Graduate Courses

Spring 2024

ART HIS 220B – Advanced Studies in Islamic Art
Seminar: Sem 1
Units: 4
Instructor(s): Balafrej, L.
Course Description: The seminar explores the historical role—and historiographical obfuscation—of minorities and minority-formation in Islamic art history, a subfield that continues to foreground Muslim religious identity and Arab ethnicity, in ways that have obscured the participation of other groups and forms of identity in the SWANA. A major aim is to consider the role of visual, spatial, and material cultures in mediating minor cultural formations—how objects, spaces, and images have served to express minority cultures and how they have produced or resisted, the processes by which communities become minorities, within and against the majority cultures of the SWANA. The seminar will discuss such themes as the use of “minority” as a rubric of analysis and a theoretical lens; the importance of minorities to production and patronage; minor figures and the politics of representation; visual and material histories of race, gender, and slavery; material phenomena of conversion, transfer, and appropriation.

ART HIS C248B – Art and Material Culture of Early Imperial China, 210 BC to AD 906
Lecture: Lec 1
Units: 4
Instructor(s): Falkenhausen, V.
Course Description: Lecture, three hours. Palaces and tombs of early imperial dynasties, impact of Buddhist art (cave temples), rise of new media and technologies. Concurrently scheduled with course C148B. P/NP or letter grading.

AN N EA M208 – Topics in Ancient Iranian History
Seminar: Sem 1
Units: 4
Instructor(s): Shayegan, M.R.
Course Description: (Same as History M210 and Iranian M210.) Seminar, three hours. Varying topics on Elamite, Achaemenid, Arsacid, and Sasanian history. May be repeated for credit. S/U or letter grading.

CMRS-CEGS Spring Research Seminar
ARABIC 275 – Encountering Arabic Manuscripts: Introduction to Arabic Paleography and Critical Edition of Manuscripts
Lecture: Lec 1
Units: 4
Instructor(s): Yarbrough, L.B.
Course Description: Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Requisite: course 103C. Introduction to Arabic paleography and how to prepare editions of medieval manuscripts with critical apparatus and stemma. During past decades enormous number of previously unknown Arabic manuscripts have been discovered. While vast range of medieval texts have been published in editions of varying quality, equally large number of manuscripts remain unpublished. UCLA has outstanding collections of Near Eastern manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish, primarily in fields of medicine, literature, philology, theology, law, and history. It is rich in works related to studies of theologians and scholars at different centers of learning in Iran during Safavid period noted for works of Shiite theology, Islamic sciences, and philosophy. Course opens this treasure to graduate students interested in editing and/or translating manuscripts. S/U or letter grading.
Class Description: Encountering Arabic Manuscripts serves as an introduction to the academic study of manuscripts in Arabic script. The emphasis of the course is on manuscripts written in the Arabic language, but it includes aspects of codicology and paleography that are pertinent to manuscript codices bearing texts written in Persian, Turkish, Urdu, and Pashto—all of which UCLA Special Collections holds—as well as other languages, such as Indonesian. Topics covered include the production and anatomy of medieval Islamic codices; the social and cultural history of reading and transmission; the production of modern critical editions; and debates around modern collecting practices.

Armenian 231A –  Intermediate Classical Armenian
Lecture: Lec 1
Units: 4
Instructor(s): Cowe, P.S.
Course Description: Lecture, three hours. Requisite: course 230C. Intensive review of grammar and reading of select prose and poetic texts. May be taken independently for credit. Letter grading.

COM LIT 250B – Ternary Positionality: Relationality, Decoloniality, and Interpretation
Seminar: Sem 1
Units: 4
Instructor(s): Stahuljak, Z.
Course Description:  This seminar attempts to undo binary thinking through ternary positionality. Instead of disrupting or subverting the binary with a new oppositional pair and thus recreating the dialectical gesture, instead of proposing the hybrid or the creole, we will attempt to think from an autonomous and relational third space. The intermediary is an example of ternary relationality: not an in-between or a go-between, a broker or a translator, and not a grey area, a middle ground, or a transitional space, but an agent in its/their own right. Specifically, the seminar will focus on: the hard binary opposition between Western epistemology and decolonial epistemic disobedience through the politics of refusal; relationality as a ternary structure; intersectionality as a ternary positionality; translation as a ternary process. To wit: how does interpreting from the ternary positionality change the stock image of the oppositional and/or ungendered historical figure of the marginalized (“the slave,” “the Indian,” and others); how does it intervene in the debates of resistance vs. refusal, or liberty vs. freedom; how does it interrogate notions of historiography of early colonial encounters (in Africa and in the Americas), or theories of world literature? To the degree that the politics of refusal seeks to disentangle from the settler-colonial policies of imperial and neoliberal nation-states, and that it does not find help in postcolonial experience and literature, the precolonial and its historically instantiated life forms and life worlds can provide comparative examples of imagining what is possible beyond the limits imposed by the neoliberal nation-state. The different historical iterations of the ternary will help us think through the most pressing issues of today and tomorrow, alongside visiting scholars working on historical and contemporary topics in philosophy, anthropology, gender, race, ethnicity, sovereignty.

