MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Spring 2024

Class Schedule

Course Descriptions

MENA 200-0-1: Making the Modern Middle East: Culture, Politics, History

This course tackles one of the most misrepresented regions of the world today. You will explore the invention and reinvention of “the Middle East” -- socially, politically, and artistically. You will analyze how this notion has been central to power plays between the West and Middle East and also within the geographic Middle East itself – via European colonialism, US foreign policy, wars and other conflicts, and ongoing uprisings. How and where have our images of and narratives about the Middle East circulated, and how have they gained such durable power? In today’s rapidly changing geopolitical landscape, are these ways of understanding the region being reinforced or are they changing, and why? Furthermore, how have people living in the region engaged with such images? What are the different ways that people have constructed alternative notions of places, peoples, and cultures across the same time and space? We highlight how the arts and media have been key to the representation of the Middle East, including reproducing and contesting stereotypes. As your gateway course to the Middle East, you will not only gain basic information; you will also learn how to learn about this misunderstood region. 

MENA 290-3-1: Porous Borders? Geography, Power and Techniques of Movement

At the advent of "globalization" some scholars argued that the movements of capital, goods, people and ideas across nation-states have rendered their borders increasingly porous. The erosive effects of this porosity in the age of the multi-national corporations heralded the death of the nation-state. Yet, in the epoch of border walls and offshored refugee processing centers, this assumed porosity of borders begs a reexamination of broader geographies of power and tactics of movement. In this course, we ask: What is a border? Is it the physical line drawn between two states? When is a border artificial and when natural? Who gets to draw these lines? How does the border become an architecture of regulation that extends access to mobility to some and denies it to others? We will probe these questions by working towards rethinking borders as equally the products of mobile social actors, contraband commodities and fluctuating values as they are of state policies aimed at managing their movements. By the end of the course students will be exposed to diverse theories of space and formations of borders in the Americas, Europe, and South Asia. They will be able to articulate what an attention to space and the relations of power inscribed in border formations can contribute to our conceptions of space and power.

MENA 290-3-2: Morocco in Film

Morocco was the 2022 World Cup underdog as the first Arab and African country to make it to the final four, but the country is little-known to many in the Anglophone world. This course introduces students to everyday life in Morocco through feature and documentary film, with an emphasis on Moroccan filmmakers. It is commonly considered part of the Arab Middle East, but it is also in the heart of Tamazgha (the Amazigh or ‘Berber' world) with a French colonial past and close linkages to Europe. Course readings draw from anthropology, literature, biography, popular culture, and film studies. Thematic foci include ethnic minorities and majorities, migration, gender, law, human rights, and religion. Students develop analytical skills, especially in regards to perspective and bias in both image production and audience reception. Evaluation will be based on weekly journaling, discussion of films, and a synthesizing essay. Most films will be available streaming on Canvas.

MENA 290-4-1: Jews and Arabs in Palestine/The Land of Israel, 1880-1948

This course will delve into the intricate social and cultural dynamics between Jews and Arabs in Palestine/The Land of Israel from the late 19th century to 1948. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, which often depict this period as marked solely by mutual rivalry, violence, and conflict, this course aims to challenge this narrative. Through the lens of a Relational History approach, we will explore diverse interactions beyond political rivalry, examining shared identities and joint experiences. We will also examine various daily encounters and collaborations that unfolded between ordinary Jews and Arabs across different public spheres such as mixed cities, the education system, business and the labor market, political organizations, leisure venues, and more. Using primary historical sources, we will analyze the myriad ways in which Jews and Arabs formed personal, and at times even romantic, relationships against the backdrop of the escalating national struggle.

MENA 290-4-2: MENA Jewry: History, Society, Culture

This course delves into the multifaceted experiences of Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), spanning from the 18th century to the present day. Looking at their history, cultural developments, societal dynamics, and linguistic transformations, we will examine the diverse cultural worlds where Arabic-speaking Jews lived and thrived. We will also explore the deep and enduring relationships they developed with non-Jews and their instrumental role in shaping local, regional, and national cultures and politics. Their identities and histories, which vary according to their place of origin, will be presented, assessed, and debated in scholarly articles and monographs, political statements, personal testimonies and memoirs, poetry and fiction, as well as music and cinema. Special attention will be given to the interplay between Jewish and Islamic cultures, continuities and ruptures between Jews and their neighboring societies, the impact of geopolitical events, and the formation of Israel within this historical context. By focusing on MENA Jewry, the course offers new perspectives on questions of Zionism and nationalism, colonialism and geography, religion and secularization, and historiography and memory.

