City and the Festival: Cult Practices and Architectural Production in the Ancient Near East: Course Requirements

Participation: Students are expected to do weekly readings regularly and comprehensively, and contribute to seminar discussions.

Small projects: In the first half of the semester there will be a series of small assignments on cities and the imagination of urban space (one involving a visualization of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, one on walking in Providence).

Creative site reports: Each student will also have a chance to present (in small groups depending on our class size) a creative archaeological site report of one of the ancient cities we will be exploring.
- Explore Michael Shanks's Stanford course getting some inspiration on reporting about an archaeological site.

Logbook: You will be asked to keep a logbook throughout the semester, as an intimate documentation of your ideas, thoughts, projects, visual imagery that this class had provoked in your mind. The logbook will be an accumulated product of the whole semester's work of note-taking, writing, sketching, drawing, cutting-pasting etc, using any kind of media. It will be your own design, your own work of art. The format is open. It could be a hardbound notebook which you can carry oround with you everywhere, or it could be a digital product, a blog, or a wiki.
- Reading: Te Heesen, A.; 2005. "Download
  ViewThe notebook: A paper technology" in Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy. B Latour and P Weibel (eds) The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 582-589.

Research project: In the second half of the semester, students will focus on a research project. Each will choose a research topic in collaboration with the instructor and turn it into a research paper. It is advisable that your project would develop from your city-presentation. In any case it should involve a theoretically informed discussion on Near Eastern cities and architectural space. The final product will involve a 3-4 page draft and an 8-10 page paper (for graduate students, 12-20 pages).

Grading will be based on class participation (25%), class presentations (10%), short assignments (30%), research project (35%).