Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

This course will explore issues of identity and difference, locality and community, through the lens of space and place. Engaging with recent scholarly work in the fields of sociocultural anthropology, migration studies, ethnic studies, sociology, geography, architecture, and literature, we will seek to decode sociospatial arrangements to understand structures and processes of exclusion and marginalization. At the same time, we will observe how material realities and linguistic discourse shape people’s navigations through space, and how efforts at placemaking create sites of collective identity, resistance, belonging, and recognition. We will ask questions such as: how should we understand notions of displacement, transborder identifications, or longings for homeland as they play out for Sierra Leonean Muslims in Washington, DC, Ecuadorian immigrants in Italy, or Indigenous Latin American migrants in California and Wyoming? How does “talk of crime” instantiate racial segregation in a Brazilian favela? What boundaries are created by gated communities in places like San Antonio, Texas and Mumbai, India? How does public policy police green spaces to restrict access by people who are unhoused in San Diego? What should we make of “placeless” spaces or states, such as those instantiated through technologies like social media, radio, or meditative practice? Posed in a wide range of ethnographic contexts, our efforts to puzzle through these issues will require attention to the ways in which space and place are spoken, embodied, gendered, racialized, and (il)legalized. We will likewise attend to the politics and ethics of decolonizing scholarship on space and place and to the meanings of an engaged anthropology that leans towards social justice.

Faculty

• Deanna Barenboim

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

As Empires expanded in the 18th-20th centuries, Europe witnessed a massive rise in collecting, measuring, counting, and describing myriad phenomena across the world, be they land masses, waterways, fossils, plants, animals, or human beings. And, domestically, there was deepening interest in the constitution and characteristics of different populations and the spaces they inhabited. In this seminar, we will examine a series of times and spaces in which gazes were focused, information gathered, and interpretations surmised in the context of Empire. Along the way we will see how some social sciences, primarily anthropology, geography, sociology, and selected area studies, have come to be formed in a variety of social and political contexts. The times and places we will study are diverse and will include, in no particular order: the rise of what we now know as scientific racism in France and Germany in the 19th century; the role of the Royal Engineers (the British military) in surveying and mapping vast territories of the British Empire; Charles Booth’s studies of the working class in 19th-century London, and Arthur Munby’s contemporary scopophilic obsession with working women. A century later, it was the Black population of Britain that was under the scrutiny of researchers from various institutions; and we will examine the myriad ways in which those communities resisted being studied. We will also look at the contradictory careers of several individuals including anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, who tried to show how deploying anthropological knowledge would permit colonial officers to administer the empires more efficiently. And, on the other hand, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kenyan anti-colonial activist who taught Kiswahili to colonial officers and studied anthropology during his time in London to bolster his case for Kenyan independence. We will also explore the work of anthropologists from the Manchester School in colonized Central Africa, including their activism supporting local miners unions. And we will learn about the significant contributions of African “research assistants,” and their contributions to social science. Our texts include writings and visual imagery from a broad array of sources including, scholarly readings, biographies, history, ethnography, and maps.

Faculty

• Mary A. Porter

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

How does a chronic illness affect a person’s orientation to the everyday? What are the social and political forces that underpin life in a homeless shelter? What is the experiential world of a blind person, a musician, a refugee, or a child at play? In an effort to answer these and likeminded questions, anthropologists have become increasingly interested in developing phenomenological accounts of particular lived realities in order to understand—and convey to others—the nuances and underpinnings of such realities in terms that more general social or symbolic analyses cannot achieve. In this context, phenomenology offers an analytic method that works to understand and describe in words phenomena as they appear to the consciousnesses of certain peoples. The phenomena most often in question for anthropologists include the workings of time, perception, selfhood, language, bodies, suffering, and morality as they take form in particular lives within the context of any number of social, linguistic, and political forces. In this course, we will explore phenomenological approaches in anthropology by reading and discussing some of the most significant efforts along these lines. Each student will also try their hand at developing a phenomenological account of a specific social or subjective reality through a combination of ethnographic research, participant observation, and ethnographic writing.

