Learning Outcomes:
At the end of the module, students should be able to:
- Understand the history of the idea of the 'Middle East'.
- Critique the way in which it is deployed to interpret life in the Arabophone, Turcophone and Persiophone lands south and east of the Mediterranean.
- Understand how ideas about ‘Middle Eastern’ societies shaped the institutions that were designed to govern them.
- Understand how activists and thinkers from the region engaged, critiqued and refuted such ideas as they attempted to emancipate themselves from colonial and postcolonial despots, imagining as they did alternative futures.