in which those subjectivities have emerged in relation to and in conversation with power structures both internal and external to the Armenian communities under discussion. Diaspora, then, will be approached not as a fixed unit of analysis, but as something that emerges and is sustained through complex relationships and negotiations with sociopolitical forces both within and outside the diasporic community. Through this course, we will see that artistic expression in the Armenian diaspora functions as a site of agency: a site in which the question of what it is to be Armenian is explored in ways that shape, challenge, and upend notions and understandings of diasporic identity.

Students will develop their research papers, and we will continue to explore aspects of the late Ottoman press.

Course introduces students to the historical context and specific characteristics of the mass printed press (newspapers, cultural and political journals, etc.) in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th C. We will investigate issues such as content, censorship, production, readership and distribution through secondary reading and the examination of period publications.

This course introduces the students to the scholarship on and the original texts of Ottoman court records. Thousands of registers with millions of court cases covering the period from the sixteenth century to modern times have survived to date. These documents are celebrated by modern historians as exceptional snapshots into the daily lives of common people. Monday sessions are reserved for the discussion of secondary literature; we will read from the original court records on Fridays.