Disasters in Middle Eastern History

(History 282J is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 382J is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) This course explores the history of disasters in the Middle East from the early modern period to the mid-20th-century. We will trace the evolving meanings of disasters and misfortunes by focusing on critical moments -- plagues, fires, earthquakes, wars -- to examine how people have responded to these events, labeled them, and devised strategies to live with or forget them. The course readings follow the evolution of policies and norms together with the articulation of new forms of knowledge and expertise in the wake of catastrophe. Additionally, particular attention will be paid to how modern conceptions of disaster relate to older understandings of apocalypse, as well as to various strands of "disaster reformism," when rethinking tragedy and time helped assert radical agendas for reforming political, economic, social, communal, racial, and gender relations while remodeling social science and intellectual life. The course focuses on various trajectories of disaster thinking in Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Armenian, and Hebrew.