Spring 2023
MA Thesis Workshop
Jared McCormick
NEST-GA 2998
The purpose of this seminar is to help you toward to the completion of your MA thesis. We’ll aimto do this through a series of four workshops across the semester. Collaboration is the guiding principle of this seminar, and to that end we are all tasked with reading each other’s work in a spirit of intellectual generosity but also critical attention. “We talk in company, we write alone.” This has both its drawbacks and benefits, but in reading and commenting on each other’s work this seminar will foster as far as possible a collaborative dimension of writing, the point being that in doing so we improve both our own writing and, crucially, our capacities to read and respond to the work of others. Please read all of your fellow student’s contributions and engage with them—this is not just an exercise in ethics/support, good writing is in fact inseparable from good reading.
In addition to the sessions outlines detailed below, in our first session we’ll make some time for thinking about the basic fundamentals of writing and responding. We’ll read the introduction of Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff’s Sharing and Responding (McGraw-Hill, 1989), which I will circulate. Across the seminar we’ll think about what constitutes a good piece of writing. We’ll think about things like thesis or argument, evidence, method, and structure; what kind of rhetorical devices we should be using and which we might want to avoid; citational styles and convention. We’ll come back time and again to basic questions: What is the main argument here? What is the scholarly field in which we are intervening? What are the contributions to that field? What are the methods and sources?
Anthropology of State and Government in the Middle East
Ola Galal
NEST-GA 2003
4:55PM - 6:55PM R
What constitutes the state, its institutions and its culture? This course will be an investigation into the history of and the practices that shape state-citizen relations. We will examine citizenship as a social construct and an institution asking how citizenship, as a logic for determining membership and for providing access to rights, is constituted in relation to different scales from the local community to the nation-state to global humanity? What political, ethical, and affective work does citizenship do in relation to other ways of conceptualizing belonging and of apportioning rights in the region, such as tribe, religion, ethnicity, sect, geographical location, neighborhood, and profession? What alternative futures are imagined or worked through in projects of government and among social movements that make claims to or against citizenship?
Topics in History and the Middle East
NEST-GA 3005
Information coming soon