Spring

This course focuses on Hittite prayers. The texts are read in cuneiform and placed it in their social-historical context. The reading hones the student's philological skills. We will study the development of Hittite prayers from the 17th century to 13th century, incorporating recent insights on the rhetorical structure and power of prayers and the influence from Mesopotamia. We will read a selection of Old Hittite benedictions (the forerunners of prayers), the hymn to the Sungod, the desperate prayers of Arnuwanda and Asmunikal for delivery from their enemies, and a plague prayer of Mursili II.

Second quarter of Classical High Intermediate Arabic

This course examines the intersections of culture, politics, and biomedicine in the Middle East from a variety of theoretical and scholarly approaches. Students will study different conceptualizations of health, healing, the body, and personhood in the region, with a strong emphasis on biomedicine and contemporary state and governmental processes. Key topics covered in class include but are not limited to: the rise of western biomedicine in the region; religious perspectives of the body; Islam and organ trafficking and transplantation; racialized bodies in medical science; war and medicine, sex, gender, and reproductive technologies, and the impact of COVID-19 across the region.

This anthropology course centers on ethnographic research conducted in and about the Middle East, but it also trains students in the practice of ethnographic field research methods. Ethnography is at the heart of the discipline of cultural anthropology. In this course, we will study what ethnography is, where ethnographic fieldwork has been conducted in the Middle East, and why, and what political and social conditions have shaped knowledge of the region. We will ultimately discover the ways in which ethnography is a complex embodied human practice.
This class has two primary learning objectives. First, to teach students how to do ethnographic fieldwork about the Middle East through assignments that mobilize various techniques, including participant observation, mapping a field-site, interviews, “deep hanging out,” gathering documents, producing genealogies and writing up field-notes. Over the course of the semester students will draw on these short assignments to produce a final ethnographic research paper on some aspect of social life. Second, alongside short fieldwork assignments, students will study the history and theoretical debates of ethnography in the Middle East, such as discussions about the politics of representation, the construction of ‘otherness’ in knowledge, colonialism and its relationship to the social sciences, gender and race theory, and the ethics of conducting research among different vulnerable groups.

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.

In usual historiography, Alexander’s campaigns from 336 to 323 BCE ushered in an age of intense cultural exchange between Hellenism and various eastern cultures that lasted until late antiquity. Applying the concept of the “Silk Road,” this course will explore cultural exchanges between the Greco-Roman world and the East from the 4th century BCE to the 3rd century CE as well as how contemporary East Asian media products represent this age. Primary sources originally written in Greek, Latin, Iranian, Babylonian, and Chinese will be read in English translations.

In usual historiography, Alexander’s campaigns from 336 to 323 BCE ushered in an age of intense cultural exchange between Hellenism and various eastern cultures that lasted until late antiquity. Applying the concept of the “Silk Road,” this course will explore cultural exchanges between the Greco-Roman world and the East from the 4th century BCE to the 3rd century CE as well as how contemporary East Asian media products represent this age. Primary sources originally written in Greek, Latin, Iranian, Babylonian, and Chinese will be read in English translations.

Cities are extraordinarily successful forms of human settlement, currently home to over 6 billion people around the world. They offer employment opportunities, production efficiency, and expansive social networks. However, they also have negative impacts on social lives, health, resources, and the environment; they are deep wells of inequality, isolation, and disease. Were ancient cities similarly difficult? Through alternating lectures and seminars, this course examines ancient Mesopotamian cities from the perspective of city life and urban challenges, comprising the positive and negative aspects and possible compensatory factors to urban living in the past. We will examine cities from the world’s earliest, in the 4th millennium BCE, through mature cities of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE, to the artificial imperial cities of the 1st millennium BCE.

TURK Reading/Research

Prior knowledge of the Middle East not required. This course aims to facilitate a general understanding of some key factors that have shaped life in this region, with primary emphasis on modern conditions and their background, and to provide exposure to some of the region's rich cultural diversity. This course can serve as a basis for the further study of the history, politics, and civilizations of the Middle East.

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.