Teaching

In five semesters of teaching, I designed courses for undergraduate and graduate students. Course descriptions and syllabi are available below.  In the Fall 2009, I will be teaching “Politics of Social Movements” and a redesigned undergraduate course on contemporary Middle East politics.

Comparative Politics (Pols 10004)

Comparative Politics examines the domestic politics of countries and people. The course is designed around multiple theoretical tools to aid students analyze country cases for comparative insights. Students encounter theories of state formation, political economy, collective identity, culture, institutional structures, and regime type. The course includes examinations of the character of colonialism and imperialism as well as globalization. This enables students to comparatively think about different countries as well as investigate important questions long considered by social scientists. This is a foundation course for undergraduates studying politics.

Politics of Social Movements (POLS 40920)

When state institutions or social norms are unresponsive to the demands of discontented segments of society, movements develop to resist the prevailing order. The movements’ aims are always the same: to change the status quo. This course focuses on four case areas to examine such social moments. The areas include: The Civil Rights movement, labor movement, lesbian & gay activism, and Islamist movements. We consider important themes such as shifts in social and historical structures, cultural framing, and the struggle to win civil and political rights. The goal will be to extract theories of social movements from the cases. We will particularly focus our attention on the process of “being included” as well as consider which groups remain excluded and why. To achieve our aims, this course considers three American and one Middle Eastern example. This encourages explicit cross-regional and comparative thinking about the politics of social movements.      

Oil, Suicide Bombers, & The Veil: Demystifying The Politics of the Middle East (POLS 40591)

The politics of the Middle East is frequently misrepresented. Theories of oil’s “peculiar” properties, the fear of terrorism, and sympathy for oppressed women drown Western media coverage. This course engages these distorted constructions and places them within larger structural and historical perspectives. This reading, writing, and thought intensive seminar introduces students to theory and context that encourage a more nuanced appreciation of the Middle East. Theories that will be considered include modernization, dependency, structuralism, and constructivism. Specific themes include: The emergence of the Middle East state system, identity politics, authoritarian persistence & blocked democratization, electoral politics, political violence, women, Islamist movements, the Iranian revolution, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.  

International Relations of the Middle East (Pols 300)

This course introduces central issues and themes useful in understanding contemporary Middle East politics within the larger framework of international relations theory. Issues explored include state formation, the absence of democracy, Middle East ‘exceptionalism’, political Islamism, the political economy of oil, and the Israeli-Arab conflict. This course emphasizes the historical and contemporary interactions between the Middle East and the United States. 

 

Political & Economic History of 20th Century Egypt (Hist 412)

This course examines important themes that shaped modern Egypt's political, social, and economic development. Specific topics to be explored include the emergence of Egypt’s state system, colonialism and imperialism, Egyptian and Pan-Arab nationalism and identities, gender, state institutions, authoritarianism, political Islamism, and socio-economic development. This course is intended to familiarize students with different analytical approaches and major issues of state formation in Egypt.

 

Politics of the Arab World (Pols 6/70591)

This graduate seminar considers competing ideas about the region identified as the Arab world. This includes key theories such as Orientalism, dependency theory (core-periphery relations), structuralism, constructivism, and modernization. Particular attention is paid to ideas of hegemony, populist and post-populist authoritarianism, civil society, Islamism, rentierism, and authoritarian persistence. These topics cast a wide net around the leading approaches to the study of the Arab world. This seminar is also methodologically driven and focuses on deeply contemplating the practice of solid, multi-disciplinary social science. In the process, the students develop an appreciation of the endogenous and exogenous factors that contributed to the emergence of the Arab state system and that continue to influence its politics.