Category: Graduate

This seminar will address various theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the Modern Middle East. We will pay particular attention to how theoretical innovations such as post-Orientalism, World Systems theory, postcolonial theory, and subaltern studies have transformed the nature of historical debates on the modern Middle East.

This course will provide a critical theoretical “toolkit” for the general study of colonial and postcolonial histories and theories. In addition to providing a basic grounding in theories of the decentered subject and theories of ideology, we will also explore texts that help us conceptualize colonialism as an historical, political, and psychological experience.

This course will introduce students to some of the key approaches in modern and contemporary critical theory. Rather than provide a comprehensive survey, the course will pair canonical texts with critical departures and reworkings by later theorists.

This course will serve as an introduction to the psychoanalytic tradition through a reading of its foundational Freudian as well as post-Freudian texts. Centered on the “so-called Copernican revolution to which Freud himself compared his discovery,” we will attend primarily to the lineaments of the unconscious.