Modern Middle East

Catalog description

This course introduces students to the history of the modern Middle East and seeks to nurture critical historical thinking about the region. It touches on a wide range of topics including different forms of colonial intervention, modernizing reforms and reforming elites, the move from empire to a new state order, the politics and culture of nationalism, post-colonial states and authoritarian regimes, Islamist mobilization, and recent neo-liberal politics. All along, a central arching theme of the course will be modernity: what shape it took at different times and places, how it was perceived and experienced, what challenges and tensions it engendered, who were the beneficiaries and losers.