Global Arc

This course offers an introduction to pre-modern Middle Eastern social history focused on gender and women's lives. Proceeding chronologically from late antiquity through the eighteenth century, we will use secondary scholarship and primary sources (including legal and literary texts, court records, and letters) to examine pre-Islamic and Islamicate ideas and practices surrounding male and female modesty, mobility, honor, kinship, social ties, access to property, legal status, and sexuality; how these ideas and practices shaped men's and women's experiences within households and in the public sphere; and how they changed over time.

This course explores why, since the late 18th century, Jews and non-Jews alike have asked if the Jews are a nation and why people answer differently, inviting students to think about the origins of nationalism and the relationship between nations and other groups - religions, 'races,' ethnicities, and states. Learn about those who insisted that the Jews are not a separate nation and consider the different motivations for rejecting the nationhood of the Jews. We will examine the varieties of Jewish nationalisms that arose at the end of the 19th century, including Diaspora nationalism, territorialism, and especially Zionism.

This course explores how feminist thought & activism circulates globally by examining a variety of feminist movements in the Middle East & North Africa. Beginning with modern feminist thought and activism in mid-19th century Syria & Egypt, we'll trace feminist movements in various contemporary contexts, from Morocco, Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon & Egypt in the 20th century, to women's participation in the Arab Spring and transnational Islamic movements in the 21st century. We'll map the local and geopolitical discourses that have shaped regional feminisms, and ask how local feminisms are transnational or global.

This is a course in comparative political theory. Beginning with a study of classical and contemporary Western liberal and democratic theory, this course explores how modern Iranian political theorists and ideologues interpret or critique liberalism and democracy or offer theories of government that stand at odds with liberal and democratic theory. These Iranian authors draw from both religious and non-religious (including Marxist) perspectives. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to put the diverse authors that they read into dialogue with one another.

The decline of marriage in recent decades is often tied to the decline of religion. But why should marriage, a contractual relationship centered on sex and property, be seen as a religious practice? This seminar considers the varied and surprising ways in which the great monotheistic traditions of the Near East came to connect certain forms of human marriage - or their rejection- to divine devotion, and considers how marriage worked in societies shaped by these traditions. Spanning biblical Israel to the medieval Islamic world, this course will introduce you to the historical study of Near Eastern religions and to the field of family history.

This course provides a detailed survey of the key jihadi groups and ideologies that have taken form in the Middle East since the 1970s. From the Iranian revolution to 9/11, and from Hezbollah to ISIS, it introduces jihadism, including pre-modern Islamic theology and law and the ways in which these have been appropriated and repurposed by jihadi ideologues for political ends. The course also shows how jihadis disseminate their ideas (e.g. journals, pamphlets, books, cassette tapes and CDs, poetry, chants, satellite television shows, online videos, and social media) and considers Sunni and Shi'i jihadi movements.

This course will look at a variety of canonical texts and genres from the Classical Arabic literary heritage and examine them through the question of "truth" and "representation." In a culture that is often said to frown upon fictional writing, we will explore attitudes towards language as a means of gaining knowledge about the world, on the one hand, and as a way to depict "reality," on the other. The texts we will be reading range from pre-Islamic poetry to 13th century shadow plays and cover a wide range of topics, including philosophy, mysticism, historiography, as well as Islamic science and art. Readings will be in English.

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.