Travel and Exploration in the Global Middle Ages

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course explores travel and exploration in the medieval Middle East, presenting the region as a central crossroads of the Global Middle Ages. Through the accounts of pilgrims, merchants, diplomats, scholars, and adventurers, students will follow routes that connected the Islamic world with Africa, Asia, and Europe. Reading travel narratives, maps, and material evidence, the course asks how movement shaped knowledge, identity, power, and cultural exchange-questions that resonate in today's world of migration, globalization, and unequal mobility. By foregrounding the Middle East as a hub rather than a periphery, the course offers a historically grounded way to think about connection, difference, and belonging in a global age. This course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. This course participates in the Languages Across the Curriculum (LxC) program for Arabic. The course is conducted fully in English, and students with no prior knowledge of Arabic are very welcome. Students with some Arabic may choose, through the LAC program, to read short texts in Arabic.