Modern Middle East: Three Centuries of Syrian History

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course uses the vantage point of Syria to survey the history of the Middle East, from the eighteenth century to today. The course will take us from the province of Damascus in the Ottoman Empire to the millions of Syrians in the West in the twenty-first century to understand the changing nature of where Syria is and what being a Syrian meant throughout these three centuries. As this course will reveal, the interlocutors of this question included rioting craftsmen and Janissaries, a local US vice-consul in Damascus, the nomads of the Syrian desert, émigré Syrian critics of the Ottoman Empire, agronomists invested in national economy, men of business as well as those of religion, and an authoritarian regime and a people who rose against it. As we unravel the social, political, economic, and intellectual processes that shaped the Syrian identity, we will cover milestone events such as the infamous interconfessional massacres of 1860, the end of the Ottoman Empire, the Baathist coup of 1963, or the Syrian Revolution in the context of the Arab Spring of the early 2010s. The course material will include scholarly texts as well as excerpts from Syrian texts, novels, and films in translation.