MENA 290-6-1: Women in Turkish Popular Culture

When we think of popular culture, we think of film, music, television, sports and fashion, among other things. But popular culture is never solely an amusement or diversion. Although entertainment is ostensibly the main purpose of popular culture, through the consumption of this ‘entertainment,’ popular culture also shapes individual and societal values and beliefs.

In this course, we will examine representations of women in Turkish popular culture and how popular culture generates and articulates understandings of gender and sexuality in contemporary Turkey and beyond. We will also focus on how these representations affect gender roles and expectations. We will consider how differences in identity, class, race, and sexuality may shift the way women are represented and even valued within popular culture. Through critical readings and discussions, we will also explore how women interact with these representations and create their own representations and counter narratives in response. We will study a variety of media, including film, television, music, sports, and social media from the last two decades of Turkish history, to examine popular portrayals of women and what they tell us about women’s roles and related tensions and anxieties played out in popular culture. In addition to case materials, we will also read general theoretical works on women, gender, and popular culture from anthropology, gender studies, and media and cultural studies.

MENA 301-3-1: Environmental Issues in the Middle East and North Africa

Extreme weather events, polluted air and waterways, dwindling biodiversity – environmental issues make up the most pressing existential threats to our global future. How do states respond to environmental challenges, including those that cross borders? How do people living in precarious environmental conditions make sense of their world and organize for change?  Focusing on states in the Middle East and North Africa, this course will offer an introduction to key concepts in environmental politics, including common but differentiated responsibility, globalization, and environmental justice. We will begin by interrogating what is meant by the terms “environmental” and “Middle East” and who has the power to make and challenge these definitions. Each subsequent week will focus on one environmental issue in the region, such as water, waste, informality, climate change, war, biodiversity, and environmental justice – as cases through which to explore different facets of environmental politics. The course aims to provide students both a strong empirical foundation in the historical background and sociopolitical reality of several main environmental challenges as well as analytical and methodological tools to critically assess contemporary environmental policies and proposed solutions.

MENA 301-3-2: Being Young and Youthful in the Middle East and North Africa

Around 108 million people in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are between of the ages of 15 and 29, representing about 28% of the region’s total population. What are the many meanings, experiences, and challenges associated with being young and being categorized as a youth in the region today? Through material such as academic and non-academic literature, films, documentaries, and graphic novels, this course will examine social and cultural constructions of youth as a class of people and how Arab youth become central to the formation of national and ethnic communities. We will explore, for example, how young women in a Jordanian high school negotiate the meanings of piety, progress, and national identity. We will analyze recent initiatives from prominent state, development, humanitarian, and economic institutions meant to “empower” or “uplift” young people. In doing so, this course will call into question why states and institutional actors often paradoxically frame youth as vanguards of ideal futures and, at the same time, as threats to social orders. Course material will also explore how youth such as street racers in Riyadh, graffiti artists in Amman, and rappers in Ramallah, attempt to define themselves in response to their positions on social hierarchies through the formation of youth subcultures, countercultures, digital communities, and political movements. Furthermore, we will attend to the omnipresence of the future in the lives of young people as they pursue work, romance, marriage, and political liberation. By the end of this course, students will have a strong foundational understanding of the many ways MENA youth attempt to build lives and livelihoods while participating in communities and networks throughout the region and globally.

MENA 390-3-1: Settler Colonialism

No two settler colonial societies are the same despite the same overarching structure of Indigenous land dispossession for the establishment of a settler society. This course will examine settler colonialism as a process, attending to its specific geographic, historical, political, and social features. Through ethnography, we will consider how Indigenous peoples experience and respond to the imposition of a settler colonial society on their political structures and lifeways. We will also consider the variegation of settler colonial societies in locales across the globe and how they have evolved over time. Furthermore, we will examine the central role of anthropology in the project of settlement.

