This seminar will focus on contemporary works, anthropological and historical, that unearth veins of research on the Arab world whose horizons transcend the earlier theoretical metonyms, as well as the frontiers of nation-states and the boundaries of religious traditions. We will read works which explore lives, ideas, practices, and institutions in the Arab world through situating them within global processes. In thinking about the Arab world in a transnational perspective we seek to look into how this area of the world both shaped other societies, and was shaped by, this global circulation of humans, commodities, technologies, ideologies, news and thought.
Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies