American University in Cairo

This course introduces scholarship, debates, methods, and professional trends in the field of literary studies, considering questions of theory, application, interdisciplinary, and textuality. It trains students in the methods used to conduct literary research in their papers and theses, giving careful attention to library resources and academic style. Thie seminar explores questions of who Indigenous peoples are, what Indigeneity is, and where Indigenous nations exist. It addresses these questions by reading a wide range of theory in the field of Indigenous Studies from around the world and also taking a look at some creative work. The course develops a comprehensive understanding of colonization and decolonization and incorporates that understanding into individual areas of study. 

This course covers the history of Cairo with an emphasis on social, political, and economic developments in the twentieth century.

This course introduces urban studies in the Middle East, drawing on textual, visual, and collaborative resources to critically explore contemporary urban life in the region. It situates the region within broader discussions on the global “urban age,” an era where purportedly half of the world’s growing population lives and works in cities. The course explores the structural and everyday forces and actors—states, people, culture, nature, wars, and disasters—that shape and connect cities across the region. It draws on debates and methodologies in urban sociology, political economy, and anthropology. The course blends theory and practice through collaborative, experiential methods such as urban diary writing, visual ethnography, and field visits.

This course offers a study of selected topics in advanced Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. It introduces students to the spoken Arabic of Cairo and concentrates on enabling students to communicate effectively in daily life. It targets high-frequency vocabulary and social situations and emphasizes pronunciation.

The course explores various aspects of cinema in Egypt and the Arab World in order to understand its history and determine the themes, styles, and character of this cinema which has been historically among the most influential in national world cinemas. It covers selected films by a number of auteurs from Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine. Special attention is paid to form and style, as well as recurrent themes; for example, the civil war and Israeli invasions in the case of Lebanon, and the Israeli occupation in the case of Palestine. Additional topics include areas such as New Arab Cinemas, classical Egyptian cinema, the Arab film industry, and independent Arab cinema.

This intermediate Arabic course increases the command of grammatical and syntactical structure of modern standard Arabic through reading materials, and develops reading and writing skills and comprehension. It offers a critical examination of social and cultural dimensions of reading materials. This is the first course in a three-semester sequence of Intermediate Arabic. 

This course focuses on histories of Palestine, beginning in the seventh century and ending in the twenty-first. It is based on a comparative approach that engages with primary sources, secondary historical texts, literary narratives, material culture, and cinematic representations. The course provides the historical and theoretical tools to learn about and engage formations of nation and history in Palestine. Its main purpose is to center Palestinian voices and experiences, both before and after 1948. By recovering such narratives, the course contributes to countering the comprehensive erasure of Palestinian history.

This course covers the family as a social institution with emphasis on Middle Eastern characteristics. It also discusses selected aspects of marriage and family life and pays special attention to the social consequences of changing family styles.

This course offers an introduction into the field of comparative politics with specific focus on the government and ideologies, social stratification, and institutions in the Middle East. It also includes a study of the problems of modernization and political development. It studies the similarities and differences between political systems by examining in-depth themes of analysis in order to provide certain patterns and dynamics to create a comparative framework tool in order to better understand the nature and dynamics of governance in the region. Themes include: Arab nationalism, democratization, personal rule, military involvement in politics, the politics of violence, and why civil war emerges. Specific country case studies are used as a basis to provide an in depth framework of understanding and analyzing the Middle East. The course creates an overall framework for students to navigate understanding of the region and develop a better understanding not only of individual political systems, but also an overall knowledge within that realm.

This course explores the various techniques and concepts of ceramics, with an emphasis on basic skills and crafts of clay. The course includes introductory information and experiments in clay free-hand technique related to ceramics arts, starting from making building techniques, glazing techniques, and kiln firing operations. The course introduces ceramic art history and its long-term cultural traditions, as well as contemporary ceramics concepts and ceramics installation arts. It has a minimum of two filed trips to Fustat, an ancient ceramics area in old Cairo, to explore the historical and local craft of ceramic art and Egypt's social history in relation to the field.