Middle East Studies

Spring 2021 Courses


MES


MES 0100 The Middle East: Cultures & Societies 
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:00-10:50 a.m.
Professor: Alex Winder
Online
This course highlights major cultural, social, and political developments in the amorphous region known, since the 20th century, as the Middle East. Covering expanses of space and time, this course attends to a diversity of peoples and polities, and considers different regional concepts that include some or all of the territories normally included in the Middle East (including the Fertile Crescent, the Mediterranean world, the Indian Ocean world, the Arab world, and the Muslim world) and addresses the region's coherence in terms of shared historical and political experiences, religious and cultural references or practices, and/or socialities and ways of being.

MES 1120 Art, Culture, and Society in Tehran
Tuesday, 4:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Professor: Samine Tabatabaei
Online
This course explores the city as physical and metaphorical space and aggregator of possibilities. It focuses on Tehran, in its historical, geographical, artistic and virtual specificity, and artists who have lived there, including: Kamal-al-molk (and his followers in the early twentieth century; artists associated with Saqqakhaneh (modern school of art) at mid-twentieth-century, artists of the Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and 1990s, and contemporary urban and transnational artists. By examining urban participation, aesthetics, and politics in Tehran across more than a century, the course provokes critical reflection on experience and representations of urban space, citizenry and creativity.

DIAP
WRIT

MES 1270 Histories of Watching and Surveying
Monday, 3:00-5:30 p.m.
Professor: Samine Tabatabaei
Online
How are surveillance practices historically embedded in social fabric? How have surveillance technologies altered social life throughout history? This course explores these questions by mapping the complex ways that technologies and societies interact to produce security, fear, control, and vulnerability. Some of the areas covered include close-circuit television (CCTV) in public and quasi-public spaces, biometric technologies on the border, and a host of monitoring technologies in cyberspaces, workplaces, and the home. Readings are drawn from the critical theories in visual culture, science-fiction, and popular media.

DIAP
WRIT

MES 1299 Rural Palestine: Natives, Peasants, and Revolutionaries
Wednesday, 3:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Professor: Paul Kohlbry
Online
This course looks at how the inhabitants of rural Palestine were seen (and saw themselves) as natives, peasants, and revolutionaries. Over the 19th and 20th centuries, rural Palestine was understood as both isolated and globalized; timeless and transforming; unchangeable and critically vulnerable to forces of modernity. The native, the peasant, and the revolutionary emerged as different actors—European missionaries and Palestinian activists, international NGOs and local cooperatives, village cultivators and urban CEOs, seed banks and financial banks—draw on rural practices, knowledges, and histories. How, then, does the rural past become the basis for claims on, and struggles for, Palestine's future?

DIAP
WRIT


LANGUAGES


Arabic

ARAB 0100 First-Year Arabic (Elsa Belmont Flores)
ARAB 0200 First-Year Arabic
 (Alla Hassan)
ARAB 0400 Second-Year Arabic (Mirena Christoff)
ARAB 0450B Beginning Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (Alla Hassan)
ARAB 0600 Third-Year Arabic (Miled Faiza)
ARAB 0800 Advanced Arabic: Language & Culture through Cinema (Elsa Belmont Flores) DIAP
ARAB 0950 Advanced Reading and Composition: Arabic Fiction in the West (Miled Faiza)

Hebrew

HEBR 0200 Elementary Hebrew (Ruth Adler Ben Yehuda)
HEBR 0400 Intermediate Hebrew (Ruth Adler Ben Yehuda)
HEBR 0600 Issues in Contemporary Israeli Society, Politics, and Culture in Hebrew (David Jacobson) DIAP

Turkish

TKSH 0110 Intensive Elementary Turkish Language and Culture (Esra Ozdemir)
TKSH 0200 Introduction to Turkish
 (Esra Ozdemir)
TKSH 0400 Intermediate Turkish II
 (Esra Ozdemir)
TKSH 0600 Advanced Turkish II Online (Esra Ozdemir)
TKSH 0720B Istanbul, Global Metropolis (Esra Ozdemir)


ELECTIVES


Courses that may count towards electives, meet with the Director of Undergraduate Studies to discuss

