This information is subject to change. For the most up-to-date information, please visit the Registrar's Directory of Classes.
Note that enrollment in language courses is determined in some cases by placement examinations. See Languages for details, and consult the pages on specific languages, such as Arabic for further information. Language courses must be taken for a letter grade. Pass/Fail or Registration credit (R) is not permitted.
For course requirements, see the pages on the Graduate and Undergraduate programs.
Course Numbering System
- 1000 and 2000: Undergraduate-level courses. Introductory and intermediate language courses are numbered at the 1000 level.
- 3000: Advanced undergraduate courses.
- 4000: Courses for graduate students and, in some cases, advanced undergraduates.
- 6000 and higher: Graduate-level courses; some 8000- and 9000-level courses are reserved for Ph.D. students only.
The following course designators appear in abbreviated form:
- MDES (Designator for all MESAAS courses that are not cross listed)
- AHUM (Asian Humanities)
- ASCM (Asian Civilizations-Middle East)
- CLME (Comparative Literature-Middle East)
- HSME (History-Middle East)
COURSES (NON-LANGUAGE)
| CONTEMPORARY ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION |
ASCM V2008 |
| George A Saliba |
| Lecture and recitation. No previous study of Islam is required. The contemporary Islamic world studied through freshly translated texts; recorded interviews with religious, political, and intellectual leaders; and films highlighting the main artistic and cultural currents. Topics include religion and society, religion and politics, issues of development, theories of government, gender issues, East-West confrontation, theatre, arts, films, poetry, music, and the short novel. |
| PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI POLITICS AND SOCIETY |
MDES W3042 |
| Joseph
A Massad |
| The History of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala) in 19th century Europe and the development of Zionism through the current "peace process" between the state of Israel and the Arab states and the Palestinian national movement. Provides a historical overview of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict to familiarize undergraduates with the background of the current situation. |
| ZIONISM: A CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE |
MDES W3541 |
| Dan Miron |
| The course,based on Zionist texts of various kinds, will offer a view of Zionism as a cultural revolution aimed at redefining Judaism and the Jewish Identity. |
| EARLY ARMENIAN LITERATURE: THE FIFTH CENTURY |
MDES W3926 |
| Nanor Kebranian |
| Using scholarly translations of the major texts of the Armenian Golden Age alongside secondary theoretical and critical works, this course will offer a focused introduction to the origins of the Armenian literary tradition emerging in the fifth century. In addition to familiarizing students with these foundation texts??? contextual origins, methodologies and historical content, the course will also invite them to assess their significance in broader conceptual terms, considering the national, cultural and historical elements concerning their reception throughout the ages. All readings will be in English and English translation. |
| SCIENCE ACROSS CULTURES |
INSM C3940 |
| George A Saliba |
| Open to seniors and some qualified juniors. Priority given to seniors. Development of scientific thought from various cultures and from antiquity till the time of the European Renaissance. Provides examples of the process by which scientific thinking has developed and illustrates that although science may not have always developed in a linear fashion, the problems science was called upon to solve exhibited a continuity that crossed cultural, linguistic, and religious borders. Global Core. |
| POSTCOLONIAL AFRICAN CITIES |
MDES W3951 |
| Rosalind Fredericks |
| This seminar considers postcolonial African cities in historical and geographical perspective. Drawing from diverse literatures, including geography, history, anthropology, cultural studies, and development studies, it offers an interdisciplinary approach to reflect on experiences of urbanization on the continent and the socio-economic, cultural, and political aspects of contemporary African urban life. |
| CULTURE & POWER IN IRAQI LITERATURE |
CLME G4106 |
| Muhsin Al-Musawi |
| This course attempts to meet the increasing need to know Iraqi culture. Through a number of typical Iraqi texts since the Epic of Gilgamesh, the question of power relations and cultural dynamics will be a way to map out an intellectual itinerary of the most ancient civilization and its subsequent histories until the modern period. |
| THE ISLAMIC CONTEXT OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS |
CLME G4227 |
| Muhsin Al-Musawi |
