The King Abdullah Foreign Scholarship Programs gives thousands of young Saudi Arabian women the opportunity to study abroad, learn English, and earn advanced degrees. How do students from this religiously conservative nation, studying at two Washington universities, construct ca…
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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 study focuses on the musical activities and views of Iranian immigrant artists who perform, teach, and support traditional Iranian music in Los Angeles and Southern California. This geographic area and its interconnected social networks, which I refer to as Irangeles, is pa…
This dissertation examines the emergence and development of traditions of family law among East Syrian and West Syrian Christians in Muslim-ruled Syria, Iraq, and Iran between the late eighth and early fourteenth centuries CE. With the general interest of integrating the history…
In the early third century BC, Ptolemaic Egypt had a reputation as a strong maritime power in the eastern Mediterranean. Ptolemy I Soter had not only gathered a strong fleet and loyal network of allies, but also compiled a surplus of resources that helped fuel the economy of the…
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 …
Nineteenth and twentieth century migratory networks had a formative, yet unrecognized, impact in the lead-up to the 1962 establishment of the Yemen Arab Republic. Migrants from Northern Yemen to Aden built discursive spaces for contesting economic and political oppression that s…
This work looks at the changing concepts of nationalism and sexuality in the 19th century Ottoman Empire and its effects on the performing arts.
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 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…
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…
This dissertation proposes a new understanding of the composition of the Pentateuchal Priestly source (P), arguing that it contains far more poetic text than previous studies have recognized. I identify the poetic material and differentiate it from prosaic texts by observing the…
Despite its accomplishment of establishing a state and a national homeland for the Jews, Zionism, the national movement of the Jewish people, remains a debated and contested ideology. It is within this debate that my dissertation is located. This study explores the evolution of …
The sociopolitical landscape of the Late Bronze Age Levant and the changes that occurred during the transition to the Iron I have long been topics of intense interest and debate, particularly because of the implications they hold for understanding the historical and biblical dat…
This dissertation examines how and why Saudis have documented their genealogies over the past three centuries. Despite the erosion of kinship ties resulting from three centuries of religious conditioning, and despite the unprecedented material transformation of Saudi society in …
In the figure of 'Abd Allah b. al-Mubarak (118/736-181/797), we find a paragon of the fields of h[dotbelow]adith, zuhd, and jihad, as attested to by the contents of the large number of references to him in the classical Islamic texts. His superior rank as a h[dotbelow]adith tran…
Anecdotes about poetry in classical Arabic works of history and literature provide a picture of the role that poetry played in this history and the degree of influence exercised by poetry in the formation of social and historical events. In this study, I aim to discover the crit…