Faculty

• Robert R. Desjarlais

First-Year Studies—Year

In modern terms, myth has come to be commonly understood as the antithesis of history. Whereas history is taken as a reasoned, factual account of the past and how things came to be, myth appears to operate in the realm of fiction or fantasy. Myths may have the claim of venerable tradition, but they are no longer accepted as an accurate record of events. The ancient world, however, made no such black-and-white distinctions. In antiquity, myth was accepted as early history. Its heroes were real, and their actions were thought to exemplify essential paradigms of political order and morality. Consequently, this course will apply a different approach in which myth is distinguished from history not by a truth test but, rather, by virtue of its function as a means of cultural self-representation. We shall examine the myths of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome—both in their literary form and in various media of visual art. Throughout, our goal will be to understand the potency of these narratives as vehicles of social or cultural values and as tools of power legitimizing and justifying closely entwined notions of religious and political authority. The course will close by considering how, in Late Antiquity, Christian narratives and ideologies in the literary and visual arts developed from the mythic traditions that preceded them. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

Faculty

• David Castriota

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

This course will pose questions about the ontology of architecture and our role in engaging its global expressions. Focusing on provocative case studies in a lecture-discussion format, this survey of architectural history will draw material from antiquity to the present, from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands. Students will learn how to describe architectural material properties, siting, function, and experience, and how to interpret them through larger dynamics of subsistence practices, trade, conquest, and ideological implementation. Subverting previous canonical approaches to architectural history, the goal of this course is not to identify and memorize a series of period styles, but to explore the social realities of architecture, and what it means to grapple with a culture that is different from your own. Through challenging analytical comparisons, primary texts, and hands-on exercises, students will learn that our categorization and interpretation of the other cultures is often heavily laden with assumptions. We will ask difficult questions. As we free ourselves from linear, binary, and anachronistic conceptions of nature, divinity, time, and purpose, we will become well-situated to imagine and respect other spatial realities, and of course, to reshape our own.

Faculty

• Ann Shafer

Open, Lecture—Spring

This course will explore the art and architecture of Spain and of Latin America as its lands emerged from colonialism to forge strong independent identities. We will focus on selected topics, including extraordinary artists such as El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Cabrera, and Aleijadinho, as well as on complex issues surrounding art and identity in contested and textured lands—in particular, Casta painting, colonialism, and arts of revolution and national identity.

Faculty

• Jerrilynn Dodds

First-Year Studies—Year

The 2024 Presidential Election result will have far-reaching implications for economic, social, and environmental policies. It will also be significant in terms of the future of American democracy and social wellbeing. In this course, we will situate current economic and political challenges in a theoretical and historical context by drawing on insights from difference schools of thought in economics as well as other disciplines such as law, politics, sociology, and history. Some of the key questions to be addressed are as follows: How can the central debates in political economy help us understand some of the unprecedented challenges we face, such as new gilded age style wealth concentration and power, economic insecurity, and the climate crisis? Why is the study of history a central methodological priority for many economists and why not so for others? Why do people distinguish between “regulation” and laissez-faire and is this a false dichotomy? What is the history of industrial and social policy in the United States and other countries? How do we understand the relationship between political and corporate power and the “rule of law” with regard to market outcomes? What is Project 2025 and how can we understand its theoretical basis and implications? These and others will be some of the questions that we will be tackling throughout the course of the year, thereby ensuring that students develop a solid foundation to the fundamental debates in economic theory and policy and understand the key role of methodology in the study of political economy. Finally, the goal is to ensure that students develop the ability to critically engage scholarly work in economics. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• Jamee Moudud

Open, Small Lecture—Year

This course on business history will situate business in its social and political contexts. At the core of the course is the argument that the economy is embedded in the political society and is thus subject to historical change. The study of business cannot be separated from politics and political struggle, which determine how society is legally constructed in any given moment in history. Thus, what is of often called “private enterprise” sits on a contextually determined set of power relations which shape and are in turn shaped by current legal institutions. Challenging the idea, common to conventional discourse, that economies can be more or less regulated, this course will focus on the politics of business regulation, which in some contexts has produced socially progressive outcomes and in others regressive ones. Regulation is ubiquitous and subject to variation given changed circumstances due say to an economic crisis, new technologies, global competition, socio-political pressures etc. In this course, the nature and politics of business regulation will be studied in different national and historical contexts, involving countries in the Global South (e.g. Mauritius, Chile, Brazil, the Indian state of Kerala, South Africa etc.) and the Global North (e.g. United States, Sweden, Germany, etc.). It will address a wide range of topics that include: (a) slavery, cotton, banking, and property rights in early American industrialization; (b) legal struggles between corporations and society over constitutional rights (e.g. what brought about the landmark Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. FEC (2010)?); (c) corporations and colonialism (e.g. the British East India Company, the Virginia Company, etc.); (d) business regulation during the post-Civil War Reconstruction Period; (e) late industrialization and social well being; (f) using the United States and Sweden as case studies, the construction of welfare states and workers’ attempts to secure social and economic rights; and (g) the history of the relationship between business associations and anti-democratic politics, including the links between Silicon Valley technolibertarians and digital capitalism (i.e. artificial intelligence and crypto currencies). At a theoretical level, the study of business history will be grounded in debates in microeconomics, theories of business investment and pricing, and the relationship between law, politics, history, and economics. This course will be of interest to students who wish to understand contemporary social and political challenges in a theoretically and historically informed way.