| Prerequisites: No prior knowledge of Arabic language is required. This course questions the popular assumption that the tales of the Thousand and One Nights lack any Islamic content and that their fantastic or erotic dimensions are the only dynamic narrative components behind the vogue. This collection is read against a number of contemporaneous writings (in English translation), including al-Hamadan's Manama, to discuss issues that relate to market inspectorships, economy, social order, marginal groups like the mad, the use of public space including the hammed, and the position on fate, destiny, time, afterlife, sex and love. The course takes its starting point from classical Arabic narratives, poetry and epistolary art and follows up the growth of this repository as it conveys, reveals, or debates Islamic tenets and jurists' stand. The course aspires to provide students with a solid and wide range of information and knowledge on Islamic culture since the emergence of the Islamic center in Baghdad (b. 762). Students are expected to develop a critical method and insightful analysis in dealing with the text, its contemporaneous works from among the belletristic tradition and popular lore, its adaptations, and use and misuse in Arabic culture since the ninth century. |
| ARAB SOCIETY & CULTURE |
MDES G4244 |
| Soraya Altorki |
| This course is intended for upper division undergraduate and graduate students. It introduces the student to the major social and cultural issues of the Arab world, as examined through various theoretical perspectives in the anthropological and sociological literature. It is hoped that the course will provide the student with the analytical tools s/he needs to take more specialized courses on the general topic. |
| ISLAMIC LAW: THREE DEBATES |
MDES G4253 |
| Wael Hallaq |
| Prerequisites: ASCM V2003 or equivalent. This seminar deals with three paradigmatic sets of questions in the history of Islamic law, each set representing and encompassing key themes pertaining to three important historical phases. Long-standing debates on the "origins" of the Shari'a will be explored, as will the constitution of the formative period, which is variably claimed to stretch from two to four centuries. Scholarship on this period will be examined as ideology. In the second set of questions, squarely situated in the post-formative period (ca. 11th - 17th c.) we examine the relationship between and among social custom, juridical practice and formal legal doctrine, discussing in outline the structural mechanisms the Shari'a has developed to accommodate legal change. Scholarship on this period and on what the features of this period came to represent in the overall constructed history of the Shari'a will also be examined as ideology. In the third set of questions, we analyze so-called legal reform and the role of state in converting the Shari'a to a modern institution that is qualitatively different from its pre-modern predecessor. Scholarship on the Shari'a in the modern period will also be examined as ideology. Finally, but not necessarily at the end of the course, we will pose questions about the nature of interpretation and language in the construction of a paradigmatic idea (and history) of the Shari'a. |
| THE CASE OF ARMENIANS IN TURKEY |
MDES W4324 |
| Melissa Bilal |
| This course aims at reconsidering the concept of "displacement" in multiple levels, especially focusing on music and memory. Its major objective is to develop critical perspectives to discuss the conditions of "being displaced" and "being at home" in relation to the minoritized groups' experiences within nationalized territories. Lectures will have a special emphasis on the Armenian community of Istanbul.
|
| THE CULTURE OF ISRAELI CINEMA |
MDES G4542 |
| Uri Cohen |
| The goal
of this class is to provide an introduction to the history of Israeli cinema whose interpretation and discussion will also be an in-depth discussion of the main issues engaged by Israeli culture. Cinema provides an interesting vantage point to approach to Israeli culture, as it always expresses a social point of view and its history not only represents the major issues Israel has dealt with since its creation, but is in itself a history of the struggle for hegemony within Israeli culture and society. Each meeting will include an in class screening of one of the major works of Israeli cinema beginning in the 1950's and leading up to "Beaufort" and "Waltzing With Bashir". Preparation for class will consist of the reading of literary and scholarly texts that provide some of the context for the movies and the issues debated within. Discussion will be based on "Reading" cinema as a complex text that allows insight not only to the issues but to the very fabric of their discourses. |
| POLITICS IN INDIA |
MDES G4601 |
| Sudipta Kaviraj |
|
| This course will combine study of long-term historical sociology with more short term understanding of policies and their possible effects. Though its main purpose will be to provide students with an understanding of politics after independence, it will argue, methodologically, that this understanding should be based on a study of historical sociology - plotting long-terms shifts in the structure of social power. The course will start with analyses of the structures of power and ideas about political legitimacy in pre-modern India, and the transformations brought by colonialism into that order. After a brief study of the nature of political order under the colonial state, the courses will focus primarily on the history of the democratic state after independence.
