This dissertation demonstrates that the presence of Latin basilissai, Catholic wives of the Byzantine despots of Morea, in Mystras between 1349, when the city became the seat of the Despotate, and 1460, when it was surrendered to the Turks, had an impact on the artistic and cultural production at court. These foreign women were agents of the ruling political and economic elites of Italian and Frankish courts, and expressed their agency by mediating their specific cultural and artistic traditions into the production of their adopted city. Art and cultural historical approaches, in which attention is focused on painted and sculpted details, inscriptions, archaeological remains, architectural design, and urban planning, are used to show that the Latin women were historical agents, whose presence can be detected in Mystras. A multidisciplinary analysis of case studies reveals cross-cultural motifs in the artistic production, demonstrating the relationship between pieces of evidence. The production of the workshops of Mystras expressed features that were, in some cases, responses to Constantinopolitan and Byzantine models, while, in others, autonomous and innovative, revealing complex cross-cultural references. Ultimately, this study shows that the particular cultural and artistic landscape of Mystras is indebted to exogenous cultures linked to these women.

This dissertation is based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with seminarian women in Iran in the summer of 2008, and from 2010 to 2011. I ask, after having unprecedented access to the howzeh elmiyeh (seminaries) after the revolution, what have been some of the consequences for the howzevi? And, how do women in the howzeh elmiyeh see themselves? Through grounded method of analysis, I have found that in their pursuit of what constitutes `a good life', the howzevi of this study were actively attempting to transform themselves and the howzeh setting, their social relationships, and the greater Iranian society at large by exploring resources available to them within a set of constraints. These limitations were often not only self-imposed but also intensified with increased access to particular networks. In the following chapters I argue for an alternative way of looking at, and talking about, the howzevi who are now positioned in institutions that have emerged at the core of the ongoing struggles to shape a particular Iran. The term howzeh elmiyeh (seminaries) may be defined as Islamic theological institutions of higher religious learning where a personal teacher-student transmission of knowledge, oral and written, of Islamic Jurisprudence and other ancilliary Islamic sciences would take place. As you may know, in Muslim populated countries like Pakistan, the howzeh is also known as a madrasa. Unlike devotees of Catholic seminaries, however, students of the howzeh elmiyeh neither observe celibacy nor are physically secluded from the rest of society. Rather, they are, and have been, an integral part of the urban landscape in Syria, Egypt, Iran and Iraq from the ninth century A.D. (Berkey 2003; Bulliet 1972; Chamberlain 1994). The howzevi of this study were between the ages of eighteen to sixty years-old, and were at different stages of their education. Some were unmarried and in the early stages of their education. Some were married with children and completing doctoral research, while others were simultaneously teaching seminary classes, working on women's Islamic rights, and partaking in the Dars- e Kharij class (the highest level in the seminary) with Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, the Supreme Leader. Belonging to the ultra- religious conservative population in Iran, their history of mobility was limited inside the home before the 1979 revolution. Absent in the anthropological literature of women in the Middle East and women in contemporary Islamic higher education, the institutionalization of the howzeh elmiyeh (seminaries) for women in Iran was a project that had been in the works before the revolution. Its formalization emerged publicly only in 1984 through the combined efforts of groups of revolutionary Islamist women in petitioning Ayatollah Khomeini for the establishment of Jami'at Al-Zahra in Qom. By Islamicizing public space, the revolution also enabled these women to move into the public sphere. Since then, the howzeh elmiyeh for women has been an ongoing statewide project through the active participation of women who credit the 1979 revolution for widespread access to this form of education. This opening amounts to a yearly average of 65,000 women attend the women's howzeh all over Iran, excluding graduates since about 1984. Annually, the howzeh elmiyeh turns away ten percent of applicants (Sakurai 2011) because the infrastructure cannot yet accomodate the demand for women's enrollment. This support for the howzevi remains unparalleled throughout the history of Shi'i Islamic scholarship in the Shi'i Islamic world. After the 1979 revolution, the access which the women of the intellectual clerical elite had to Islamic education for women was extended to "all women"; all women, who, at least, were willing to observe the social constraints of the howzevi lifestyle, regardless of the socioeconomic group they belonged to, and/or the fact that they did not come from an intellectual Shi'i scholarly family. This served a purpose, however. The revolutionary state appropriated the concept of the howzeh elmiyeh for women (Adelkhah 2000) in order to produce a specific type of revolutionary woman. Notwithstanding, as the revolutionary state created a new public space for Islam (Adelkhah 2000), it also provided new leadership opportunities for women (Afary 2009; Najmabadi 2008; Sedghi 2007). Women students were able to embark on a fully-funded path towards potentially becoming, among other Islamic scholarly aspirations, a mujtahideh, a woman who may derive religious rulings for herself, a process called ijtihad, and who are also able to engage in discussions about Islamic laws and its applicability in Iranian society. This research is in conversation with how women in the Middle East are neither passive nor homogenous (Abu-Lughod 1993; Holmes-Eber 2003; Mahmood 2005; Osanloo 2009; Torab 2007), as well as within the discourse on society and the women's movement in Iran (Adelkhah 2000; Afary 2009; Afshar 1998; Bahramitash 2008; Kamalkhani 1998; Kian-Thiébaut 2002; Kunkler & Fazaeli 2012; Mahdavi 2007; Mir- Hosseini 1999; Moghissi 1994; Najmabadi 2008; Osanloo 2009; Paidar 1995; Poya 1999; Sakurai 2011, 2012; Sedghi 2007; Torab 2007; Varzi 2006).

