Firstbridge courses are offered to degree seeking freshmen and registration is done via webform in pre-arrival checklist.
Professor(s)
Notes
Following the decline of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, five founding moments have marked the history of the Middle East.
The first is the one of European promises, betrayals and establishment of maps and borders (1915 - 1920).
The second moment is that of the creation of Israel in 1947, followed by the First Arab Israeli war (1948-49), and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
The third moment, 1973, is the one of the last Arab-Israeli war (in terms of State to state actor), the end of Nasserism, the oil boom and the rise of political Islam.
The fourth moment is that of the Iranian revolution in 1979 followed by the devastating Iraq-Iran war. It happened at the same moment when the Afghan jihad started against the Soviet army.
The fifth is the one that started in 2011, when revolutions against dictatorships erupted in many Arab countries. Conflicts, counter-revolutions and foreign military interventions followed and led to the series of crises that the Middle East (and the world) continue to witness today.
The course will explore these moments and will examine how the evolution of languages and dialects affected them culturally and politically.
Learning Outcomes
- Students will become familiar to the ME modern history and political evolution
- They will also learn how to connect events and conflicts to political and historical founding moments
- Local and Global Perspectives: Students will enhance their intercultural understanding of languages, cultures, and histories of local societies and the global issues to which these relate (CCI LO1)
- Exploring and Engaging Difference: Students will think critically about cultural and social difference; they will identify and understand power structures that determine hierarchies and inequalities that can relate to race, ethnicity, gender, nationhood, religion, or class (CCI LO3)
- Information Literacy: Students will comprehend how information is produced and valued in order to discover, evaluate, use, and create information and knowledge effectively and ethically. In FirstBridge, students will demonstrate the conversational nature of scholarship, and recognize their potential role and responsibilities as contributors to that conversation. For each discipline taught in FirstBridge, students will identify reference works, journals, databases and/or major works in history, in order to start effective research in the field.
- Life at University: Students will acquire the study skills, time management, and interpersonal skills needed to meet the demands of university-level academic work at a Liberal Arts College individually or as a team. Students will value the multiple meanings of place through experiential learning at AUP and beyond in the Parisian or global context.
Syllabus
Schedule
| Day | Start Time | End Time | Room |
|---|---|---|---|
Monday | 13:45 | 15:05 | PL-3 |
Thursday | 13:45 | 15:05 | PL-3 |