Tag Archives: Graduate school

Week 1 Roll Call

Week 1 turned out to be quite light on the reading. See below for the readings I did get to look at, my thoughts on/overview of them, and future posting possibilities.

Middle East in the Twentieth Century

There are three assigned texts for this class: William Cleveland’s A History of the Modern Middle East, James Gelvin’s The Modern Middle East: A History, and Charles D. Smith’s Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. My plan is to provide a summary of the readings and class lectures. Week 1 focused on the Middle East in the 19th century, with Turkey, the Arab Middle East, and parts of North Africa under Ottoman rule, and Iran under Qajar rule. We discussed the development of notions of modernity over the course of the 19th century in Europe and the Middle East, showing the ways in which the same modernization projects happening in Europe were occurring in the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran concurrently. We also looked at the lead up to World War I, which we’ll be discussing more fully Week 2.

I’m also going to (*fingers crossed*) use this space to keep you (and myself) up-to-date on my readings for the final assignment I’m undertaking for this class. I’ve decided to conduct a historiography* of sorts, using the opportunity of a class assignment to begin to situate myself in the literature I will be using for my dissertation project, as well as for my Middle East research paper next quarter (our program requires two two-quarter research series – this year I’ve been in the U.S. Research seminar; next year I’ll take the Middle East). So, I’ll be looking at memoirs, the vast majority written by women, from the Mandate period (1920-1945) in Syria and Lebanon. I’m excited to get this project going and have two on my list so far: Anbara Salam’s Memoirs of an Early Arab Feminist and Wadad Makdisi Cortas’ A World I Loved. More to come on this.

Scholarship of the Modern Middle East, Post-Colonial

No assignments for Week 1. Stay tuned next week for my summary of Stephen Hemsley Longrigg’s Syria and Lebanon under French Mandate.

The French Revolution, 1789-1815

Week 1 in this class provided an introduction to some of the social conflicts present in pre-revolutionary France. Along these lines, the assigned readings focused on providing a general historical background supported by a variety of primary sources from Laura Mason and Tracey Rizzo’s The French Revolution: A Document Collection, as well as some online sources.

Though this is the class that I’m a grader for, and not one that I’m taking, I’m going to include the readings for it in my weekly roll call. I think this class will provide good fodder for a discussion of pedagogy and pedagogical techniques related to readings, course content, and class structure.

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*Historiography: the study of the study of history; or, how historians have examined a particular event, period, or person, with a particular focus on how that has changed over time, methods that have been employed in historical analysis, and the theoretical framework that has been used in that study

 

If you’re on the quarter system, how was your first week? If not, how’s the mid-semester point? Anyone on spring break?

Week 5 Roll Call

Hi all. Here are the readings from last week, week 5. All caught up!

Historical Scholarship of the Modern Middle East, Late Ottoman Empire
Topic: The Ottoman Empire and world capitalism

Emrence, Cem. “Three Waves of Late Ottoman Historiography, 1950-2007.” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 41, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 137-151.

Summary: This study examines three waves in the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire. These waves are modernization approaches (1950s-1970s), macro models (1970s-1980s), and post-structural agendas (1990s-2007). The future of late Ottoman historiography lies is addressing two unanswered questions: that Ottoman studies has thus far been dominated by, first, mono-causal approaches (meaning that historians are still looking for a single cause for Ottoman social transformation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and, second, by “propensity accounts” (these emphasize the active and purposeful role of the Ottoman state and local elite in social formation).

Kasaba, Reşat. The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy: The Nineteenth Century. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988.

Summary: Kasaba challenges the traditional nineteenth century paradigm that looks at military decline and societal improvement during that period as disparate processes. The author brings these concurrent processes in relation to each other and demonstrates that they were intertwined, simultaneous aspects of broader process related to the integration of the Ottoman Empire into the capitalist world economy.

Pamuk, Şevket. “Institutional Change and the Longevity of the Ottoman Empire.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35, no. 2 (2004): 225-247.

Summary: Pamuk suggests that though the central bureaucracy of the Ottoman Empire was inherently pragmatic and flexible, as shown by its successful expansion and ability to survive into the modern period when others like it were not, its innovation was limited to those institutions that maintained the traditional order and Ottoman power. The result was that changes enacted by the state didn’t allow for its entrance into capitalist economic development or other new forms of economic organization. The inability of the empire to do this led to its disintegration.

Historical Studies of Women and Gender
Topic: History of manhood and masculinity

Beattie, Peter. “Beyond Machismos: Recent Examinations of Masculinities in Latin America.” Men and Masculinities 4 (2002): 303-308.

Summary: In this article, Beattie examines anthropological and literary studies of Latin American conceptions of masculinity and machismo. In his analysis of these studies, the author concludes that these works reveal how masculinity and machismo are “complex and malleable concepts that invite contestation and reinterpretation by individuals, groups, and scholars,” (303) charting new grounds in discussions of gender identity.

Basso, Matthew. Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Summary: This works examines the home front World War II experience of copper miners in three mining towns in Montana. Through the author’s analysis of their actions, he posits that these coppermen actively challenged the sacrificial masculinity propagated by the federal government and instead clung to their white working class masculinity evidenced by their refusal to work with females and men of color. This (white) working man’s masculinity played a role in the formation of conservative post-war masculinities.

