Autumn

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

This course, which builds upon Intermediate Modern Hebrew (second-year HEB) assumes that students have full mastery of the grammatical and lexical content of the intermediate level. The focus of instruction is on the further development of intermediate language skills in Modern Israeli Hebrew with special emphasis on oral and written communication. At the end of the course, all students are expected to reach an Advanced level of proficiency, as defined by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) in speaking, reading, and listening comprehension. The acquisition of cultural literacy will be an integral part of the curriculum throughout the semester.

The beginner’s course is the first of three sequential courses offered to students at the university. The course aims to introduce students to reading, writing and speaking Modern Hebrew. Toward that end all four-language skills are emphasized: comprehension of written and oral materials; reading of non-diacritical text; writing of directed sentences, paragraphs, and compositions; speaking. You will learn the Hebrew root pattern system, and by the end of the year you will have mastered the five (active) basic verb conjugations in both the past and present tenses (as well as simple future). This grammatical knowledge is complemented by an 800+ word vocabulary, which is presented with an eye toward the major syntactic structures, including the proper use of prepositions. At the end of the year, you will conduct short conversations in Hebrew; read materials designed to this level and write short compositions.

Archaeology is the study of the material evidence of past human activity. This course, which is offered every year in the Autumn Quarter, explores the history of archaeology as a discipline and the methods used by archaeologists to obtain evidence about past human activity via excavations, surface surveys, and remote-sensing technologies such as satellite imagery and ground-penetrating radar, with emphasis on archaeological fieldwork in the Middle East. This course also surveys the latest methods used to date, classify, and analyze various kinds of evidence after it has been obtained. And since archaeological data is always collected and interpreted within an intellectual framework of theoretical conceptions concerning human society, culture, and history, this course provides a brief overview of “archaeological theory,” i.e., the uses made by archaeologists of a wide range of different social theories that may lead to quite different interpretations of the same data. This topic is explored in more depth in a companion course on “Social Theory and Ancient Studies” (NEHC 20010/30010), which is offered in alternate years in the Winter Quarter.

First readings in texts in the Ugaritic language (1250-1185BC).

Review basic Hebrew grammar, emphasis on morphology and basic syntax - Review/acquire historical morphology - Acquire facility in reading Biblical Hebrew prose

The course concentrates on the written language and aims at enabling students to use Modern Hebrew for research purposes. The course is designed to enable students to read Hebrew freely. Major grammatical & syntactical aspects will be covered, and students will acquire substantial vocabulary with attention paid to lexical collocations and semantic fields. By the end of the course, students are expected not only to be able to successfully satisfy their departmental language requirements but also to have a great set of skills that would allow them to read any given text, written in Modern Hebrew. (The tern “Modern Hebrew” covers primarily literature from the mid 20th century to current time).

The course, which builds upon Introductory Modern Hebrew (first year HEB) focuses on the acquisition of proficiency and communicative skills in Modern Hebrew. The purpose of this class is to expand and strengthen beginners' Hebrew skills so that they become more self-assured, communicative, and versatile when they listen to, read, speak, and write Hebrew. It emphasizes both communicative and cultural themes and focuses on developing a rich and active vocabulary in several language domains

This course will explore how parts of the modern Middle East confronted questions and definitions of race and gender that were often first defined in the west. Organized thematically and covering a region that spans from North Africa to Iran, we will use the analytics of race and gender in an intersecting way to explore topics in the Middle East such as: colonialism, slavery, Arab Nationalism, Zionism, whiteness, racism, eugenics and scientific racism, and global solidarity movements. In so doing, our course will reveal that race is an operative category in the study of Middle East history, the historical racial logics operating in various Middle Eastern countries, and how race and gender intersect at the site of individual as well as the effects of this. This course is designed for anyone interested in race theory, gender theory, intersectionality, and Middle East history. By the end of this course, students will have the tools to think in a gendered and raced multidimensional way about aspects of Middle East history that do not often receive such an intersectional treatment. Additionally, they will develop the methodological tools to discern local race and gender logics that might be different than what they’re most familiar with. Finally, through coming to understand their relationship to the knowledge of our course, students will also be able to use the course as a springboard for continued learning in other courses that treat race, gender, and the Middle East.

Although Egyptians demonstrated use of sophisticated mathematics, including geometry, already in the Old Kingdom, the oldest preserved mathematical texts date from the Middle Kingdom. In this course we will read sections of several of these MK hieratic texts, including problems involving a wide range of math skills and applications; we will then read portions of the so-called Demotic mathematical papyri to see how Egyptian math evolved into the Ptolemaic period. No special background is required although comfort with numbers will be an asset