Dates: 09/04 - 12/20
M	T	W	Th	F	Sa	Su
	9:55 am 11:35 am JRC 246		9:55 am 11:35 am JRC 246

Subject: History (HIST)

CRN: 42631

Lecture

St Paul: John Roach Center 246

Requirements Met:
     Writing in the Discipline

  Shaz Ahmadi

Since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, Europeans and Middle Easterners have been writing modern histories of the Islamic world. The colonizer and the colonized, however, asked fundamentally different historical questions. In this course students will learn about the methods of studying Middle Eastern history, or the techniques of analyzing primary sources to piece together an argument about the past, as well as the ways in which the privilege and historical context of researchers inflect their scholarship. By focusing on the methodologies that scholars engage in order to study the Middle East, like Marxist analysis, gender theory, microhistory, or postcolonialism, students learn about trends within the discipline of History, as well. While early western historians of the region were sometimes directly or indirectly involved in the colonial project, Middle Eastern scholars were largely concerned with justifying their independence through nationalist histories. Soon, however, there were critiques of these entrenched positions. Rather than offer nationalist narratives of the past or judge the relative advancement of a given society, historians of the Islamic world began to ask deeper questions. They examined the role of the state in the national community, the experiences of the underclasses, the ways institutions of power pathologized sexuality, the heteronormativity of public culture, and strains of intellectual thought. This course delves into the methodologies in the field of history as well as the ways in which an author’s power and privilege informed their scholarship.

4 Credits