This seminar focuses on Islamic thought and society during the 17th and the 18th centuries. Our key concerns are two: to understand what Islam, and Islamic thought, looked like in the late medieval and the early modern world; and to think about how we should try to approach the study of Islam in that world. A good deal of our focus is on South Asia, though we also read about other regions, including Iran and the Arab Middle East. The required readings are in English. For those interested, some weeks might have supplementary readings in Arabic as well.

This course engages certain major trends, debates, and questions that populate the field of Islamic Studies today, broadly defined. A central objective of this course is to think carefully about ways in which anthropological and other theoretical perspectives currently operative in the field might enrich more textually oriented approaches to the study of Islam, and vice versa. In addition, this course allows students to explore the question of how their particular research projects fit into and intervene in the broader landscape of Religious Studies and Islamic Studies.

This course engages certain major trends, debates, and questions that populate the field of Islamic Studies today, broadly defined. A central objective of this course is to think carefully about ways in which anthropological and other theoretical perspectives currently operative in the field might enrich more textually oriented approaches to the study of Islam, and vice versa. In addition, this course allows students to explore the question of how their particular research projects fit into and intervene in the broader landscape of Religious Studies and Islamic Studies.

This seminar surveys recent trends in historiography about medieval Jews and Judaism. We read and compare major works of scholarship written mainly during the last two decades that focus on medieval Jewish history in both Europe and the Middle East, from the 9th century to the 14th century. Special emphasis is placed on works of social and cultural history that illuminate Jewish communal life and religious identity in varying historical contexts. All required readings are in English, but supplementary readings are suggested for students with reading knowledge of Hebrew.

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This graduate course seeks to provide the participants with a broad introduction to major intellectual trends in the history of Islam in South Asia from the early nineteenth century to the present. We focus on the work of select individuals and discuss their writings in the context of their intellectual, social, cultural, and political milieu. Translations and exegeses of the Qur'an, Islamic law, politics, and social thought are among the themes on which we focus.

The impact of twentieth-century philosophical ideas on the academic study of religion: naturalism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, Nietzschean genealogy, and American pragmatism, among other philosophical movements.

The impact of twentieth-century philosophical ideas on the academic study of religion: naturalism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, Nietzschean genealogy, and American pragmatism, among other philosophical movements.

The impact of modern philosophical ideas on the academic study of religion: naturalism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, genealogy, ideology, social construction, and epistemic injustice, among other philosophical movements, as well as the complex interplay between constructions of religion, race, and gender.

The idea to be explored is that there are many distinctively human capacities that the ability to speak does not presuppose but that the practice of conversing does, mostly, catalyze. These capacities may include the capacity to make up our minds, to reason and follow rules, to make conscious perceptual judgments, to make mutual commitments, and to hold and be held responsible.

The idea is to look at some central capacities of the human mind beginning with judgement and reasoning, including reasoning from perception, then moving on to discuss the capacity to make value judgements, ascribe and assume responsibility, and achieve the status of a person.

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This course is a close reading of Spinoza's "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus." Topics discussed include the relation between philosophy and theology, the status of revelation and prophesy, Spinoza's account of miracles, the relation between religion and politics, and the freedom of religious practice and expression. We are especially interested in the relation of this text to others of Spinoza's writings, and to the writings of other figures, including Descartes, Hobbes, and Maimonides.

An introduction to medieval Near Eastern legal cultures that focuses on the intertwined development of Jewish and Islamic law from late antiquity until the twelfth century. We consider both legal writings such as codes and responsa and evidence for practices in state and communal courts. Geared both to students interested in legal history and to students interested in using legal texts and documents for general historical research.

Most varieties of late ancient Judaism disappeared after late antiquity, leaving rabbinic Judaism challenged only by Karaism (a medieval anti-rabbinic movement). This course examines this shift, focusing especially on the role played by the Babylonian Talmud's canonization and circulation throughout the Near East. Students will learn to work with the medieval Jewish scholastic genres that developed around and against the Talmud (rabbinic responsa, commentaries, and digests, as well as Karaite exegesis), consider material evidence for these texts' production and consumption, and survey their historical contexts and parallels.

Karaism was the only major alternative to rabbinic Judaism in the Middle Ages: an anti-rabbinic, scripturalist, scholarly, messianic, and proto-Zionist Jewish movement that developed in Iran and Iraq in the ninth century and that by the tenth century had spread across the Islamic Middle East. This course examines how and why Karaism emerged and flourished during this period and after, and what its history tells us about Judaism in the medieval Islamic Middle East more generally. Proficiency in either Hebrew or Arabic required.

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