This dissertation is about men's guestrooms (sing. diwaniyya ; pl. diwaniyyat or dawawin ) in Kuwait and their place in the nation's unique welfare compact with its citizens. The central question guiding this research is unambiguous: Why do Kuwaiti men visit the dawawin ? The an…
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While the notion that civil society organizations can democratize authoritarian regimes from below has become an article of faith among many policy makers and democracy promoters, some area experts warn that practitioners and advocates should not overestimate civil society's dem…
This study employs a new methodological approach in examining Egyptian and Egyptianized material in the Levant, which entails a thorough analysis of a range of broad and narrow Late Bronze Age and early Iron Age contexts at three sites in the Levant, entirely from an Egyptian pe…
This dissertation presents a synthesis of settlement patterns in the central coastal plain of modern Israel from the onset of the Middle Bronze Age to the end of the Iron Age (ca. 2000-539 B.C.E.). The ancient mound of Jaffa, situated on the southern Levantine coast south of the…
The Nabataeans, best known today for the spectacular remains of their capital at Petra in southern Jordan, continue to defy easy characterization. Since they lack a surviving narrative history of their own, in approaching the Nabataeans one necessarily relies heavily upon the co…
Since the toppling of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, a one-dimensional narrative of the Arab Uprisings has become axiomatic in both foreign and Arab spheres. The mainstream narrative paints the movement as one for Western-style democracy and discursively associated …
This dissertation argues that the nature, scope, and larger implications of the interregional interaction between Kermans and Egypt during the Classic Kerma / Second Intermediate Periods can be reconstructed by analyzing the use of Egyptian and Egyptianizing material culture con…
Over the last 9 years, the United States Government spent approximately 300 billion on the war in Afghanistan. Despite the employment of these resources, the goal of creating stability in the country has not been achieved. This is especially the case at the village, town, and di…
This thesis interrogates the hotly contested issue of Armenian genocide recognition and its ramifications on Istanbul Armenian immigrants residing in the greater Los Angeles area. Previous Armenian genocide scholarship has examined the events leading to the 1915 genocide and the…
The Dhamar Plain is a region in the central highlands of Yemen where a disunited tribal population continually contended with a succession of invading states for its control over the course of the Islamic period. In order to better understand these processes of contentious subju…
The Medjay were an elusive people whom Ancient Egyptian texts seem to refer to as either an ethnic or an occupational group. In the early part of their history, they appear to have been a subgroup of Nubians associated with a land called Medja. In the later part, the word Medjay…
As the primary stratum of the rabbinic corpus, the Mishna establishes a dynamic between rabbinic authority and olam haba that sets the course for all subsequent rabbinic discussions of the idea. The Mishna Sanhedrin presents the rabbis as arbiters of the afterlife, who regulate …
This dissertation examines a brief stage in the early female life course among the lower to upper middle urban Jewish classes of the Fatimid and Ayyubid empires. Using evidence drawn from a broad range of primary texts (primarily published and unpublished documents preserved in …
This work looks at the changing concepts of nationalism and sexuality in the 19th century Ottoman Empire and its effects on the performing arts.
In 1846, the British polymath Austen Henry Layard began archaeological excavations in the mounds of ancient Assyria, approximately twenty miles south of the modern day city of Mosul, Iraq. Uncovering artifacts almost immediately, Layard's discoveries were sent to the British Mus…
The research starts by explaining the theoretical basis for the impact of post-traumatic stress on the poetry of Amir Gilboa, as well as on individual who have been traumatized by extreme events. The first chapter focuses on Gilboa's reconstruction of Holocaust testimonials as e…
The purpose of this dissertation is to identify the semantics of honor and shame in the Hebrew Bible and to demonstrate how these social values intersect with Israel's fundamental social organizing principle, covenant. Though many scholars have claimed that honor and shame are p…
This dissertation offers a new understanding of Khirbet al-Mafjar, an early Islamic palace complex just north of the city of Jericho, by using a GIS-supported analysis of the physical and sociocultural landscape of the Jericho plain. The methods used in this dissertation grew ou…
New Kingdom pharaohs were quick to display their dominance over foreign captives in a variety of contexts—reliefs on temple walls, statuary, various artifacts, texts, etc.—using brutal and degrading imagery. Indeed, depictions of foreign captives in humiliating or torturous pose…