Same as HST 210. This course explores the history of Middle Eastern culture and socio-political thought through cinema. It will focus on the representations of gender, sexuality, class, and the evolution of socio-political ideologies over the course of the 20th-21st centuries. Further, it investigates how Arab filmmakers portrayed their reality cinematically, and how they viewed the lens a medium for socio-political debate.

Same as MES 210. This course explores the history of Middle Eastern culture and socio-political thought through cinema. It will focus on the representations of gender, sexuality, class, and the evolution of socio-political ideologies over the course of the 20th-21st centuries. Further, it investigates how Arab filmmakers portrayed their reality cinematically, and how they viewed the lens a medium for socio-political debate. (E)

The career and conquests of Alexander the Great (d. 323 B.C.) wrought far-reaching consequences for many in Europe, Asia and Africa. In the ensuing Hellenistic (Greek-oriented) commonwealth that spanned the Mediterranean, Middle East, Central Asia and India, Greco-Macedonians interacted with Egyptians, Babylonians, Jews, Iranians, Indians and Romans in ways that galvanized ideas and institutions such as the classical city as ideal community, cult of divine kings and queens, “fusion” literatures, mythologies and artistic canons and also provoked nativist responses such as the Maccabean revolt.

The emergence, expansion and maintenance of the Russian Empire to 1929. The dynamics of pan-imperial institutions and processes (imperial dynasty, peasantry, nobility, intelligentsia, revolutionary movement), as well as the development of the multitude of nations and ethnic groups conquered by or included into the empire. Focus on how the multinational Russian empire dealt with pressures of modernization (nationalist challenges in particular), internal instability and external threats.

Topics course.

 : This course will be organized around several central questions: What is the history of fascism and how does it matter? How can we historicize and understand the critical currency of gendered and racialized categories at the center of fascist ideologies? Students will develop a clear understanding of how historians have studied fascism through primary and secondary reading, as well as an examination of relevant visual culture.

Women’s experience and constructions of gender in the commonly recognized major events of the 20th century. Introduction to major thinkers of the period through primary sources, documents and novels, as well as to the most significant categories in the growing secondary literature in 20th-century European history of women and gender.

From the High Middle Ages through the 15th century. Topics include cathedrals and universities, struggles between popes and emperors, pilgrimage and popular religion, the Crusades and Crusader kingdoms, heresy and the Inquisition, chivalry and Arthurian romance, the expansion and consolidation of Europe, and the Black Death and its aftermath.

Twenty-first century scholars argue that race is a constructed social identity that began to coalesce around the seventeenth century. But were they right? In this course, we will look to the Middle Ages to challenge the consensus that racial constructions were a byproduct of modernity. Does race function differently between the world of Latin Christendom and that of the dar al-Islam? What are the advantages and dangers of using the prism of race to analyze ethnic, cultural and religious differences in this medieval period?

Topics course.: Histories of social conflict, protest, and revolution in early modern and modern Japan. In the early modern period (1600–1867), peasant resistance and protest, urban uprisings, popular culture, “world-renewal” movements, and the restorationist activism of the Tokugawa period.

Topics course.: This course interrogates and historicizes the problem of “development” in 20th-century Africa. In doing so, we query the assumptions made by colonial officials, postcolonial leaders, social scientific experts and local communities as they sought to understand and articulate African pathways into a largely ill-defined social and economic modernity.