A broad introduction to the history of Jewish civilization from its Biblical beginnings to the Middle Ages, with the main focus on the formative period of classical rabbinic Judaism and on the symbiotic relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

An independent study in Hebrew language for undergraduates

Directed research or candidacy exam and proposal preparation.

A course designed around the concentration and research topic of the PhD candidate to guide them through the submission of their dissertation proposal and prepare them for their Candidacy Examinations

This course will explore the origins, the history and, most importantly, the literary and cinematic art of the struggle that has endured for a century over the region that some call the Holy Land, some call Eretz Israel and others call Palestine. We will also consider religious motivations and interpretations that have inspired many involved in this conflict as well as the political consequences of world wars that contributed so greatly to the reconfiguration of the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and after the revelations of the Holocaust in Western Europe. While we will rely on a textbook for historical grounding. the most significant material we will use to learn this history will be films, novels, and short stories. Can the arts lead us to a different understanding of the lives lived through what seems like unending crisis?

This course introduces students to one specific Book of the Hebrew Bible. "The Bible in Translation" involves an in-depth reading of a biblical source against the background of contemporary scholarship. Depending on the book under discussion, this may also involve a contextual reading with other biblical books and the textual sources of the ancient Near East. Although no prerequisites are required, this class is a perfect follow-up course to "Intro to the Bible."

This course treats monotheism as a particular historical development of the texts in the Hebrew Bible (that is, the Jewish Tanakh/Christian Old Testament), and thus analyzes the idea of “one God only” as the product of a complex set of historical conditions. It will take extensive time to examine the early history of the Hebrew Bible’s familiar God, Yhwh, in inscriptional, biblical, and archaeological evidence, showing that he was once at home in the polytheistic environment of the ancient Near East (Southwest Asia). By embracing these longstanding entanglements, this course will explore the means by which Hebrew scribes came to define this deity not only as the most important god among many, but as the only all-powerful deity to exist in the entire cosmos. A variety of topics will be covered, addressing a number of questions raised by the evidence at hand: what is the evidence for Yhwh outside of the Bible? How do historians define his emergence in history? Did he really have a wife named Asherah? What did he look like and where did he live?
What circumstances caused Judean writers to consider him the only all-powerful deity the universe? And finally, how did the subsequent Jewish imagination re-inscribe the older polytheistic world in light of monotheizing changes? While knowledge of the Bible, its languages, and its history may seem like a desired feature for the prospective student, there are no prerequisites. This course will be able to introduce the material to those at a beginner’s level.

Thousands of years after the pyramids were built and the last hieroglyphs were written, ancient Egypt remains a source of mystery and intense interest. Why are we so fascinated with ancient Egypt, and what does that fascination reveal about us? This course explores the reception history of ancient Egypt: how people in various periods and areas of the world have thought about ancient Egypt, what it has meant to them, why they were interested in it, and how they brought the ancient Egyptian past into the present. We will focus not on ancient Egypt itself, but on the history of perceptions of, ideas about, and interactions with ancient Egyptian culture. Our investigation will include how Egyptians of later periods thought about their ancient past, as well as European and American representations (and appropriations) of ancient Egypt. A major focus of the course will be the impact of political and cultural relations between Egypt and the West on perceptions and uses of ancient Egyptian culture.
This interdisciplinary course will combine multiple areas of history—intellectual, cultural, and political—and multiple types of sources, including historical writing, literature, film, and opera. Beginning with ancient Greek and Roman visitors to Egypt, we will investigate changing modes of understanding, constructing, and representing ancient Egypt, from the medieval sultans of Egypt to Mozart to W. E. B. DuBois to protesters in Egypt’s 2011 revolution.
Over the course of the semester, we will explore questions such as:
- What does it mean to think of Egypt as African vs. Middle Eastern vs. Mediterranean? Is Egypt Western, Eastern, both, or neither?
- To whom does ancient Egyptian heritage belong? How do colonialism and conceptions of race and ethnicity factor into this question?
- How do the past and the present shape each other? What is the impact of modern politics and culture on perceptions of the past? What role does the past play in the formation of modern political, social, and cultural identities?
- How can we learn about modern problems and concerns from representations of the past?

This self-contained course sets the Sumerian language, writing system and use of writing in their social and historical context. The aim is to provide students of ancient history and culture from diverse disciplines with a good grounding in Sumerian culture, familiarity with the Sumerian language and cuneiform writing system and the requisite knowledge for critical assessment of published translations and of the secondary literature. The course is organized as two threads, culture on the one hand and language on the other. The two threads are united by taking examples in the language exercises, vocabulary assignments, etc., as far as possible from the domain of the week' cultural topics. The net effect is to examine the culture both through contemporary secondary literature and through direct contact with elementary primary texts of relevance to the various topics of discussion. The language component of the course will be carried out in a combination of transliteration and cuneiform, with an expectation that all students will gain familiarity with at least the core 80 syllabic signs, and about 100 additional logographic signs.

This course will deal with those texts of the Middle Kingdom that are written in the classical form of the language. It will include both monumental inscriptions, such as autobiographical stela inscriptions (P. Newberry, BENI HASSAN) and stelae (Seth, LESESTUCKE) as well as narratives in prose (DeBuck, READING BOOK). Religious texts (ibid. and COFFIN TEXTS) will also be studied and analyzed. Distinctions between the grammar of the literary and non-literary genres will be discussed.