Faculty

• Jamee Moudud

First-Year Studies—Year

This course will provide a broad introduction to the political, social, cultural, and intellectual history of the Middle East from the late 18th century to the present. After a brief conceptual overview, the course will draw upon a wide array of primary and secondary sources to illuminate the manifold transformations and processes that have contributed over time to shaping what has meant to be “modern” in this remarkably diverse and dynamic region. Particular attention will be paid to the following themes: the question of modernization and reform within the Ottoman and Qajar empires; the experience of different forms of European imperialism in the Middle East; the integration of the Middle East into the world economy; World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; state-building in both colonial and postcolonial contexts; transformations in religious thought; changing family norms and gender roles and the genesis of Middle Eastern women’s movements; nationalism; class politics, social movements, and revolution; Zionism and the Israel-Palestine conflict; post-World War II geopolitics and the Cold War in the Middle East; Nasserism and pan-Arabism; the role of US power in the Middle East; the origins and spread of political Islam; the political economy of oil; globalization and neoliberalism; and the impact of various new cultural forms and media on the formation of identities across the region. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• Matthew Ellis

Open, Large seminar—Fall

The Middle East has a long and rich urban tradition, boasting some of the world’s oldest cities. At the same time, the cities of the region have undergone profound changes over time, particularly as a result of the range of global forces, patterns, and linkages that are intrinsic to the process of “modernity” (a conceptual category that will be examined at great length). This course will explore the lived experience of urban space as a lens through which to view broader transformations in the social, political, economic, and cultural history of the Middle East from late antiquity to the present. The course will also introduce students to some recent developments in urban theory and different methods that scholars have adopted to capture various aspects of city life, particularly in the modern period. To this end, the approach of the course will be interdisciplinary, drawing from such fields as art history, anthropology, sociology, geography, comparative literature, film studies, and political economy to explore the historical development of Middle Eastern cities through a variety of frames. In our effort to think beyond the “hard city” of bricks and mortar, particular attention will be paid to the cultural imagination and expression of various Middle Eastern cities in literature and film—our main “primary sources” in this course. Throughout the course, we will examine what cities have meant for Middle Eastern society and culture in a variety of contexts; study how various individuals and social groups across the region have experienced and used urban space; explore how writers, artists, and filmmakers have attempted to imagine and render their urban milieus; and consider the extent to which the Middle Eastern experience of urban modernity has paralleled others around the globe. Cities to be covered include: Cairo, Istanbul, Damascus, Mecca, Baghdad, Tehran, Isfahan, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Aleppo, Alexandria, Beirut, Algiers, Marrakesh, Aden, Izmir, and Dubai.

Faculty

• Matthew Ellis

Open, Seminar—Year

This course will provide a broad introduction to the political, social, cultural, and intellectual history of the Middle East from the late 18th century to the present. After a brief conceptual overview, the course will draw upon a wide array of primary and secondary sources to illuminate the manifold transformations and processes that have contributed over time to shaping what has meant to be “modern” in this remarkably diverse and dynamic region. Particular attention will be paid to the following themes: the question of modernization and reform within the Ottoman and Qajar empires; the experience of different forms of European imperialism in the Middle East; the integration of the Middle East into the world economy; World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; state-building in both colonial and postcolonial contexts; transformations in religious thought; changing family norms and gender roles and the genesis of Middle Eastern women’s movements; nationalism; class politics, social movements, and revolution; Zionism and the Israel-Palestine conflict; post-World War II geopolitics and the Cold War in the Middle East; Nasserism and pan-Arabism; the role of US power in the Middle East; the origins and spread of political Islam; the political economy of oil; globalization and neoliberalism; and the impact of various new cultural forms and media on the formation of identities across the region.

