Minorities in the Middle East (HIST053 PZ (original) (raw)

MIDDLE EAST STUDIES CORNERSTONE syllabus

2024

Course Description The Middle East Studies Cornerstone is a required seminar for students beginning the Middle East Studies MA Program. Its aim is to introduce students to the study of the Middle East from a multidisciplinary perspective. The course is designed to provide a shared language for researchers in the field, introduce them to the evolution of the field itself from its genesis as “Oriental Studies” to the present, and help them understand the different “ways of knowing” that each discipline or professional approach brings to the study of the region. Each class session highlights distinctive issues of research design, methodology, or disciplinary perspectives. The seminar format combines lectures with discussions, with an emphasis on students' active participation and presentations.

Migration and the Middle East: Fall 2018 Revised Syllabus

Description This seminar introduces the contemporary Middle East by drawing upon cutting-edge studies written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. These include history, political science, sociology, and anthropology, as well as studies of mass media, gender, religion, urban life, and art. We will spend the first few weeks of the semester surveying major trends in modern Middle Eastern history. We will spend subsequent weeks intensively discussing assigned readings along with a variety of short films (including documentaries, music videos, and interviews) that we watch in class. The semester will leave students with a foundation in Middle Eastern studies, a sense of current directions in the field, and experience in writing essays and research papers. Structure, Requirements, and Grades This class is a discussion-intensive seminar, although the professor will give short lectures each week to place readings in context. Students are expected to participate actively, to prepare occasional presentations on selected readings, and to join discussions on readings and on films that we watch in class. Failure to attend classes will result in deductions from the final course grade. Policies: No laptops or other devices. Students can bring drinks or snacks to class. Writing assignments include two short review essays (600 words each); a library research assignment called " The Shelfie " (details below; this includes bringing a book to class and submitting a copy of a photograph plus a 250-word essay); a preliminary proposal for the final paper; a preliminary draft of the introduction for the final paper; and the final paper itself (12-15 pages). The goal of the final paper is to give students an opportunity to formulate and pursue independent research during the last half of the semester, by analyzing current research on a selected topic. Note that students are required to follow the Chicago style for citations and bibliographies. We will spend some time discussing the Chicago method in class. Extensions for papers are not routinely granted. Late papers will be subject to daily five-point penalty deductions. The professor will not accept papers that are more than one week late.

Course Syllabus: Sources and Methods of Islamic Studies

Course Descriptions: (as in Catalog) The course introduces students to the intersection of Islamic sources and research methods. The first half focuses on the specific sources for doing research in Islamic studies, both traditional and western sources, and it covers all concentrations in the Islamic studies program. Fundamental traditional Islamic texts will be utilized and studied in order to help students become familiarized with these traditions by synthesizing historical, conceptual and applied aspects. The second half of the course introduces the epistemology, the context and the practice of applied social science research with specific reference to the study of religion, and will study a number of approaches to research design, evidence, analysis and ethics. The final component of the course entails designing a sample MA thesis proposal, which will acquaint students with the process of applying their theoretical and conceptual insights in concrete research areas.

Syllabus: Women in the Middle East: A Modern History

Course Description: How have women, as subjects, objects, and agents, shaped the history of the modern Middle East? Until relatively recently, the history of women in the Middle East was characterized in a two dimensional way – as objects in need of reform, or victimized subjects in need of saving. This course will examine a wide breadth of work from the past two decades that has worked to show the myriad and diverse ways in which women have impacted the history of this region in the modern era, and ask serious questions about what that means for our contemporary views on Middle Eastern politics, and to some extent the wider Islamic world. Students will be introduced to cutting edge scholarship that mines previously ignored or unheard of sources on women's history, and will be encouraged themselves to write and reflect on women's history from many different vantages and lenses. The course will be organized around thematic concepts including labor history, urban history, reproductive politics, fashion and geopolitics. Assignments: There will be four components that will make up your grade in this course. You will be responsible for writing an essay, due at the end of the course, between five and seven thousand words long on a subject relevant to the course and chosen in consultation with the instructor. The essays should aspire to a reflection on the scholarly works examined in class, informed by some limited additional primary source research, and might appear suitable for publication in either (slightly stodgy) outlets like the New York Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement, or hipper venues like the Los Angeles Review of Books or Publicbooks.org. Essays will be graded on style, persuasiveness of argument, and the incorporation of a variety of source material. The second component of the course will consist of contributions to the course source-blog. You will be required to post to the blog six times throughout the course of the semester. Each post must highlight and examine a single source, be it a piece of text, a photograph, an audio recording, a film or some other artifact, in roughly 300-500 words. Posts should take the form of " explainers " by highlighting the significance of the source, and describing its particular history. Good examples of document and source blogs include: Tozsuz Evrak, The Cornucopia Blog, stambouline.org, The Vault, Ajam Media Collective, Afternoonmap.org, etc. Blog posts will be graded for quality, the lowest grade will be dropped at the end of the course only if all six are completed – if you only submit five posts, you will receive an " 0 " for the sixth grade, and it will count. The third component will be a student presentation. Typically, the instructor will preface each class discussion with a very short introduction to the module being examined, lay out why the particular readings were chosen, and fill in some of the historical gaps left uncovered by the readings. Each student (or if necessary, pairs of students) will then be responsible for introducing the readings for the week, and kicking off the discussion. The presenting student(s) should have