|
| LATE OTTOMAN STATE AND SOCIETY |
MDES W4940 |
| Nader Sohrabi |
| |
| PAN AFRICANISM: FRENCH &FRANCOPHONE PERSPECTIVES |
MDES G6144 |
| Mamadou Diouf |
| This seminar explores how Black leaders, intellectuals, and artists chose to imagine Blacks (African and people of African descent) as a global community from the late 19th century to the present. It examines their attempts to chart a course of race, modernity and emancipation in instable and changing geographies of empire, nation, and state. Particular attention will be given to manifestations identified as their common history and destiny and how such a distinctive historical experience have created a unique body of reflections on and cultural productions about modernity, race, religion, class, gender and sexuality, in a context of domination and oppression. |
| SEM:STUDIES IN MODERN ARABIC LITERATURE |
CLME G6231 |
| Noha Radwan |
| This is a course designed to help students who are at the high intermediate and advanced level of reading in Arabic language to read modern Arabic literary works, in both poetry and prose. Class discussions will focus on the qualities and subtleties of these works that might be lost in translation. |
| THE MODERN STATE AND THE COLONIAL SUBJECT
|
MDES G6406 |
| Mahmood Mamdani |
| This seminar on the development of legal thought on the colonial subject will read and discuss texts focusing on three different historical periods: the 16th and 17th century conquest of native peoples in the New World, the subjugation of British India (including the Dutch East Indies and the Malay states) before and after the 1857 Uprising, and the conquest of southern and tropical Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. Participation is limited to 20 to be admitted after the first class. |
| JEWISH WRITING AND MODERNISM |
MDES G6524 |
| Dan Miron |
| This seminar forms part of an extended seminar focusing on the view that what was often referred to as "The Modern Jewish Literature" or "The Modern Jewish Canon" does not exist. As a matter of fact, it is doubtful that a unified Jewish culture and a one, comprehensive Jewish literature, ever existed (after Biblical times). Modernity, however, clearly and blatantly fragmented Jewish cultural life and creativity, and what Jewish literary production throughout the last two hundred and fifty years amounts to is not a continuous "Jewish" canon but rather a welter of competitive, and often mutually exclusive Jewish literary canons of various kinds: some defining their parameters within nationalist ideologies and written in Jewish languages, and some developing a mentality of "dual citizenship." Writing in various non-Jewish languages and addressing a non Jewish readership, some (not all) Jewish writers also wrote as Jews (and to a certain extent, for Jews). Together these modern Jewish literary traditions form a complex that can be studied and understood in terms of contiguity rather than those of continuity. The purpose of the seminar is to explore the dynamics and parameters of this Jewish literary contiguity. It would be done in a series of one-semester graduate seminars, each focusing on a different aspect of this very comprehensive topic. The languages all students would be expected to know are Hebrew and English, although texts originally written in Yiddish, German, Russian and other languages would be used (in English and Hebrew translations). |
| POSTCOLONIAL THEORY |
MDES G6600 |
| Hamid Dabashi |
| This course will go over some philosophical and interpretative problems raised by recent works in a field described as 'postcolonial theory'. It will start with the original debates about 'Orientalism' - particularly its critical arguments about the question of representation of the Orient in art and literature, the question of the writing of history, and the logic of basic concepts in the social sciences. The course will analyse some 'Orientalist' texts in detail, assess the criticisms offered by postcolonial writers, and take up these three problems - of representation, history and conceptualization for detailed, rigorous critical discussion. |
| MIDDLE EAST RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM |
MDES G8101 |
| Timothy Mitchell |
| This course is open to all graduate students conducting research on aspects of the modern history, culture and politics of the Middle East. Students preparing a dissertation chapter, MA thesis, M. Phil examination field, PhD. prospectus or similar project will develop and present a draft of their work. We will choose additional readings to accompany each presentation, focusing on scholarship that informs or extends the issues addressed in the research. The aim of the colloquium is to enable students to clarify and test the questions that shape their work and to better situate it within current methodological and theoretical debates. |
| STUDYING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN THE ARAB WORLD |
MDES G8280 |
| Joseph A Massad |
