The Middle East: Cultures & Societies

Catalog description

This course highlights major cultural, social, and political developments in the amorphous region known, since the 20th century, as the Middle East. Covering expanses of space and time, this course attends to a diversity of peoples and polities, and considers different regional concepts that include some or all of the territories normally included in the Middle East (including the Fertile Crescent, the Mediterranean world, the Indian Ocean world, the Arab world, and the Muslim world) and addresses the region's coherence in terms of shared historical and political experiences, religious and cultural references or practices, and/or socialities and ways of being.