Description
The Cairo Geniza is a cache of texts from an Egyptian synagogue including letters, lists and legal deeds from before 1500, when most Jews lived in the Islamic world. These are some of the best-documented people in pre-modern history and among the most mobile, crossing the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean to trade, study, apprentice and marry. Data science, neural network-based handwritten text recognition and other computational methods are now helping make sense of the texts on a large scale. Students will contribute to an evolving state of knowledge and gain an insider's view of what we can and can't know in premodern history.
Sample Reading List
- S. D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders
- Jessica Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean
- Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza
- Eve Krakowski, Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt
- Marina Rustow, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue
- Oded Zinger, Living with the Law
Reading/Writing Assignments
100 pages of reading per week. Weekly readings are a mix of primary sources and interpretive works of social history. Hands-on work includes collaborative research projects involving data curation and interpretation, as well as frequent short writing assignments.
Requirements/Grading
Term Assessments:
- Presentation or performance - 10%
- Papers/writing assignments - 40%
- Participation - 20%
Final Assessments:
- Final paper, problem set, or project - 30%
Other Requirements
Not Open to First Year Undergraduates.
Prerequisites and Restrictions
No source languages are required.
Other Information
A final digital humanities project will account for 30% of the grade.