Faculty

• Matthew Ellis

First-Year Studies—Year

This course will provide a comprehensive introduction to the foundational texts of Islam, the historical development of different Muslim cultures, and the contemporary issues that animate Islam’s ever-evolving manifestations. We will begin with the Qur’an, a book whose juxtaposition of narrative fragments, apocalyptic imagery, divine voice, and sociopolitical themes conveyed in rhymed Arabic prose has both entranced and confounded readers. We will look at the historical roots of the “isms” used today to describe the orientations of Sunnism, Shi‘ism, Sufism, and Salafism. Looking beyond the Middle East, where only about 20 percent of the current global population of Muslims reside, we will examine how migrating people, concepts, texts, and practices both transform and are transformed by existing traditions in different geographical locations. Contemporary preoccupations such as the status of women in Islam and the relationship between Islam and politics will be examined from a variety of perspectives illustrating the intricacies of Muslim and non-Muslim acts of interpretation and their relationship to power and authority. Whether you are an insider or an outsider to the worlds of Muslim thought and practice, the universal value of Muslim traditions is undeniable; we will be taking everything we read seriously as applicable to our everyday lives. What does the Qur’an have to tell us about visible and invisible worlds? How can an understanding of Sharia law and Sufi ethics help us with our own urgent moral dilemmas? What does it mean to cultivate a sense of the sacred and what spaces are opened up through this way of being in the world? How do commitments to certain metaphysical claims relate to our engagements in social and political acts? To address these and other questions we will study not only religious texts, but also how Islam and Muslim practices are represented in autobiographies, fiction writing, films, music and art. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• Kristin Zahra Sands

Open, Seminar—Fall

Jewish mystics have left us with a vast corpus of imaginative literature that raises vital questions about the creation of the universe, the place of humans in the cosmos, the relationship of humanity to God, and the role of human agency in salvation and soteriology. This course will provide an overview of the development of Jewish mysticism, with a particular focus on the esoteric method, discipline, and school of thought known as Kabbalah. The course will approach mysticism not as a marginal or esoteric curiosity, but as a recurring and generative mode of Jewish religious creativity, deeply embedded in textual traditions, historical experience, and cultural imagination. We will begin with the hekhalot and merkavah literature of late antiquity, examining early Jewish mystical ascent narratives, ritualized practices of visionary experience, and the theological challenges posed by proximity to the divine. These texts will introduce key themes, such as sacred language, secrecy, embodiment, danger, and authority, that reverberate throughout the later history of Kabbalah. From there, we will turn to the emergence of medieval Kabbalah in 12th- and 13th-century Provence and Spain, focusing on the development of the sefirotic system, symbolic theosophy, and new conceptions of God, Torah, and human action. A central portion of the course will be devoted to the Zohar, the foundational work of Kabbalah. We will read extended passages closely, attending to its mythic imagination, narrative form, and radical reconfiguration of biblical interpretation, gender, and divine plurality. The seminar will then move to the Lurianic Kabbalah of 16th century Safed, exploring how doctrines of cosmic rupture and repair became powerful frameworks for understanding exile, history, and ethical responsibility. The course will then continue with Hasidism, analyzing how earlier mystical ideas were reshaped into devotional practices, charismatic leadership, and new models of religious subjectivity in early modern Eastern Europe. We will examine both the continuity and tension between elite esotericism and popular spirituality. We will also look at the rise of Christian Kabbalah, and Christian thinkers who reinterpreted Kabbalah according to a Christian framework. In its final section, the seminar will turn to modern and postmodern reinterpretations of Kabbalah, including both literature inspired by Kabbalah, and modern pop cultural appropriations of Kabbalah. Readings will include writers who draw on Kabbalistic motifs to grapple with trauma, language, identity, and the limits of meaning. Throughout the course, students will engage primary texts in translation alongside critical scholarship, developing skills in close reading, historical analysis, and theoretical reflection. The seminar will invite sustained attention to how mystical traditions endure, adapt, and provoke new questions about religion, interpretation, and the imagination.

