Each of the following minicourses runs for four weeks. The class will meet once a week online for three hours. The courses are designed for a broad spectrum of learners including upper level undergraduate and graduate level students as well as independent scholars.
[Meeting dates and time for each course to be specified]
While Kurdish language courses in the United States are rare, courses devoted to Kurdish linguistics are even more so. This course examines the Kurdish language, its dialects according to their geographical distribution, and its genetic affiliation with other languages and presents core structural properties of Kurdish. In this class, students will gain familiarity with the typology and general linguistic properties of Kurmanji Kurdish along with Kurdish alphabet, writing system and sound system.
In recent decades postcolonial theory has launched a powerful critique of the humanities and social sciences. Postcolonial approaches, based on alternative epistemologies, question the modes of knowledge production and lingering effects of colonialism in the modern social sciences. This course applies to Kurdish studies the critique and objections raised by postcolonial theories. The course will examine the representation of Kurds in late Ottoman and Republican Turkish administrative documents, embassy reports, missionary accounts, travelogues, literary works, and scientific works to reveal their implicit biases.
Kurds today find themselves at the contested nexus of religion and various nationalisms, with Islam, a potential common ground, employed both for and against their interests. This minicourse aims to make sense of the experience of ‘Kurdish Islam’ and its entanglement with the modern Kurdish struggle. The course attempts to understand how Islam has been reinterpreted to accommodate Kurdish claims to national rights, chief among them the right to statehood. Together we will explore such concepts as sovereignty, secularism, nation, and nationalism in the context of contemporary Kurdish experience.
One of the most important religious and intellectual figures in modern Turkey is Said Nursi. His parochial appropriation by his followers and his prejudiced association with the Nurcu Movement in the eyes of the larger public have left hidden many aspects of this highly consequential Muslim scholar. His Kurdish identity, the intellectual and political dimensions of his early life are yet to be given relief from obscurity by new scholarship. In this course, Said Nursi' s Kurdish identity as it pertains to his biography and intellectual output will be explored. The reception of his work and the various forms of violences to which his legacy has been subjected after his death will be examined.
Written mostly in verse, Kurdish literature deserves greater scholarly attention, for it is through Kurdish literature that one can most clearly trace the intellectual and aesthetic development of Kurdish culture. This course will introduce Classical Kurdish literature and highlight some of its main themes. After a general survey of the period, we will engage in an interpretation of selections from Melayê Cizîrî’s Dîwan, one of the most important Kurdish literary works. Through a hermeneutical approach to Cizîrî’s poetry, we will understand his approach to such concepts as being, God, religion, gender and what it means to be human.
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