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.

In this course we will explore the history of the multi-ethnic (i.e., Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Palestinians, Persians, Turks) and multi-religious (i.e., Christians, Muslims, Jews) Middle East through the lens of marriage. We will ask how political, ethno-religious, ideological and economic factors in the wider Middle East transformed marriage practices, laws, cultural and political conceptions of marriage over the course of 500 years. We will examine how the institution of marriage and the cultural imaginations of marriage have been shaped by laws, norms of gender and sexuality, interethnic and interreligious relations, international relations, class relations and economic networks. We will examine how marriage has served as a tool of power for empires and for settler-colonialism.

The overarching 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 lens 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 different polities, religious and confessional communities.

Students do not need to have taken a prior course on the Middle East. Lectures in class will provide a historical background to the assigned readings. Students will be asked to read scholarly works from the disciplines of history, anthropology and literature, watch documentaries and films, and provide critical analysis of the textual and visual materials both in classroom discussions, writing assignments and in a podcast recording project, as well as undertake a writing assignment on marriage based on interviews that students will conduct with a family member.

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Requirements class fulfills