Faculty

• Joel Swanson

Open, Seminar—Spring

Muslim mystics have left us with a vast body of literature that explains the faculties and capabilities of human beings. These theoretical writings go hand in hand with the experiential dimension of Sufi practice, which includes the careful and diligent cultivation of spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical disciplines. The purpose of their path, as they often label their thought and practice, goes beyond that of religious salvation, at least as understood in the usual sense. Their goal might be best described as a desire to attain intimate knowledge of the true nature of reality, as in the saying of the Prophet Muhammad: “Our Lord, show us things as they really are.” Following another saying of the Prophet, “He who knows himself, knows his Lord,” Sufis have insisted that this deeper knowledge can only be accomplished by a greater understanding of oneself. This necessarily involves the deconstruction of any solid or static notions about what is perceived to be the self. According to Sufis, what we think of as ourselves is really a cacophony of forces from within and without that flow through and interact with different faculties within us. The spiritual disciplines in which Sufis immerse themselves are intended to destabilize the false self by enabling the practitioner to become more conscious of these forces and faculties. Furthermore, according to Sufis, there is a strong relationship between our level of awareness, our attitudes and behaviors, and the way in which we perceive reality. Changes within us change the reality that seems to be outside of us. Through a series of readings from Sufi figures in the past and present, this course will explore their systematic exposition of the “sciences of the soul.”

Faculty

• Kristin Zahra Sands

Open, Seminar—Spring

Since the destruction of the Second Temple and the ensuing Jewish exile in 70 CE, most of Jewish history has been spent in a state of exile and dispersion. As such, Jewish thinkers have grappled extensively with how to understand exile and diaspora as foundational concepts of identity and meaning. This seminar will examine how the concepts of galut (exile) and diaspora have functioned as central, generative, and contested categories within Jewish intellectual, religious, political, and cultural history. Rather than treating exile simply as a condition of loss or punishment, the course will ask how Jewish thinkers have interpreted exile as a theological problem, a historical reality, a political framework, and a mode of identity, and whether diaspora may be understood as a productive and creative condition. The course will begin with rabbinic and Talmudic understandings of exile, exploring how the destruction of the Temple and the dispersal of the Jewish people were reinterpreted through law, narrative, and ritual. We will examine how rabbinic Judaism transformed exile into a livable and meaningful condition, reimagining sacred space, authority, and communal life in the absence of sovereignty. From there, we will turn to medieval Jewish thought, focusing on figures such as Maimonides and Judah Halevi, whose writings articulate divergent theological and philosophical responses to exile, ranging from rational universalism to longing for land, language, and embodied collectivity. The core of the seminar will concentrate on 19th- and 20th-century Jewish thought, when exile and diaspora became urgent categories in the context of emancipation, nationalism, imperialism, antisemitism, and mass migration. We will read Jewish philosophers, political theorists, poets, novelists, and artists who grappled with alienation, homelessness, translation, and minority existence. Special attention will be paid to non-Zionist political projects, including the Jewish Labour Bund, Jewish Autonomism, and other diasporist movements that imagined diaspora as a site of political possibility, cultural autonomy, and ethical internationalism rather than solely as a problem to be overcome. Throughout the course, we will investigate the question of whether exile must be conceived solely in negative terms, or whether it can be understood as positive, generative, and critical, a condition that produces new forms of subjectivity, solidarity, creativity, and critique. We will also ask how Jewish diasporic identity has functioned as a lens for thinking about diaspora more broadly, including questions of race, displacement, colonialism, and statelessness. In the final portion of the seminar, Jewish texts and experiences will be placed in conversation with Black studies and postcolonial studies, exploring shared and divergent accounts of diaspora, memory, trauma, and resistance. These comparative perspectives will allow us to consider how exile and alienation challenge not only the nation-state, but also stable notions of selfhood, belonging, and political identity. Through close reading and sustained discussion, students will engage exile as both a lived condition and a powerful framework for critical thought.

