Winter

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.

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 Hakan Karateke's unpublished "Ottoman Reader" serves as a text book.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)

The second quarter of a two-section course in which Elementary Kazakh and Elementary Uzbek will be offered as one class, with the option for students to study one or the other, or both simultaneously.

Continued reading of texts in the Ugaritic language, emphasis on prose texts.

The American Muslim community hails from all corners of the globe, and represents a diverse mix of ethnic groups, socio-economic backgrounds, political persuasions, and theological positions. American Islam is older than the nation itself, and Muslims have contributed to the American project throughout its history. Today, the United States represents one unique node in a complex, global Muslim world, with deep and active relationships connecting the United States to the historic centers of Muslim life. Conspicuously religious Muslims also occupy greater positions of power and visibility across American society, from the halls of Congress to the comedy club stage. This course will provide a historically-informed, globally-inflected exploration of contemporary American Islam. Students will engage primary texts of American Muslim life and consider them within social, cultural, and historical context.

This course will discuss current trends in research for 19th and early 20th Century Ottoman and Turkish history.