This course is designed to engage students in conversations about particular perspectives on the history of a selected nation, region, people, culture, institution, or historical phenomenon as specified by the respective instructor. By taking this course, students will come to understand, and develop an appreciation for, some combination of: the origins and evolution of the people, cultures, and/or political, economic, and/or social institutions of a particular region(s) of the world. They may also explore how human encounters shaped individual and collective identities and the complex political, economic, and social orders of the region/nation/communities under study. Instructors and subject will vary.

Marriage has always been much more than the relationship between two individuals. In this course through the lens of marriage we will explore the history of the multi-ethnic (i.e., Arabs, Armenians, Turks) and multi-religious (i.e., Christians, Muslims, Jews) Middle East. We will ask how marriage practices and conceptions of marriage transformed across space and time. How did political, ethno-religious, ideological and economic factors in the Middle East shape marriage practices? In turn, we will explore how gender norms and behaviors, norms of sexuality, interethnic and interreligious relations, as well as class relations and economic networks have been shaped through the institution of marriage. We will treat marriage as a social, cultural, economic, political and legal category and construct. The goal of this course is to familiarize students with the history of the Middle East from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, while getting them to think critically about the institution of marriage on a historical spectrum. The institution of marriage will allow students to grasp the multi-ethnic and multi-religious dynamics of the Middle East, while comparing marriage practices, laws and traditions across religious and confessional communities. We will explore the role of marriage in practices of governance, community building, and also highlight how conceptualizations of marriage have changed through time. Through movies and news articles connections will be made between historic and contemporary practices in the Middle East. Students do not need to have taken a prior course on the Middle East as a requirement. Lectures in class will provide a historical background to the assigned readings. Students will be asked to watch films and read scholarly articles from the disciplines of history, anthropology and literature, then provide critical analysis of these readings and movies both in classroom discussions and in writing. Instructor bio: Dzovinar Derderian received her PhD in 2019 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in the Department of Middle East Studies. Focusing on 19th-century Armenians of the Ottoman empire, her research explores the various circular processes such as migration, communication and participatory politics through which provincial Armenians engaged in national and imperial modernization. Both in her research and teaching she is interested in exposing the dispersed ways in which power functions and inequalities are shaped. She has taught World History, Armenian and Middle East history courses at the American University of Armenia, at the University of California, Irvine and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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