Archaeology and the Ancient World

ARCH 0372 Meeting with Mesopotamia (Zachary Rubin) DIAP | First-Year Seminar
ARCH 1025 Greece–Egypt–Anatolia–Mesopotamia: Transcultural Interactions in the Ancient World (Felipe Rojas Silva)
ARCH 1712 Ruins: Cross-cultural Understandings of the Material Traces of the Past (Felipe Rojas Silva)

Assyriology

ASYR 1400 Introduction to Sumerian (Matthew Rutz)
ASYR 2710 Babylonian Astronomy (John Steele) Graduate seminar

Classics

CLAS 0450 Philo of Alexandria and His World (Pura Nieto Hernandez)
CLAS 1210 Mediterranean Culture Wars: Archaic Greek History, c. 1200 to 479 BC (Graham Oliver) WRIT

Comparative Literature

COLT 1431B Modern Arabic Poetry (Emily Drumsta) WRIT

Egyptology

EGYT 1030 Collapse! Ancient Egypt after the Pyramid Age (Christelle Alvarez)
EGYT 1320 Introduction to Classical Hieroglyphic Egyptian Writing and Language (Middle Egyptian II)
 (James Allen)
EGYT 1420 Ancient Egyptian Religion and Magic (James Allen)
EGYT 2300 Readings in Ancient Egyptian (Leo Depuydt) Graduate seminar
EGYT 2620 Demotic Texts (Leo Depuydt) Graduate seminar

History of Art and Architecture

HIAA 0041 The Architectures of Islam (Sheila Bonde) WRIT

History

HIST 1456 Bankrupt: An Economic and Financial History of the Middle East in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Sreemati Mitter)
HIST 1457 History of the Palestinians (Beshara Doumani) DIAP | WRIT
HIST 1963Q Sex, Power, and God: A Medieval Perspective (Amy Remensnyder) WRIT
HIST 1964L Slavery in the Early Modern World 
(Adam Teller) DIAP | WRIT
HIST 1968V America and the Middle East: Histories of Connection and Exchange 
(Faiz Ahmed) 
HIST 1969F Nothing Pleases Me: Understanding Modern Middle Eastern History Through Literature (Sreemati Mitter) DIAP | WRIT

Humanities

HMAN 1974P Theo-Politics: Political Readings of the Hebrew Bible (Adi Ophir)

International and Public Affairs

IAPA 1804A Iran and the Islamic Revolution (Stephen Kinzer) WRIT Syllabus
IAPA 1804L Africa's Colonization in Comparative Perspective 
(Gabriel Koehler-Derrick) DIAP | WRIT
IAPA 1804Q French Colonialism in Global Perspective, 19th-20th Centuries (Madeline Woker) DIAP | WRIT

Judaic Studies

JUDS 0050H Israel's Wars (Rachel Rojanski) First-Year Seminar

Political Science

POLS 1822I Geopolitics of Oil and Energy (Jeffrey Colgan) WRIT

Religious Studies

RELS 0420 Sacred Bodies (Susan Harvey)
RELS 1325E Ecotheology in Ancient Christianity (Susan Harvey)
RELS 1330A The Life and Afterlives of the Apostle Paul (Jae Han)
RELS 2100B Exegesis at Qumran
 (Saul Olyan) Graduate seminar
RELS 2400L Topics in Islamic Studies: Methods and Theories (Nancy Khalek) Graduate seminar



DIAP

MES 1120 Art, Culture, and Society in Tehran (Samine Tabatabaei)
MES 1270 Histories of Watching and Surveying 
(Samine Tabatabaei)
MES 1299 Rural Palestine: Natives, Peasants, and Revolutionaries (Paul Kohlbry)
ARAB 0800 Advanced Arabic: Language & Culture through Cinema (Elsa Belmont Flores)
ARCH 0372 Meeting with Mesopotamia (Zachary Rubin)
HEBR 0600 Issues in Contemporary Israeli Society, Politics, and Culture in Hebrew (David Jacobson)
HIST 1457 History of the Palestinians (Beshara Doumani) 
HIST 1964L Slavery in the Early Modern World (Adam Teller)
HIST 1969F Nothing Pleases Me: Understanding Modern Middle Eastern History Through Literature (Sreemati Mitter)
IAPA 1804L Africa's Colonization in Comparative Perspective (Gabriel Koehler-Derrick)
IAPA 1804Q French Colonialism in Global Perspective, 19th-20th Centuries (Madeline Woker)