studying the middle east: Reading recent ISME faculty publications
Tue 12-2PM 2.2051
In this course, we’re reading our way through the latest research coming out of our own ISME faculty. Instead of the usual canon, over the semester we’ll dig into what the people teaching you are actually working on — recent articles, new angles, ongoing debates. You’ll get a sense of the range of how the Middle East is researched at Freie Universität Berlin, and just as importantly, a feel for who has expertise in what — handy to know once thesis supervision comes around. These texts also feed into the parallel writing course, where you’ll respond to them directly through a dedicated writing assignment.
Week 1 — 13 Oct — no session on campus // read the information on the course and module here on the blog and find and read the first paper by Schirin Amir-Moazami for the session on 20 Oct.
Week 2 — 20 Oct — universities and Staatsräson
Amir‑Moazami, ‘Not open for debate’? Staatsräson and the policing of knowledge production
further reading if you take the time: Amir-Moazami, Prevent, Promote, and Govern: Rationalities of Islamism Prevention as Democracy Promotion in Germany
Week 3 — 27 Oct — redefining knowledge
Casey, Will Digital Destroy the Humanities?
-OR-
Leicht, From Knowledge (ʿIlm) to Intellect (ʿAql): On a Remarkable Terminological and Conceptual Shift in Maimonides’s Thought
Week 4 — 3 Nov —crisis and scent politics
Liebelt, Kolonya Renaissance: Disinfection, Healing and the Role of Eau de Cologne during the early COVID‑19 Crisis in Turkey and its Diaspora
Week 5 — 10 Nov — no session on campus // reading time
liturgy between script and speech: Cantera, On the Edge between Literacy and Orality: Manuscripts and Performance of the Zoroastrian Long Liturgy
Week 6 — 17 Nov — states and the politics of the poor
Harders, The politics of the poor in the Middle East and North Africa
Week 7 — 24 Nov — revolutionary lives and memoir
Hartmann, Roupen Der Minasian: Three Kinds of Agency
Week 8 — 1 Dec — hidden archives and digital ethics
Evans, Bringing Up Underground Corpora: Ethics and Manuscripts in an Age of Digital Reproduction
Week 9 — 8 Dec — no session on campus // reading time
manuscripts and digital methods: Gruendler & Kozae, Human intuition and computational clustering: tackling a fluid textual tradition
Week 10 — 15 Dec — preservation and oral heritage
Omarkhali, The Yezidi Religious Textual Tradition: From Oral to Written
Week 11 — 5 Jan — green ethics
Krawietz, Reassembling Creation: Green Ethics and Scholarly Disciplines in the Islamic Tradition
Week 12 — 12 Jan — no session on campus // reading time
literature and politics: Alali, The Relationship between Politics and Literature: A Study in the Reconceptualization of Political Literature
Week 13 — 19 Jan — biography and history
Maksudyan, Biographical Approaches to the Study of the Armenian Genocide
Week 14 — 26 Jan — digital humanities
Mueller-Laackman et al., Manifesto for Multilingual Digital Humanities
Week 15 — 2 Feb (last session on campus) — modernity as a regional problem
Zemmin & Topal, Conceptualizing Near Eastern Modernity
Week 16 — 9 Feb — no session on campus // writing time
further texts
Bar Moshe, Diversity explained: Why do qǝltu dialects present three different forms for the long persons in the prefix-conjugation?
Dönitz, Hebrew Panegyric of the Late Middle Ages: Shemaryah, Son of Elijah, and His Praise Poems
Furman, “Superiority is due to us, and the king should come from among us”: The Arab Conquests and Conflicts of the Early Umayyad Era in a 7th-Century Syriac Universal History of Yoḥannān bar Penkāyē
Gasparini, Why a language dies: The case of Bəṭaḥrēt in Oman
Gruendler, Ibn Rushd’s cultural adaptation of Aristotle’s Poetics
Leicht, A Maimonidean Life: Joseph ben Judah Ibn Shimʿon of Ceuta’s Biography Reconstructed
Klimiuk, Living in Bab Tuma: Two Texts in Damascene Arabic
Klimiuk & Alkhaled, At the Margin of Two Dialect Zones: A Transitional Arabic Variety from Bloudan (Syria)
Mauder, The Religious Cultures of Premodern Islamicate Courts in Transregional Perspective: Topic, Concepts, Questions and Findings
Schenzle, Egypt 3105 CE: Salama Musa’s views on utopia
Schewe, On the Sound of Qurʾān: Nasalization (ghunna) as Ornamentation and Accentuation in Recitation
Stephan, Framing Narratives: Expanding the Narratological Frame Concept for the Study of the Premodern Arabic Tradition
If you study this course as part of Studying the Middle East (MA ISME): see the writing course for details on the examination.
If you study this course as part of Research Perspectives (MA ISME): Submit a project draft of 2000 words (either for a master’s thesis or a phd or a research project) as mark-down (!!!) via email (from your fu-berlin email address) until 12 Feb for the first deadline, or 26 Feb for the second deadline. The paper is evaluated on a pass/fail basis, so it doesn’t count towards the final grade.
If you study this course as part of Forschungsperspektiven der Arabistik (MA Arabistik): Submit an essay of 5 pages (either for a master’s thesis or a phd or a research project proposal) as mark-down (!!!) via email (from your fu-berlin email address) until 12 Feb for the first deadline, or 26 Feb for the second deadline. The paper is evaluated on a pass/fail basis, so it doesn’t count towards the final grade.