Faculty

• Joel Swanson

Advanced, Seminar—Year

In recent years, gender and nationalism have been at the center of local, national, and global politics and concerns in the United States, but also globally. Starting with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, attempts to overturn availability of contraception in numerous states in the United States, as well as at the national level, struggles over gender and/or heteronormativity continue to be ongoing. Overall, nationalism can be understood as a project simultaneously involving construction(s) of bodies, memory, history, and identity. In this seminar, we will identify the multiple and shifting dimensions of nationalism as a world historical phenomenon. Central to our focus will be the centrality and particular constructions of gender in different national projects. Attention will be paid to nationalism in its colonial and contemporary trajectories. Questions to be addressed will include the following: What is the relationship between nationalism and identity? Which symbols/languages are called upon to produce/evoke collective identity? What are the various inclusions, exclusions, and silences that particular historically-constituted nationalisms involve? Is nationalism necessarily a positive force? If not, under what circumstances, in what ways, and for whom does it pose problems? What is the relationship of nationalism(s) to socially and politically marginalized groups? How is pluralism and difference constructed and treated? How do the same issues, such as those regarding cultural authenticity and identity, take on a different meaning at diverse historical moments? How is the insider/outsider relationship conceptualized, and what shifts occur in different periods? Women have been interpellated and have participated within nationalist movements in a variety of ways. The dynamics and contradictions of such involvement will be analyzed closely. We will strive to explore the implications of these processes for women's and non-binary individuals' sense of self, citizenship, and belonging at specific periods and over time. In the spring semester, we will turn our attention more specifically to performances of nationalism through institutional and popular cultural arrangements. Under the former category, we will look at issues of migration, immigration, and exile; public policy and international relations; war and conflict. In the arena of popular culture, we will examine the production of nationalism(s) through the mass media, sports, film, museums and exhibitions, and tourism. Conference work can include an examination of a specific nationalist movement, theoretical issues pertaining to nationalism(s), memory, identity, performances of nationalism(s) in popular culture and the mass media, and the interplay between institutional and everyday constructions of nationalism in specific settings.

Faculty

• Shahnaz Rouse

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

What might it mean for a writer to be useful to a state? How have states used writers, witting and unwitting, in projects aimed at influence and hegemony? How might a state make use of language as a weapon? What might it mean for a writer to attempt to avoid being useful to a state? How might a state inflect and influence the intimacy between a writer and what we may write? In this course, we will discuss an array of choices writers have made in relation to state power, focusing particularly on the United States from just after World War II until the present. Students will be asked to read excerpts from six texts: Joel Whitney's Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers; Frances Stonor Saunders' The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters; Eric Bennett's Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War; Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism; and two long poems, Peter Dale Scott's "Coming to Jakarta" and Dionne Brand's "Inventory." This is not a history or a literature course; our lens will be that of a writer, using deep study and playful practice to figure out the dilemmas and best practices of the present. Although this is a lecture course, students will be asked to participate, improvise, and work with a partner, as well as participate in one seminar a week, which will function as a writing workshop. At the end of the course, students will be asked to present what they have learned in the form of an 8- to 10-page letter—to your partner, to me, or to anyone else you choose, living or dead—addressing some of our class questions and your responses to them. The only expectation is the courage to think out loud with other people—a.k.a. the courage required to learn.

Faculty

• Suzanne Gardinier

Open, Seminar—Fall

The Iowa Writers' Workshop was founded by Wilbur Schramm in 1936. Schramm went on to a many-faceted career, which included cowriting a postwar manual for the army called The Nature of Psychological Warfare. He saw the writing workshop as a way to train “the kind of young persons who can become the kind of writers we need,” in a future framed by the dominance of the United States. This course will look for the traces of this project of domination in poetry and will ask what might happen for writers when the domination is seen from the point of view of the dominated and the “free” from the point of view of the prison. Why are censorship and incarceration such central facts of what it means to be a poet elsewhere? Why has that not been true in the United States? How does Archibald MacLeish’s “a poem should not mean but be” or T. S. Eliot’s “like a patient etherized upon a table” sound beside Adam Wazyk’s “how many times must one wake you up before you recognize your epoch?” or Suzanne Césaire’s use of surrealism as a tool to recover stolen power, “purified of colonial stupidities”? What is real freedom? What are its ways? How is the poetry that comes from it? Our class text will be an anthology and workbook, The Most Beautiful Sea: Poems & Pathways Toward Poems, including the work of Nas, Elizabeth Bishop, Refaat Alareer, Nâzım Hikmet, Marie Howe, Joshua Bennett, Lucille Clifton, Nipsey Hussle, Mahmoud Darwish, Dionne Brand, and the greatest of all poets: Anonymous. Students will be asked to complete in-class writing exercises, write letters with a partner, bring drafts to conference, and make a chapbook. In the words of Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet, we will look together for “the most beautiful sea” that “hasn’t been crossed yet," also known as, “the most beautiful words I wanted to tell you / I haven’t said yet.”

Faculty

• Suzanne Gardinier