INF STD 289 – Seminar: Special Issues in Information Studies: Global History of Libraries: Colonial Pasts, Decolonial Futures
Seminar: Sem 1
Units: 4
Instructor(s): Nguyen, C.A.
Course Description: Seminar, three and one half hours. Identification, analysis, and discussion of critical intellectual, social, and technological issues facing the profession. Topics may include (but not limited to) expert systems, literacy, electronic networks, youth at risk, information literacy, historical bibliography, preservation of electronic media, etc. May be repeated with topic change. Letter grading.
Class Description: Study traces global history of libraries as social space of reading and technology of information organization. Study challenges discourses of libraries as public good and neutral storehouse of knowledge; and instead examines contradictory politics of libraries, and ways in which they have been reimagined through social practice and political movements. Study undertakes global approach to understanding libraries around world, with attention to role of colonialism and capitalism within development of libraries, from 15th century to present. Study covers preservation and power; collection regimes; state institutions; private libraries; memory and history; print culture and print capitalism; and debates on gender, class, and race in history of library. Study draws from intersections of history of book, information, libraries, and postcolonial and decolonial studies.

HIST M248 – Anthropology and History of Mediterranean
Seminar: Sem 1
Units: 4
Instructor(s): Slyomovics, S.
Course Description: (Same as Anthropology M248 and Near Eastern Languages M248.) Seminar, three hours. Introduction to historical and anthropological writings about Mediterranean. Draws on variety of classic and contemporary theories, histories, and ethnographies about Mediterranean Sea. Topics include geographical and imaginary boundaries, Mediterranean honor/shame concepts, colonial and post-colonial Mediterranean, Levantinism, thalassology, Mediterraneanism, French Mediterraneans, Jewish Mediterranean, colonial and post-colonial sea and migrants and mobilities. Focus on critical history of anthropological study of Mediterranean and scholarly literature that emphasizes southern shores of Mediterranean. Letter grading.

Italian 214C – Studies in Medieval Literature: Petrarca’s Canzoniere
Lecture: Lec 1
Units: 4
Instructor(s): Gragnolati, M.
Course Description: Lecture, three hours. S/U or letter grading.

Musicology 255 – Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Early Music
Seminar: Sem 1
Units: 4
Instructor(s): Favila, C.
Course Description: This seminar considers the intersection of gender, sexuality, and music from the Middle Ages through early modernity, revisiting some twenty-two years after its 2002 publication the concepts and methodologies explored in an edited collection by Todd M. Borgerding, Gender, Sexuality, and Early Music. In addition to exploring what the last twenty years have offered in music studies, we will engage with recent scholarship emerging in voice, sound, medieval, and early modern studies on gender and sexuality, as well as with contemporary theoretical frameworks within the broader humanities and social sciences. Participants will work on a research project throughout the quarter that expands and the historiography of early music and sound in relation to women and gender. The project should result in a written essay (ca. 6,000–10,000 words) on any topic of choice but aiming towards a critique of Western European patriarchy and towards probing how the fields of music studies, and especially early music, represent women, people of color, and the LGBTQIA+ community historically and in the present. Drafts of projects will be presented in week 11 in the form of a 15 min. conference presentation, and the final written essays, incorporating feedback from the presentation question and answer session, will be due shortly after. No prior experience in reading Western music notation is required.

PHILOS 207 – Knowledge, Belief, and the Canon in Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy
Seminar: Sem 1
Units: 4
Instructor(s): Robiglio, A
Course Description: Philosophy, since its appearance in the Greek World, has expressed the ambition to constitute a well-founded, rational and universal knowledge, valid for all times and places. Paradoxically, however, such claim has always been formulated from a concrete historical situation, by individuals who lived in a specific geographical area, expressed themselves in a given language, and dealt with particular problems relevant in determined places and times.
The seminar addresses the tension between particular vs universal, regional vs. global in the History of Philosophy. How does one define an intellectual tradition within a global context? The broad question shall be addressed via two specific problems: What is the relation between language and thought? How do belief and knowledge relate each to the other? The testing grounds of the theme we intend to explore are the writings of thinkers born/ risen/ based in Flanders: from Henry of Ghent (c. 1217-1293) and Siger of Courtrai (c. 1283-1341) to Martin Del Rio (1551-1608), and Robert Bellarmin (1542-1621). They are considered as the leading representatives of the “Flemish Canon”. Having belonged to an indefinable regional cultural sphere, do they manifest any common philosophical trait?

SEMITIC 210 – Ancient Aramaic Dialects
Lecture: Lec 1
Units: 4
Instructor(s): Bonesho, C.E.
This seminar investigates the use of Aramaic and its dialects from the Iron Age to the Sasanian period with the goal of locating Aramaic in its various imperial contexts. Aramaic has been a language and script used both by conquerors and those conquered for over a thousand years, including the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Greek and Roman Empires. In this course, students will read Aramaic texts in their original language with an emphasis on if and how Aramaic is used either by Empire or by others as a response to Empire. This study requires placing Aramaic texts in their socio-historical contexts, a close reading of morphemes and content, as well as an analysis of a text’s materiality and presentation. In doing so, students will gain further knowledge on the diversity and the development of Aramaic and its placement in the branch of Northwest Semitics with the overall purpose of providing students an opportunity to work on their own individual research relating to Aramaic and Empire.