Introduces students to historical reasoning. Students learn to analyze historical evidence in context in order to explain how the past produced the ever-changing present. This course introduces students to the history and cultures of the Middle East and North Africa, focusing on the region's interaction with global powers. With special attention placed on global developments and local responses, the course will highlight the origins and expansion of Islamic empires, modern interactions with the West through imperialism and oil concessions, responses to this interaction from nationalist, secularist, and Islamist movements, and the issues these responses generate in the present day, including questions of ethnic conflict and religious pluralism.

This course explores how people have thought about bodies, illness, and medical treatment over the last several centuries, specifically in the western and Middle Eastern contexts. By investigating the origins of different medical epistemologies, we highlight both the development and spread of Western medicine. In the Middle Eastern context, we will analyze native concepts of health and healing, pandemics and disease during the colonial era, the proliferation of medical disciplines during the nineteenth century, and the professionalization (as well as privatization) of health care in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Prerequisite: One 100-level history course.