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 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.
This course covers the period from ca. 1700 to the present. It explores Muslim intellectuals’ engagement with tradition and modernity in the realms of religion, politics, literature, and law. We discuss debates concerning the role of religion in a modern society, perceptions of Europe and European influence, the challenges of maintaining religious and cultural authenticity, and Muslim views of nation-states and nationalism in the Middle East. We also give consideration to the modern developments of transnational jihadism and the Arab Spring. This course sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies.
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.
NEHC 20202 or NEHC 20602, or equivalent
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.
The goal of this class is to get an overview of Hittite literature, as “defined” by the Hittites themselves, in the wider historical-cultural context of the Ancient Near East. Some of the most important questions we can ask ourselves in reading ancient texts are: why were they written down, why were they kept, for whom were they intended, and what do the answers to these questions (apart from the primary content of the texts themselves) tell us about — in our case — Hittite society?
This course counts as a Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality course for GNSE majors. This course will provide a historical and theoretical survey of issues pertaining to gender and sexuality in the modern Middle East. First, we will outline the colonial legacies of gender politics and gendered discourses in modern Middle Eastern history. We will discuss orientalist constructions of the harem and the veil (Allouche, Laila Ahmed, Lila Abu-Loghod), and their contested afterlives across the Middle East. We will also explore colonial (homo)sexuality, and attendant critiques (Najmabadi, Massad). We will pay especial attention to local discourses about gender and sexuality, and trouble facile assumptions of “writing back” while attending to the various specificities of local discourses of everyday life across various sites of the Middle East. Eschewing reductive traps for more nuanced explorations of the specifics of life in Beirut, Cairo, Istanbul, or Tehran – as well as to rural areas – we will show how gender and sexuality are constructed and practiced in these locales. In addition to foundational scholarly texts in the field, we will also engage with an array of cultural texts (films, novels, poetry, comics) and – where possible – have conversations with activists who are working in these sites via Skype/teleconferencing.
The course introduces students to current methodological trends in the Western study of intellectual history and then examines debates and discourses in the field of Islamic intellectual historiography, with a focus on selected examples. Students will develop and present individual original research projects.
This course covers the period from ca. 1700 to the present. It explores Muslim intellectuals’ engagement with tradition and modernity in the realms of religion, politics, literature, and law. We discuss debates concerning the role of religion in a modern society, perceptions of Europe and European influence, the challenges of maintaining religious and cultural authenticity, and Muslim views of nation-states and nationalism in the Middle East. We also give consideration to the modern developments of transnational jihadism and the Arab Spring. This course sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies.
The class explores the history of Iraq during the years 1917-2015. We will discuss the rise of the Iraqi nation state, Iraqi and Pan-Arab nationalism, and Iraqi authoritarianism. The class will focus on the unique histories of particular group in Iraqi society; religious groups (Shiis, Sunnis, Jews), ethnic groups (especially Kurds), classes (the urban poor, the educated middle classes, the landed and tribal elites), Iraqi women, and Iraqi tribesmen. Other classes will explore the ideologies that became prominent in the Iraqi public sphere, from communism to Islamic radicalism. We will likewise discuss how colonialism and imperialism shaped major trends in Iraqi history. The reading materials for the class are based on a combination of primary and secondary sources: we will read together Iraqi novels, memoirs and poems (in translation), as well as British and American diplomatic documents about Iraq.
