Related Papers
Course Outline 2015 - ANT3345 / Anthropology of Maghreb and Middle East
Marie-Claude Haince
2023 •
Arie M Dubnov
Course Description: This graduate seminar introduces major trends and critical issues in historiography and historical thinking, primarily focusing on developments that shaped the discipline during the twentieth century. Its principal aims are: (1) To survey important conceptual and methodological landmarks in the development of "History" as a kind of knowledge, discipline, rhetoric, and practice (2) To become familiar with critical theoretical approaches that have significantly impacted the writing of history and contributed to major historical "turns." (3) To point to often implicit and unexamined assumptions about historical research and presentation that precede our trips to the archives and hours of writing (4) To promote a sense of intellectual community among incoming graduate students in history with different areas of concentration. The seminar will put a special emphasis on scholarly debates regarding the above questions. Among other things, we will inquire into the history of certain basic historical concepts often thought not to have a history, including the past itself. We will trace how academic history came to be seen as a "science," rival conceptions that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries over what exactly this meant, and the challenge posed by postmodern theory to classifying historical knowledge as "objective." We will look at some of the different ways historians have tried to explain the purpose of their work while also probing the tension between academic and popular uses of history. We will explore debates over how broadly or narrowly historians should delimit their subjects (micro versus macro scales), as well as what weight they should ascribe to particulars or universals, persons or collectives, individual events or large-scale structures, dominant or subordinate groups, narrative or analytical presentation, hermeneutical or causal explanation, ideas or discourses or material factors in the understanding of historical experience and change. We will pay close attention to how historians conceptualize their questions, use evidence, and develop their interpretations, arguments, analyses, narratives, and explanations. Finally, we will examine how historians have assimilated (or not) insights and models from other disciplines, including philosophy, the natural sciences, social and economic theory, literary and critical theory, and anthropology.
IAFF/PSC 6388. Nationalism in Europe_Mylonas_Graduate course_MA
2022 •
Harris Mylonas
This is a class on the causes and the political effects of nationalism in Europe. The first part of the course is designed to provide you with an understanding of the most prominent explanations of the emergence and spread of nationalism, and the background knowledge and tools with which to evaluate them. We will study the transition from Empires to nation-states. We will also focus on developments in the "periphery of Europe." The second part of the course focuses on the effects of nation-building on state policies toward non-core groups and diasporas, patterns of political violence, and political identities. The third part of the course deals with contemporary challenges: populism, nativism, immigrant incorporation, the prospects of a European supranational identity, contemporary self-determination movements, and Gendered dimensions of nationalism. We will cover cases across Europe and from different time periods. You will learn how to formulate research questions, develop arguments, and evaluate hypotheses.
Noa Shandlinger
Middle Eastern Societies- Course Syllabus
Atef Said
PSC 6362. Nation-Building in the Balkans_Mylonas_Syllabus (Graduate, MA)
Harris Mylonas
Many Belts, Many Roads: China and the Islamic World, c.600AD-Present
2019 •
John Chen
This seminar invites you to explore the history of interactions between China and the Islamic world across the greater Indian Ocean region, sometimes called the “maritime Silk Road.” It will focus especially on Muslims living in China itself, who played a particularly important role bridging these diverse spaces and cultures. Temporally and spatially broad, the course covers the 1,400 years since the rise of the Tang Dynasty to the east and Islamic societies to the west. For most of those fourteen centuries, China and the Islamic world boasted the largest cities on earth, such as Chang’an, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Beijing, Cairo, and Constantinople. Before European expansion, flows of people, goods, and ideas between those urban foci accounted for the majority of the world’s economic activity and some of its richest cultural achievements. Those complex exchanges have left some of the least understood yet quietly consequential legacies for the more recent era of nationalism, Western geopolitical dominance, and “China’s rise.” This seminar offers multiple ways of understanding Chinese, Islamic, and global history, and illuminates aspects of contemporary Chinese state and society, intra-Asian exchange, and international relations. It will encourage you to think (and think again) about both interconnectedness and difference in the context of greater Asia. It will demand that you look beyond the framework of the nation-state, but will also ask you to contemplate how nationalisms have shaped understandings of the pre-national past. It will invite you, furthermore, to consider whether our basic definitions of “China” and “Islam” adequately account for the connected histories we will discuss. Specific themes will include community formation, material exchange, texts and transculturation, art and architecture, religious thought and practice, border-crossing and mobility, border-making and inequalities, state-building and state-minority relations, the transformations and disruptions of the European colonial era, the transition from dynastic empires to modern nation-states, processes of ethnicization and minoritization, and the “presence of the past.”
Triumph and Tragedy, Independence and Nakba (Catastrophe): The 1948 War in historical perspective
Arie M Dubnov
May 2018 marks the 70th anniversary of Israel’s Independence, as well as the 1948 War in Palestine/Israel. The war, which broke out in November 1947 in the wake of the UN General Assembly Resolution in favor of partition of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab states, was exceptionally cruel, leaving deep scars in both communities. To this day, it signifies different things for each side – a creation of a new, sovereign Israeli state for the Jews, and displacement, together with loss of land and home for the Palestinians. Indeed, even the different names used to mark the violent events and their aftermath – “Atzmaut” (Hebrew for Independence) and “Nakba” (Arabic for “Disaster” or “Catastrophe”) – capture this dissonance. The overall aim of the course is to explore the local, regional, and global contexts that produced the cataclysm of 1948, and to delve into the consequences and unresolved political, social, and cultural questions it left behind. To accomplish this overall aim, the students taking the class will be asked to engage in two connected, yet distinct types of scholarly inquiry: First, the course will introduce students to the major developments leading up to the war, the key personalities, events and various stages of the war, and some of the major historiographical debates which emerged in the last two decades. Second, switching from history to memory and “memory activism,” the course will analyze the way in which the war was narrated and remembered by Israelis and Palestinians, and the way in which this memory changed over the years. The course wishes not to avoid dealing with a controversial topic, but to do so in a scholarly and academic manner. It will provide a room for showcasing different narratives, historiographies and modes of interpretation, in a conscious attempt to go beyond political partisanship insofar as the topic permits. The timing is also auspicious. The class will run in tandem with multiple special events that will take place during the spring semester, and we intend to take advantage of this unique opportunity. Hence the class’s format is somewhat unconventional: first, in addition to the traditional class discussions, students will be also required to attend the movie series Cinema and the Memory of the 1948 War that will run parallel to the class during this semester (see dates below); second, students will be required to attend the one day conference entitled Nakba, Past & Present, that will take place on Friday, April 13 2017, at the Elliott School’s Institute for Middle East Studies.
SCTS 200 Science in Society: Values, Ethics and Politics (Fall 2019)
2019 •
Jörg Matthias Determann
Semester course; 3 lecture hours. 3 credits. An interdisciplinary introduction to the ethical, social and political dimensions of science, technology and medicine examined through case studies and debates.
Syllabus for Mass Media in the Middle East
Mass Media in the Middle East
2023 •
Walter Armbrust
