Graduate

TURK Reading/Research

A selection of Turkish printed texts in Arabic script from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is introduced in order of difficulty. Hakan Karateke's unpublished "Ottoman Reader" serves as a text book. The texts are drawn from historical textbooks, official documents, novels, and other genres.

Advanced Turkish students will develop their language skills in speaking, reading, translating, listening, and writing, while learning about Turkish society and culture at the same time. To address all of these aspects each class is divided into three sections which focuses on a specific skill.

This sequence features proficiency-based instruction emphasizing speaking and writing skills as well as reading and listening comprehension at the intermediate to advanced levels in modern Turkish. Modern short stories, novel excerpts, academic and journalistic articles form the basis for an introduction to modern Turkish literature. Cultural units consisting of films and web-based materials are also used extensively in this course, which is designed to bring the intermediate speaker to an advanced level of proficiency.

Elementary Turkish (First Year)

In this course, we will read a selection of Sumerian texts that provide insights into the image of the king. We will start with royal inscriptions, move on to the so-called royal correspondence of the Kings of Ur, and finish with excerpts from the self-praise poem of king Sulgi commonly referred to as ‘Sulgi B’. Apart from tackling philological issues and practicing to read cuneiform from copies and photos, we will also address broader questions during classroom discussions, such as: Can we use royal inscriptions, correspondence, and hymns as historical sources? Can we bridge the gap between the reign of historical Ur III kings and their feats as commemorated in texts preserved exclusively on Old Babylonian manuscripts? Can we use language and orthography for dating a text?

This course covers Elementary Sumerian.

This sequence deepens and expands the students' knowledge of modern Persian. The goal is to enable the students to gain proficiency in all skills of language acquisition at a higher level. In this sequence, the students learn more complex grammatical structures and gain wider vocabulary through reading paragraph-length texts on a variety of topics related to Persian language, literature, and culture. Students will also be familiarized with Persian news and media terminology. Class meets four hours a week with the instructor and one hour with a native informant who conducts grammatical drills and Persian conversation.

This sequence concentrates on all skills of language acquisition (reading, writing, listening, and speaking). The class begins with the Persian alphabet, and moves to words, phrases, short sentences, and finally short paragraphs. The goal is to enable the students towards the end of the sequence to read, understand, and translate simple texts in modern standard Persian and engage in short everyday conversations. All the basic grammatical structures are covered in this sequence. Introducing the Iranian culture through the texts is also a goal. The class meets four hours a week with the instructor and one hour with a native informant who conducts grammatical drills and Persian conversation.

This course offers a critical appraisal of the concepts of empire and imperialism in the historiography of ancient Mesopotamia and Iran to address political formations that developed (and vanished) during the first millennium BCE, with a focus on the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Achaemenid empires. This seminar will explore the nature of power, control, and resource management in these early empires, and how they served as the blueprint for the later imperial formations of Classical and Late Antiquity. Students will address a substantial part of Mesopotamian and Iranian history and study in depth some key historiography issues for the history of Antiquity. Primary documents will be read in translation and the course has no ancient language requirements. However, some readings of secondary literature in common academic languages (especially French and German) are to be expected. Students will be asked to present the readings and participate in classroom discussions; write a book review; and conduct a personal research on a topic of their choice (midterm annotated bibliography and research proposal; final essay).