MENA 390-3-2: Muslim Politics

The emergence of Muslim politics is arguably one of the defining transformations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This course explores the diversity of the contemporary political experiences of Muslims in multiple and shifting contexts to address questions such as: what is the role of ideology and faith in Muslim politics? Where does political Islam come from? How does politics play out in the lives of Muslims? How diverse are contemporary political experiences of Muslims? How did immigration, globalization, Islamic revival and violent extremism and securitization policies reshape the political and religious landscape of Muslim-majority nations as well as in non-Muslim countries? What does the study of political Islam teach us about the relationship between religious and politics in the modern world?

The course is divided in three parts. In Part 1, we focus on the politics of Islamic revival through the trajectories of various Islamic political movements in the Middle East, Asia and Africa to understand the origins of the rise of political Islam and its national, regional and global impact. In Part 2, we turn to transnational Muslim networks and connections to explore the main issues around global political Islam in its various forms including violent Islamic extremism, Sufism, piety movements, economic networks. In Part 3, we examine the social, political and historical dynamics shaping the politics of Muslim minorities in Europe and the USA, including the war on terror, identity politics, racialization and islamophobia. We discuss also anti-Muslim violence and its origins.

Our cross-cutting themes include state in the Muslim world, party politics, secularism, democracy, social movements, political violence, the politics of religion, security policies, globalization, citizenship, social and economic development.

MENA 390-6-1: The Global City: Ottoman Istanbul

As the capital of the Ottoman Empire for nearly 500 years, Istanbul flourished as one of the largest and most culturally diverse cities in the world. Multilingual, multiethnic, and multiconfessional, Istanbul's cosmopolitan society inhabited a bustling port city at the crossroads of three continents whose syncretic architecture and urban design reflected both the social diversity and political authority of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman dynasty transformed the ancient Byzantine metropolis of Constantinople into the material embodiment of its imperial ambitions over Europe, Africa, and Asia. Yet these top-down efforts to recast Istanbul in the Ottoman image did not go unchallenged by Istanbulites themselves, who imagined alternative social orders for their city and reappropriated urban spaces as sites of public resistance.

This course explores the art, architecture, and urban history of Ottoman Istanbul from the city's conquest by Sultan Mehmed II in 1453 to its occupation by the Allied Powers at the end of World War I (1918). The course studies Ottoman Istanbul's urban life in a wide range of spaces, from mosques, churches, palaces, and royal mansions to marketplaces, public baths, and coffee houses. In addition to key monuments like the Hagia Sophia and Topkapı Palace, we will also study manuscript paintings, calligraphy, photography, public festivals, urban design, and large-scale engineering projects. We will pay special attention to the relationship between the city and questions of class, politics, gender and sexuality. We will also consider Ottoman Istanbul's connections to other global centers of art and architecture, such as Cairo and Paris.

MENA 390-6-2: Topics in Middle Eastern Music

Middle Eastern musical arabesque, reminiscent of the intricate patterns of carpets, parallels the path of the marketplace, echoes nocturnal poetry and dramatic conflicts. 

The class on the music of the Middle East explores classical, folk, and popular musics of the region in their historical unfolding and current state. Music of the region is inseparable from religious and social dynamics. Discussion of the place of music in Islam leads to separately studying the musical cultures of Iran, Turkey, Egypt, and Iraq. The class will study the diverse music of Israel and to the intricate cultural dynamics of different, as well as musical traditions of religious and ethnic minorities, such as Yezidis, Syriacs, Zoroastrians. The discussion of music as culture inevitably raises questions of gender, turmoil, and conflicts – all topics that make music relevant to our lives.

ART_HIST 319-0-1: Monsters, Art, and Civilization

Griffins, sphinxes, demons, and other fabulous creatures appear frequently in the art of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Eastern Mediterranean world. They stand at the intersection of the normal and abnormal, the natural and unnatural. Why did these images become so widespread, and what cultural functions did they serve? Can we connect their invention and dissemination with key moments in human history and cross-cultural interaction? What was the role of material representations of the supernatural in preventing and healing disease and other human misfortunes?

