Global Arc

This class explores medieval Islamic history through everyday documents from Egypt: letters, decrees, contracts, court records, and accounts. We will read a wide range of documents in translation, learn to understand them, and use them to evaluate politics, religion, class, commerce, material history, and family relationships in Egypt from just before the Islamic conquests until just before the Ottoman era. We will also consider documents themselves, as historical artifacts and as historical evidence. Why did medieval people produce and preserve written records? And what does history look like when told through documents?

How does one write a history of quotidian life in a premodern society? This course takes history to the micro-level, with rigor. Sometimes the simplest questions (food, clothing, shelter, patterns of marriage and reproduction) can be the most challenging - and exciting - to answer. Our laboratory will be the medieval twin cities of Fustat-Cairo, a burgeoning metropolis astride the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan trade routes and an excellent place for take-out food. You will have the opportunity to contribute to an evolving state of knowledge via primary sources and hands-on experiments.

This course introduces students to classic and recent theoretical debates about secularism and secularization. We will consider a range of historical-ethnographic examples, focusing particularly on the limits of secularism in its modern encounter with Islam and Muslim communities in North Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America. By comparing the realities of everyday life in a variety of national contexts, we will ask what secularism offers as a human way of experiencing the world, a mode of legitimating norms and constructing authority, and a method of telling stories and creating myths about human values and historical progress.

Despite living in an increasingly globalized society, the notion of different and opposing civilizations is still used as a way to add meaning and definition to our world. In this course, we will critically evaluate what is at stake when employing the concept of civilization. Using historical contexts from "Western" and "Near Eastern" civilizations, we will explore civilizational encounters from the Afroasiatic roots of Classical Civilization to America's culture wars. With one foot in the past and one in the present we will seek to understand whether civilizations exist and why civilizational paradigms endure despite drawing controversy.

Violence in the contemporary Middle East may be seen as a rebellion of youth against aging political regimes and the foreign influences in the region. This course is intended to examine this generational hypothesis in the context of the social and political history of the Middle East and North Africa. Particular emphasis will be given to the study of social as well as political violence. Students will be introduced to such topics as the emergence of youth as a political concern, the way Islamist movements focus on youth issues (e.g., education and leisure), and the complex and diverse relationships between the body, violence, and politics.

This course explores the history of North Africa, an area undergoing radical political turmoil since the beginning of the Arab spring in January 2011. The course explores the colonial and postcolonial transformations of the Maghrib from the 19th to the first decade of the 21st century. Through a range of secondary and primary sources, the purpose of the course is to give an overview of the colonial effects and legacies on and in North African societies, but also to start questioning the colonial period as a framework of analysis.

What did slavery represent for Islamic societies, and what does human trafficking mean in the Middle East and North Africa nowadays as Salafist groups such as ISIS restore practices of enslavement in Syria and Iraq? After a presentation of the issues related to slavery in Muslim societies today, we will ask ourselves if there was even such thing as Islamic slavery: Did Muslim societies organize a specific type of slave trade? To what extent was slavery a pivotal institution? We will see that various experiences of slavery shaped discourses about race and gender, and we will assess the main legacies of slavery in current Muslim societies.

This course draws on rich historical literature, theoretical perspectives, and empirical analysis to overview key themes in the study of the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa. Students will gain an understanding of how core political and economic institutions developed throughout the modern Middle East, and to what end. The course will explore a variety of explanations for institutional durability and change in the region, including the roles of religion, culture, oil rentierism, and colonialism. Finally, the course will provide insight into cutting-edge methodological approaches to the study of the Middle East.

From the mid to late 20th century, Algeria has occupied a key position in the imagination of major world actors such as the Black Panthers, Viet Cong and George W. Bush administration. Yet, observers have often examined the global significance of events in the North African nation, namely its storied revolution against France, while neglecting Algerians' lived experiences of these same moments. This class re-centers attention on different Algerian communities' views of histories concerning their country from the rise of nationalism in the early 20th century through the ongoing 2019 Hirak movement within local, regional, and global frameworks.

This seminar familiarizes advanced students with a range of developments shaping the Levant and, more specifically, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria in the interwar period. Our focus will be on primary texts. Each week we will read parts of one landmark work in the Arabic original--mostly monographs written on a particular topic, and a few memoirs--as well as secondary sources. We will think about such topics as nationalism, urban culture, historiography, geography, education, and changing gender roles.