| This course aims to familiarize graduate students with the different methods and approaches that U.S. and European scholars have used to study gender and sexuality in other societies generally, and the way they study them in the context of the Arab world specifically.
|
LANGUAGE COURSES
Middle East Languages
Arabic
| ARABIC for HERITAGE SPEAKERS II |
MDES W1209 |
| Youssef Nouhi |
| FIRST YEAR ARABIC I |
MDES W1210 |
| Reem Faraj |
| FIRST YEAR ARABIC II |
MDES W1211 |
| Rym Bettaieb |
| Reem Faraj |
| Tarik Belhoussein |
| Tarik Belhoussein |
| SECOND YEAR ARABIC I |
MDES W1214 |
| Ouijdane Absi |
| SECOND YEAR ARABIC II |
MDES W1215 |
| Ghada Badawi |
| Ouijdane Absi |
| May Ahmar |
| Rym Bettaieb |
| THIRD YEAR ARABIC II |
MDES W4211 |
| May Ahmar |
| Youssef Nouhi |
| 4TH YEAR ARABIC II: MODERN PROSE |
MDES W4213 |
| Taoufik Ben-Amor |
| 4TH YEAR ARABIC II: CLASSICAL PROSE |
MDES W4214 |
| Taoufik Ben-Amor |
Hebrew
| 1ST YEAR MODERN HEBREW: ELEMENTARY II |
MDES W1511 |
| |
| 2ND YEAR MODERN HEBREW: INTERMEDIATE II |
MDES W1513 |
| Nehama R Bersohn |
| 2ND YEAR MODERN HEBREW: UPPER INTERMEDIATE II |
MDES W1515 |
| Nehama R Bersohn |
| INTERMEDIATE HEBREW: INTENSVE GRAMMAR REV |
MDES W1516
|
| |
| 3RD YEAR MODERN HEBREW II |
MDES W4511 |
| Ruth Raphaeli-Slivko |
| READINGS IN HEBREW
TEXTS II |
MDES W4513 |
| Ruth Raphaeli-Slivko |
Persian
| ELEMENTARY PERSIAN II |
MDES W1711 |
| Ghazzal Dabiri |
| INTERMEDIATE PERSIAN II |
MDES W1713 |
| Ghazzal Dabiri |
Turkish
| ELEMENTARY MODERN TURKISH
II |
MDES W1911 |
| Etem Erol |
| INTERMEDIATE MODERN TURKISH II |
MDES W1913 |
| Etem Erol |
| ADVANCED TURKISH II |
MDES W4911 |
| Cenk Palaz |
Armenian
| ELEMENTARY ARMENIAN II |
MDES W1311 |
| Charry Karamanoukian |
|
| READINGS IN ARMENIAN TEXTS |
MDES W4314 |
| Charry Karamanoukian |
|
| Readings in Armenian Texts is the highest-level language course offered by the Armenian Language Program at MEALAC (MESAAS). It is designed for students who have a good foundation of the language or have attained the equivalent of Intermediate level Armenian and wish to perfect their knowledge of grammar while developing their skills in independent reading. The content of the course will change each term. Students will be introduced to a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts in Armenian. Texts will consist of full length short stories and newspaper articles as well as excerpts from lengthier works, all in modern Western Armenian. The emphasis will be on analyzing context, syntax and grammatical structures as clues towards comprehension. In addition to grammar and vocabulary analysis, students will produce translations, brief summaries and commentaries on the texts they read, both orally and in written form.
|
South Asian Languages
Sanskrit
| ELEMENTARY SANSKRIT
II |
MDES W1402 |
| Som Dev Vasudeva |
| INTERMEDIATE SANSKRIT II |
MDES W1405 |
| Elaine M Fisher |
| ADVANCED SANSKRIT II |
MDES W4812 |
| Som Dev Vasudeva |
/tr>
Hindi-Urdu
| HINDI FOR HERITAGE SPEAKERS II |
MDES W1609 |
| Rakesh Ranjan |
| ELEMENTARY HINDI-URDU II |
MDES W1611 |
| Rakesh Ranjan |
| Tyler Williams |
| Dalpat Rajpurohit |
| Suman Mallipattana |
| INTERMEDIATE HINDI-URDU II |
MDES W1613 |
| Dalpat Rajpurohit |
| Dalpat Rajpurohit |
| READINGS IN HINDI LITERATURE
I |
MDES W4610 |
| Susham Bedi |
| Contemporary Hindi Short Story: Women Writers: This course focuses on selected contemporary women writers of Hindi short stories. Although most of these writers are middle-class, their work is concerned to examine larger social issues, including caste and class. Videotaped Hindi-language interviews with the writers, and many related background materials, will be made available in electronic form. There will also be a packet to be purchased from Village Copier. The course will focus on developing reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills, as well as working with advanced grammar topics. The course will be conducted largely in Hindi. |
| HINDI-URDU: AN OVERVIEW |
MDES W4613 |
| Frances Pritchett |
| Prerequisites: Completion of Intermediate Hindi-Urdu or consent of instructor. A review and overview of the shared Khari Boli grammar, of both scripts, and of the linguistic and literary history of Hindi-Urdu. The course will solidify your knowledge, introduce you to new resources, and prepare you to do scholarly work in either script. Students will have a chance to plan and conduct a number of 'TBA' class hours according to their own interests; these classes are usually very enjoyable. |
| READINGS IN URDU LITERATURE
II |
MDES W4636 |
| Frances Pritchett |
Tamil
| ELEMENTARY TAMIL II |
MDES W1102 |
| D. Samuel Sudanandha |
| INTERMEDIATE TAMIL II |
MDES W1202 |
| D. Samuel Sudanandha |
Kannada
| ELEMENTARY KANNADA II |
KANA W1102 |
| Suman Mallipattana |
African Languages
Swahili
| ELEMENTARY SWAHILI II |
SWHL W1102 |
| Jane Clayton |
| Membezi J. Inniss |
| INTERMEDIATE SWAHILI II |
SWHL W1202 |
| Membezi J. Inniss |
| ADVANCED SWAHILI II |
SWHL W3336 |
| Membezi J. Inniss |
Wolof
| ELEMENTARY WOLOF II |
WOLOF W1102 |
| Mariame Sy |
| INTERMEDIATE WOLOF II |
WOLOF W1202 |
| Mariame Sy |
Zulu
| ELEMENTARY ZULU II |
ZULU W1102 |
| John Zuzo |
| INTERMEDIATE ZULU II |
ZULU W1202 |
| John Zuzo |
