Asian/African/Middle Eastern History

This course looks at history of post-1949 China from two different perspectives. Students will read "proper" historical texts: political and intellectual essays, government documents, social reports, and scholarly historical monographs. These will be juxtaposed to different forms of narrative construction: movies, novels, and autobiographical accounts. With this integrated approach, the course examines the history of the People's Republic of China but also the continuous interplay between historiography and politics, history and memory, popular culture and learning.

Evolution and global spread of Muslim societies, modernization and its problems.

This course examines the history of the African slave trade. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was the world's largest forced migration between continents, but it was only one of many slave trades that shaped societies throughout the world. In order to understand the historical significance of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, we will compare it to other slaveries. In examining the historical significance and legacies of the slave trade, we will link the histories of Africa to that of the New World and to Europe. There continue to be heated debates about the volume and impact of the slave trade on African and New World societies. We will explore these debates. The course will also examine the changing meaning of the term "slavery" and examine some modern forms of slavery that persist to this day.

This course explores the formation of modern East Asian nations and of the idea of East Asia itself in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines the interrelated histories of China, Japan, and Korea and the forces that forged modernity in East Asia: wars, colonialism, imperialism, Cold War geopolitics, nationalism and socialism. The course presents an overview of large historical processes, but introduces different perspectives by looking at how individuals narrated their experiences in memoirs, diaries, short stories, novels, and films.

This course is an introduction to the history of an enormous continent, Africa. Because of the size of the geography, population and time covered, one of the main purposes of this course is to pave the way to the upper division regional and thematic classes. We will move our way through African history both temporally and thematically. Lectures will introduce key themes and ideas and in section you will discuss historical evidence for African communities, cultures and ideas. This course is suitable to those who know nothing of Africa, and to those who are considering taking an upper division lecture classes or seminar in African history or Africana Studies.

History of Ottoman Empire from its origins through the direct Western European impact, focusing on the political and social history of the empire in Europe and Asia.

Survey of Indian history from 7th century to 1750.

This course focuses on Cleopatra VII (69-30 BCE), the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt and one of the best-known women in history and a key powerbroker during a period of important political change, one with enduring repercussions for the western world. She has been, however, deliberately memorialized as a "romantic" agent, a deployer of "feminine wiles", whose gender and political toolbox rightly doomed her efforts to failure. Students will interrogate the process of transforming a historical individual into an object lesson, a trope of femininity, and a cinematic legend, unpacking the messages crafted for a range of audiences and purposes by multiple creators, including Cleopatra herself. We begin with the historical background of the Hellenistic period, cosmopolitan and multicultural, focusing especially on the dynamism of women in the ideology of royal power and as image-makers in their own right, developing special forms for female authority and female patronage. A number of earlier Cleopatras establish context and particular precedents, creating official personae to engage effective interactions with fundamental groups; these include the resilient Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra II (r. 175-116 BCE) and Cleopatra Thea, token in a dynastic alliance who became Great Queen of Syria, dominating the Seleucid throne for a generation. Students will then sift through the evidence for Cleopatra VII, both the contentious (and largely hostile) material for her Mediterranean activities as well as the Egyptian record that may represent the specific efforts of the queen herself, utilizing then-ancient symbol and ritual to assert her legitimate imperial authority and structure her collaboration with major stakeholders in the Nile realm. The last section of the course looks to the lingering memory of Cleopatra long after her death, closely examining images in drama, art, and film to explore how the story of Cleopatra has been crafted and recrafted to represent different "truths" about sex, power, and identity.

By reading and discussing many different ancient texts, including philosophy, Jewish histories and literature, and, especially, papyri from Egypt, you will explore the social and cultural history of the eastern Mediterranean from Alexander the Great until the Roman conquest.

Rise of Islam, creation of Islamic society, relationship of religion and politics.