Spring

In this course, we will read a variety of texts that imagine or represent the Arab experience of exile to and diaspora within the United States, focusing on the ways that these texts re-construct and imagine the key dialectic of home/diasporic space, specifically within the framework of the complicated and dynamic relationship between the Arab world and the United States. Throughout the quarter, the readings would enable us to engage with several key concepts related to the Arab (and broader) immigrant experience in the US, including race, memory and nostalgia, language, and second-generational post-memory, as well as the role of the immigrant community in forming the ‘homeland’s’ vision of itself. We would begin with a historical overview of emigration from the Arabic-speaking world, beginning with the vast emigration of Lebanese and Syrians from Mount Lebanon and Syria in the mid-nineteenth century, but will pay particular attention to moments in which this identity has been or become particularly fraught, for example, following such events as the 1967 war, the 9/11 attacks, or the recent Executive Order by the Trump Administration (1/2017).

This course explores the rituals, oral literature, and music associated with the nomadic cultures of Central Eurasia. It is a continuation of the course titled "Intriduction to the Musical Folklore of Central Asia", offered on odd-numbered years in the Spring Quarter. The course covers the traditional musical performances, oral literature, and other oral performance genres of the Kazakhs, Kirghiz, Turkmens, Siberian peoples, and Mongols, and examines topics in Central Eurasian animist/shamanist/Tengriist cultural practices.

The course examines a wide array of scholarship surveying the problems posed by the rise of Islam from the historical and historiographical points of view.

This course offers an introduction to the terms and concepts current in Arabic philosophical writings in the classical period of Islamic thought (roughly 9th to 17th century). It begins with the movement to translate Greek texts into Arabic and the debate among Muslims about the validity of philosophy versus revelation. From a close reading of key works (in English) by important philosophers such as al-Kindī, al-Rāzī, al-Sijistānī, al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), al-Ghazzālī, Ibn Bājja, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Suhrawardī, and Mullā Ṣadrā, a series of lectures will follow the career of philosophy in the Islamic world, first as a ‘foreign’ science and then, later, as selectively rejected but also substantially accepted as a natural component of sophisticated discourse.

This course covers the period from ca. 1800 to the present, exploring the works of authors, film-makers, poets, intellectuals, political theorists, religious reformists and scholars of Islam who interpreted various aspects of Islam or Islamicate civilizations: the history of the former Dar al-Islam and the histories of modern Muslim-majority nation states; the encounter with colonialism and the West; attitudes toward "modernity"; calls for religious and social reform; ideas of political legitimacy; modern forms of spirituality; issues of gender, class, race, multiculturalism; the development of new genres of literature and art; etc. We focus primarily on Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel.  The course focuses on encountering primary works (non-fiction, fiction, and poetry, films, music, etc.), contextualized through lectures, discussion and secondary readings.

This sequence surveys the main trends in the political history of the Islamic world, with some attention to economic, social, and intellectual history. This course covers the period from ca. 1100 to 1750, including the arrival of the steppe peoples (Turks and Mongols), the Mongol successor states, and the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria. We also study the foundation of the great Islamic regional empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Moghuls.

Students in this course will explore and engage two categories frequently deployed in the study of ancient and modern societies—“magic” and “monsters”—through interaction with textual and iconographic material from the ancient 

<p>This sequence introduces three great empires of the ancient world. Each course in the sequence focuses on one empire, with attention to the similarities and differences among the empires being considered. By exploring the rich legacy of documents and monuments that these empires produced, students are introduced to ways of understanding imperialism and its cultural and societal effects—both on the imperial elites and on those they conquered.</p><p>For most of the duration of the New Kingdom (1550-1069 BC), the ancient Egyptians were able to establish a vast empire and becoming one of the key powers within the Near East. This course will investigate in detail the development of Egyptian foreign policies and military expansion which affected parts of the Near East and Nubia. We will examine and discuss topics such as ideology, imperial identity, political struggle and motivation for conquest and control of wider regions surrounding the Egyptian state as well as the relationship with other powers and their perspective on Egyptian rulers as for example described in the Amarna letters.</p>

This course will provide an overview of Anatolian/Hittite literature, as “defined” by the Hittites themselves, in the wider historical-cultural context of the Ancient Near East. In the course of discussions, we will try to answer some important questions about Hittite inscriptions, such as: 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 Hittite society?

This course provides an introduction to the social, political, and cultural history of Mesopotamia, from the origins of writing and cities in Sumer (ca. 3200 B.C.), through the great empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia.