Media are commonly viewed as catalysts of social change, particularly in reference to recent uprisings in the Middle East. This course will consider how scholars have assessed the relationship between media and social change from the early diffusion of mass communication in the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary world of social media.
The American Muslim community hails from all corners of the globe, and represents a diverse mix of ethnic groups, socio-economic backgrounds, political persuasions, and theological positions. American Islam is older than the nation itself, and Muslims have contributed to the American project throughout its history. Today, the United States represents one unique node in a complex, global Muslim world, with deep and active relationships connecting the United States to the historic centers of Muslim life. Conspicuously religious Muslims also occupy greater positions of power and visibility across American society, from the halls of Congress to the comedy club stage. This course will provide a historically-informed, globally-inflected exploration of contemporary American Islam. Students will engage primary texts of American Muslim life and consider them within social, cultural, and historical context.
Media are increasingly integrated into contemporary life. As in the past, we consume media—watching movies and television, listening to music and podcasts, and following influencers on social media. However, these passive activities now overlap with media production, participation, and commentary. For Muslims negotiating identity in diverse global society, media figure into representation and self-representation in complex, often subtle, ways. Intersecting with the family, mosque, community, and other core social institutions, media play a central role in contemporary Muslim experience. This class will examine religious media, i.e. those branded as “Islamic” in some fashion, such as television programs on Islamic law, or social media content with explicit religious commitments and claims to authority. It will also consider how Islam has been represented in popular culture, and the ways Muslims have related to those constructions of their faith. However, this dichotomy of religious and popular media no longer holds with Muslim-oriented television shows like Ramy, Ms. Marvel, the integration of Islam into popular American entertainment from Jack Ryan to Mr. Robot, and the complex engagement with religion in media across the historically Muslim world.
World War I in the Ottoman Empire. This course will examine WWI in in the Ottoman Empire broadly, considering social, economic, and military aspects of the conflict and with attention to the wartime experience for those at the front and on the home front. This is a two-quarter seminar, where the first quarter can be taken independently as a colloquium-style course for credit.
This course will discuss current trends in research for 19th and early 20th Century Ottoman and Turkish history.
Although we may have passed “peak Rumi,” Persian poetry is still often translated and consumed as a component of modern “global” spirituality, and poets like Hāfeẓ and Rumi are frequently understood to be universalizing mystics. This course explores how Persian poetry has been adapted into European languages and interpreted over the past two hundred years, from Transcendentalists to New Agers, with a particular focus on how it has been variously invested with religious or “spiritual” meaning in Euro-American contexts. Class readings include a variety of translations of Persian poetry; secondary sources on translation, reception, and “world literature”; and theoretical critiques of “religion” and “mysticism” as analytic categories. All readings are in English, and no prior familiarity with Persian or the Persian language is required.
All readings are in English, and no prior familiarity with Persian or the Persian language is required.
This course will cover the history of the Fatimid (Shiite) caliphate, from its foundation in the North Africa about 909 until its end in Egypt 1171. Most of the material will be presented in classroom lectures. Sections of the course deal with Fatimid history treated chronologically and others with separate institutions and problems as they changed and developed throughout the whole time period. Readings heavily favored or highly recommended are all in English.
In this course, students will learn about the bordering of the Middle East, as a regional whole, and in the particulars of individual nation-state boundaries, in the 19th and 20th centuries. We will study ideas about North African and Southwest Asian geography, history, and culture, and their use, by Ottoman, British, and French imperial actors engaged in creating and enforcing political boundaries. We will also learn about the impacts of these borders on the lives of the bordered in the past and present.
This Seminar for graduate students centers on the use of material and documentary sources for the study of early Islamic history (ca. 640-1000 CE), particularly looking at multiple religious groups, languages, and literary traditions. It will introduce the students to the study of documentary texts such as the Arabic papyri, the expansion of Arabic papyrology as a field, and the integration of literary and non-literary sources. Students will be encouraged and challenged to think of texts also as material objects. We will talk about sources and resources for the study of political, economic, social, and intellectual histories of the Islamicate world; in so doing, we will discuss also methods, problems, and perspectives.
This course is an introduction to the history and the study of early Islamicate societies, from the rise of Islam in late antiquity to the early Abbasid period (ca. 600-950 CE), considering various religious and social groups. We will look at the same historical arc from multiple perspectives: political events, such as the Muslim conquests and the rise of ruling dynasties, but also other factors that impacted people’s lives in the early centuries of Islamic rule—the environment they inhabited and transformed, documents they created, social institutions, and economic activities. What broad developments characterized the early Islamic period? Who brought those changes about? And how are they studied today?
