This course is designed to help you build upon what you have learned in Elementary Persian I. Emphasis is placed on using the language for interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational modes of communication. Therefore use of English is restricted. Listening, speaking, reading, and writing-as well as culture, vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation-are integrated into the course. Students must either have successfully completed Elementary Persian I, or take the departmental exam.

A continuation of Advanced Persian I, students will advance their skills in reading and listening, as well as in writing and speaking to near fluency. Graduate students may have additional assignments.

In this course, we will continue to address a broader variety of cultural topics in order to increase your proficiency in linguistic as well as cultural terms. Emphasis is place on actively using Persian for interpersonal, interpretive and presentational modes of communication. Therefore use of English is restricted. Listening, speaking, reading, and writing are integrated into the course, as are culture, grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Students must either have successfully completed PERS 613 or PERS 617, or take the departmental placement exam.

This course is designed to help you build upon what you have learned in Elementary Persian I. Emphasis is placed on using the language for interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational modes of communication. Therefore use of English is restricted. Listening, speaking, reading, and writing-as well as culture, vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation-are integrated into the course. Students must either have successfully completed PERS-011, or take the departmental exam.

Thousands of years after the pyramids were built and the last hieroglyphs were written, ancient Egypt remains a source of mystery and intense interest. Why are we so fascinated with ancient Egypt, and what does that fascination reveal about us? This course explores the reception history of ancient Egypt: how people in various periods and areas of the world have thought about ancient Egypt, what it has meant to them, why they were interested in it, and how they brought the ancient Egyptian past into the present. We will focus not on ancient Egypt itself, but on the history of perceptions of, ideas about, and interactions with ancient Egyptian culture. Our investigation will include how Egyptians of later periods thought about their ancient past, as well as European and American representations (and appropriations) of ancient Egypt. A major focus of the course will be the impact of political and cultural relations between Egypt and the West on perceptions and uses of ancient Egyptian culture.
This interdisciplinary course will combine multiple areas of history—intellectual, cultural, and political—and multiple types of sources, including historical writing, literature, film, and opera. Beginning with ancient Greek and Roman visitors to Egypt, we will investigate changing modes of understanding, constructing, and representing ancient Egypt, from the medieval sultans of Egypt to Mozart to W. E. B. DuBois to protesters in Egypt’s 2011 revolution.
Over the course of the semester, we will explore questions such as:
- What does it mean to think of Egypt as African vs. Middle Eastern vs. Mediterranean? Is Egypt Western, Eastern, both, or neither?
- To whom does ancient Egyptian heritage belong? How do colonialism and conceptions of race and ethnicity factor into this question?
- How do the past and the present shape each other? What is the impact of modern politics and culture on perceptions of the past? What role does the past play in the formation of modern political, social, and cultural identities?
- How can we learn about modern problems and concerns from representations of the past?

This course introduces students to selections from the best literary works written in Hebrew over the last hundred years in a relaxed seminar environment. The goal of the course is to develop skills in critical reading of literature in general, and to examine how Hebrew authors grapple with crucial questions of human existence and national identity. Topics include: Hebrew classics and their modern "descendents," autobiography in poetry and fiction, the conflict between literary generations, and others. Because the content of this course changes from year to year, students may take it for credit more than once. This course is conducted in Hebrew and all readings are in Hebrew. Grading is based primarily on participation and students' literary understanding.

The body has long been the focus of social and scientific inquiry, as well as the foundation of religious, philosophical, and artistic thought. This seminar examines premodern and modern notions of the body in the Middle East as they intersect with colonialism, nationalism, religion, labor, law, military, gender, race, medicine, and art. Students use the notion of the body as a "useful" historical category to investigate the broader social, cultural, and political transformations occurring in the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran, followed by post-empire and colonial modern Middle Eastern contexts. The course addresses diverse views and theories as manifested in the constructions and practices over the body by using literary texts, primary sources, medical recipes, religious orders, and even public monuments to unearth the role of the body in the making of Middle Eastern history.

Visual expression was first developed in Mesopotamia in the same environment as the invention of writing. This lecture class will introduce the arts of the major periods of Mesopotamian History ending with the "cinematic" effects achieved by the Assyrian artists on the walls of the royal palaces. The strong connection between verbal and visual expression will be traced over the three millennia course of Mesopotamian civilization from the earliest periods through the imperial art of the Assyrians and Babylonians of the first millennium BCE. The class and the assignments will regularly engage with objects in the collections and on display in the galleries of the Penn Museum.

This course treats monotheism as a particular historical development of the texts in the Hebrew Bible (that is, the Jewish Tanakh/Christian Old Testament), and thus analyzes the idea of “one God only” as the product of a complex set of historical conditions. It will take extensive time to examine the early history of the Hebrew Bible’s familiar God, Yhwh, in inscriptional, biblical, and archaeological evidence, showing that he was once at home in the polytheistic environment of the ancient Near East (Southwest Asia). By embracing these longstanding entanglements, this course will explore the means by which Hebrew scribes came to define this deity not only as the most important god among many, but as the only all-powerful deity to exist in the entire cosmos. A variety of topics will be covered, addressing a number of questions raised by the evidence at hand: what is the evidence for Yhwh outside of the Bible? How do historians define his emergence in history? Did he really have a wife named Asherah? What did he look like and where did he live?
What circumstances caused Judean writers to consider him the only all-powerful deity the universe? And finally, how did the subsequent Jewish imagination re-inscribe the older polytheistic world in light of monotheizing changes? While knowledge of the Bible, its languages, and its history may seem like a desired feature for the prospective student, there are no prerequisites. This course will be able to introduce the material to those at a beginner’s level.

Thousands of years after the pyramids were built and the last hieroglyphs were written, ancient Egypt remains a source of mystery and intense interest. Why are we so fascinated with ancient Egypt, and what does that fascination reveal about us? This course explores the reception history of ancient Egypt: how people in various periods and areas of the world have thought about ancient Egypt, what it has meant to them, why they were interested in it, and how they brought the ancient Egyptian past into the present. We will focus not on ancient Egypt itself, but on the history of perceptions of, ideas about, and interactions with ancient Egyptian culture. Our investigation will include how Egyptians of later periods thought about their ancient past, as well as European and American representations (and appropriations) of ancient Egypt. A major focus of the course will be the impact of political and cultural relations between Egypt and the West on perceptions and uses of ancient Egyptian culture.
This interdisciplinary course will combine multiple areas of history—intellectual, cultural, and political—and multiple types of sources, including historical writing, literature, film, and opera. Beginning with ancient Greek and Roman visitors to Egypt, we will investigate changing modes of understanding, constructing, and representing ancient Egypt, from the medieval sultans of Egypt to Mozart to W. E. B. DuBois to protesters in Egypt’s 2011 revolution.
Over the course of the semester, we will explore questions such as:
- What does it mean to think of Egypt as African vs. Middle Eastern vs. Mediterranean? Is Egypt Western, Eastern, both, or neither?
- To whom does ancient Egyptian heritage belong? How do colonialism and conceptions of race and ethnicity factor into this question?
- How do the past and the present shape each other? What is the impact of modern politics and culture on perceptions of the past? What role does the past play in the formation of modern political, social, and cultural identities?
- How can we learn about modern problems and concerns from representations of the past?