Ditz, Toby. “The New Men’s History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History.” Gender & History 16, no. 1 (April 2004): 1-35.

Summary: In this article, Ditz points out some of the problems male and masculinity studies have confronted since its inception in the 1990s – namely, that many studies of masculinity do not address the nature of gendered power that inherently creates male-ness in contrast to and in dominance over female-ness. She proposes five potentially problematic aspects of masculinity studies and then provides a historiographical overview of early American history showing the ways in which these problems can be avoided.

Sinha, Mrinalini. “Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India.” Gender & History 11, no. 3 (1999): 445-460.

Summary: Through a historiographical examination of colonial Indian historiography on gender, Sinha posits that this historiography offers a useful and necessary contribution to the study of masculinity. This is the case because historical studies of gender and masculinity during the colonial period put power at the center of its analyses, thus necessitating a reconsideration of bodily difference, making visible the relational construction of masculinity and the anxieties inherent to that construction, as well as its construction in relation to its ideological and material context.

Research Update 1: Topics and Travel Plans

In my resolution post, I said that I would provide more research updates, including a post (or two or three) on my recent research trip. Well, here’s the first installment!

One requirement of the UCSD history department is two series of a research seminar. The first series I’m taking is the United States research seminar, a two-quarter course that meets in the fall and spring quarters, with a writing “break” in the winter. As an extension of sorts to my thesis, I’m focusing on the early Arab American experience in the first part of the 20th century. At the end of last quarter, I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d be doing, but I’ve gotten myself focused a bit more and I’ll be looking at an Arab American women’s organization, the Syrian Ladies’ Aid Society of Boston, in the first two decades after its formation in 1917.

In my examination, I want to discuss women’s participation in the public sphere through their involvement in the Syrian-American (“Syrian-American” here is used to refer to most of the Arabic-speaking people who came to the United States prior to World War II; most were Christians—Maronites–and came from the Ottoman administrative province known as Balad al-Sham, Greater Syria, and distinguished themselves from Muslim Ottoman subjects by emphasizing their Syrian-ness rather than Turk-ness), greater Boston area, national, and international communities.

Most of the materials for my project are not available through interlibrary loan (for those who don’t know about this, it’s an amazing service offered by most universities that allows you to access books, articles, sources, and the like from other libraries), so I knew at the end of last quarter that I might need to do some traveling. There were three places in particular that I was able to find through WorldCat that had some of the things I was looking for: the Arab American National Museum (AANM) in Dearborn (near Detroit), Michigan, the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC) at the University of Minnesota, and the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University. I ultimately decided that going to the AANM would be the most fruitful. So, I bought my plane ticket, got myself a winter coat, and packed my bags, set to leave on January 1 for 5½ days of research.

Check out the blog next week to see Research Update 2: In the Archive.

Week 1 and 2 Roll Call

I apologize for being a little behind on my weekly list. Lucky for you though, I’ve got a two-for-one kind of deal going on this week – two roll calls in one! So, without further ado…

Historical Scholarship of the Modern Middle East, Late Ottoman Empire

Week 1

Berkes, Niyazi. The Development of Secularism in Turkey. Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964. [reprinted in 1998 by Routledge; this is the version I used]

Week 2

Lerner, Daniel. The Passing of Traditional Society. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958. (selected chapters)

Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.

Masters, Bruce. The Arabs of the Ottoman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Historical Studies of Women and Gender

Week 1
Topic: The history of women and gender: experience and discourse

Hershatter, Gail. “The Gender of Memory: Rural Chinese Women and the 1950s.” Signs 28, no. 1 (2002): 43-70.

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race.” Signs 17 (Winter 1992): 251-274.

Offen, Karen. “History of Women.” In Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, 463-71.

Passerini, Luisa. “Women’s Personal Narratives: Myths, Experiences, and Emotions.” In Joy Webster, et al, eds., Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narrative. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989: 189-197.

Scott, Joan. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053-1075.

Scott, Joan. “Revisiting ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.’” American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (December 2008): 1334-1430.

Scott, Joan. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773-797.

Week 2
Topic: Feminist anthropology and the body: women in medieval Europe

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast, Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. (selections)

Caciola, Nancy. “Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Psychology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 2 (April 2000): 268-306.

Ortner, Sherry B. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” In Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Women, Culture, and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974: 68-87.

Class Schedule – Winter 2014

Week 1 has passed and we’re into the quarter full-swing. This quarter I’m taking Arabic, the first section of Middle East historiography that focuses on the Ottoman Empire from the 18th to the 20th centuries (Historical Scholarship of the Modern Middle East, Late Ottoman Empire), and Historical Studies of Women and Gender. Both the Middle East course and the women and gender course have great syllabi that I’m looking forward to sharing with you.

I’ve also been assigned an undergraduate class for which I’m going to be grading the midterm and final; as of last count, the class had about 75 students, but will probably whittle down to around 50. The class is outside my major field, and covers Mexico in the 19th century from decolonization to revolution (1810-1910). For it being an immediate neighbor to the south, I unfortunately know very little about Mexican history and am looking forward to learning more.

I hope you enjoy following along for the next two and a half months!