This course explores the supernatural subject in ancient art with new perspectives drawn from art history, history, anthropology, cognitive science, and archaeology. We will examine a wide range of objects and representations (including sculptures, figurines, seals, amulets, and other media) along with ancient texts that help us understand their meaning and function.

HISTORY 300-0-26: Nomads in World History

In contrast to prevailing stereotypes of nomads as improvised, marginal wanderers or their romanticized depiction as exemplifying a simpler way of life, pastoral nomadic societies had a decisive role in shaping global history. From the late second millennium BCE to the eighteenth century CE, pastoral nomads emerged, often from the fringes of Eurasian civilizations, and wielding substantial military force influenced sedentary states, empires, and societies, from China to the Middle East and Europe. Beyond their military prowess, however, they also functioned as cultural agents. Sedentary people - Chinese, European, Muslim or others - portrayed them as violent intruders negatively impacting their cultures; yet nomads also facilitated and directed the exchange of goods, people, animals, religions, ideas, and technologies across civilizational boundaries, and maintained a relationship of interdependence with their settled neighbors. This course offers a comparative perspective on the role nomadic societies had in world history, spanning the early nomadic empire of the Xiongnu in nowadays Mongolia, Chinggis Khan's universal empire, the Berber Arabs of North Africa, and the Turkish armies in Asia Minor. We will explore how modern historians navigate the paucity of sources about nomads and the polities they established, and untangle narratives predominantly crafted by members of the sedentary societies.

JWSH_ST 390-0-1: Water in Arid Lands: Technology & Innovation in the Middle East

This seminar will explore how water availability shapes the development of civilizations and drives innovation in water technologies. The course will investigate historical dimensions of water in drylands in the Middle East, starting from ancient civilizations and the water infrastructures that were essential to the development of societies in arid regions. We will use this historical context as a stepping-stone to understand the more recent history of the Middle East, focusing on challenges faced by states in the Jordan River Basin. We will then examine efforts to develop the water resources needed to support burgeoning populations, such as irrigation projects designed to convert barren desert into cultivated agriculture. This more recent history includes geopolitical conflicts over land and water that continue to this day. We will evaluate regional water resources in the context of current and future climate and geopolitical conflicts, review recent advances in water technologies spurred by these limitations, and explore potential social and technological solutions for long-term water sustainability in the Middle East. We will discuss how water access and control contributes to trans-boundary politics and tensions between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the west Bank and Gaza, along with collaborative solutions developed between Israel and Jordan. Finally, we will discuss opportunities for global translation of innovative water technologies and water-management solutions. Start-up culture and innovation in water technologies for local use, notably in Israel and more recently in other nations of the Middle East, serve as a model for improving water supply in other arid regions. The course will host a symposium on water innovation, featuring national and international experts on water technology, policy, and commercialization.

RELIGION 230-0-20: Intro to Judaism

This section of Introduction to Judaism will serve as an introduction to Jewish textual sources. The course can explore a range of classical and contemporary Jewish textual genres, as well as Jewish textual objects, from Torah scrolls and Jewish type to digital commentary. Students will learn how to engage texts deeply through different hermeneutics, including through close-reading and in partnership with other students. Our approach will also pay attention to the media and materiality of Jewish transmission across different kinds of Jewish sources.

ANTHRO 490-0-2: Ethnography in the Archives

The defining research method of ethnography is participant observation with living interlocutors. Ethnographic understanding emerges through human exchange and collaborative meaning making, both between the anthropologist and research participants (participation) and between individuals in the field of investigation or fieldsite (observation). What does it mean, then, to do ethnography in the archives? Archives -- inscribed traces of lived worlds left by people - seeming cannot speak back to the reader. Without this lived exchange, what can we learn from documents created historically for administrative purposes of states or colonial empires? In this graduate seminar, we consider both narratives of state domination through text creation and possible stories about actions of individuals in non-dominant social groups, especially women, children, the poor, and ethnic minorities. Rather than adopting purely an anti-empirical approach to archived texts, we consider ways in which the bureaucratic scribe's record is both situated fact and angled purpose, and how documents' potential stories exceed their intended purposes. Theoretical and conceptual readings frame case studies from the MENA region including Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Egypt, and Morocco. Students write and workshop original research papers from an archival corpus of their choice.