Islam and Competing Nationalisms: The Kurds and the Turks in the late Ottoman Era is a work, which traces how religion was intimately intertwined with nationalism during the crucial period of the late nineteenth century in the Modern Middle East. In this approach, I call into question the extent to which the principle of secularism and ethnicity serve as the only foundations of the modern nation state. Within the context of the late Ottoman Empire, my research foregrounds the differences between interpretations of Islam at the center and the myriad understandings of Islam adopted by those on the margins. I demonstrate how diverse Muslim communities (Arabs, Kurds and Turks) have linked their interpretations of 'authentic' religion to claims of 'ethnic superiority' during the process of nation building. I contend that this tension between the normative State interpretation of Islam and alternative visions was critical in shaping modern nationalism in the Middle East. This is significant for establishing how nationalism can in turn affect the range of religious interpretations. My work thus provides a new historically grounded theoretical foundation for recent debates on nationalism that have emerged in recent decades. My dissertation is based on a close examination of British archival records, Ottoman state records, Ottoman journals and other primary sources in Arabic, Kurdish (both Kurmanci and Sorani dialects), Persian and modern Turkish -- most of which I obtained during my yearlong field research as a Fulbright scholar.

Founded by the Fatimids in 970 A.D., al-Azhar has been described variously as "the great mosque of Islam," "the brilliant one," "a great seat of learning...whose light was dimmed." Yet despite its assumed centrality, the illustrious mosque-seminary has elicited little critical study. The existing historiography largely relies on colonial-nationalist teleologies that are grounded in a strong centrifugal essentialism: positioning Cairo (and al-Azhar) at a center, around which faithfully revolve concentric peripheries. Setting its focus on the eighteenth century and beyond, this dissertation investigates the discursive postulates that organize the writing of the history of al-Azhar. Through textual explorations that pivot in space and time, it elucidates shifts in the entanglement of disciplines of knowledge with those of the self at a particular historical juncture and location. It thus locates al-Azhar in the modern order of knowledge, even as it imagines another intellectual universe bound by ideas, texts and authors who lived before and outside Europe: one which articulated itself in conceptual, epistemic, moral, social, cultural and institutional ways, modernity as such cannot not capture.

This dissertation presents, for the first time, a freestanding account of notions of time and temporality as seen in the visual arts of the late Archaic and Classical Greece and contextualizes it within the larger cultural history of time. There is a growing consensus among scholars regarding a societal shift in fifth-century Greek attitudes towards time, from the authority of the past to the uncertainties and the immediacy of the present. This dissertation explores such changing notions of time in the visual tradition in four different ways: firstly through the personification of the key notion of kairos, which embodies on many levels the manifestation of this new temporality; secondly by investigating the emergent interest of the "historical present" in the artistic subject matter of the so-called Historienbilder; thirdly through a detailed investigation of new pictorial strategies in Greek vase painting that carry specific temporal attributes, by focusing on the motifs of jumping, lifting and dropping; and lastly, by dissecting the anatomy of the popular motif of "erotic pursuits" in vase painting, which embodies the sensory nature of this new temporality that hinges upon the notion of suspense and delay. These investigations employ a new phenomenological framework that centers on the "embodied viewer", connecting the temporality as understood by the viewer with that which is portrayed in the object, bringing together the visible temporality in art and the experienced temporality of the society, which the viewer inhabits. This framework is first sketched out by offering a phenomenological reading of a full 3-D digital reconstruction of the Lysippan Kairos. Such changes in the notion of time in the visual arts, seen as early as the late sixth century BCE and fully manifest in the Classical period, is also put into relief by a brief examination of analogous literary techniques, with a focus on the case of Aeschylus.

Between 1880 and 1930, European and American modernists connected to the theater became fascinated with the subject of the baroque. Among the first, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that the baroque style recurs throughout western history, tending in every artistic medium toward the theatricality of strong emotions and exciting gestures. His writings reflect a larger trend during this period, imagining the baroque as a spectral presence of sorts, a force both haunted by theater and haunting western history repeatedly. “Traditions of the Baroque” takes up these various hauntings, pursuing two simultaneous claims. It argues that the memory of the baroque stages of seventeenth-century Europe helped produce new forms of theater, space, and experience around the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, it also argues that modern theater has played a key role in the baroque’s development into a modern philosophical concept, both for the analysis of art, and for a self-reflexive inquiry into the nature of philosophical discourse itself. These two reciprocal developments amount to a “modernist baroque” paradigm in theory and theater alike: a pattern of having to look back to the past in order to pursue the new. Tracing this pattern, “Traditions of the Baroque” focuses on avant-gardists whose thought and writing takes place between theory and performance: philosophical theater-makers and theatrical philosophers from Nietzsche and Stéphane Mallarmé to Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein. Moving between the page and the stage, it tracks citations of seventeenth-century theater through modernist aesthetic theory across an array of otherwise disparate materials: Nietzsche’s writings on Wagnerian opera; Mallarmé’s hermetic and unstageable theatricals; Benjamin’s analyses of Expressionism and Epic Theater; and Stein’s saintly miracle plays. At each step, it uncovers a notion of historical unfolding based not on narrative progress, but on the citability and iterability of the past, making clear that the idea of the baroque spurred modernist thinkers to reimagine both western history and modernity altogether. Far from perpetuating age-old anti-theatrical prejudices based in transcendental metaphysics, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Benjamin, and Stein all adopt baroque forms of theatricality precisely to subvert the ideological regimes of the past. The baroque becomes, for these authors, a means to disrupt norms of representation across a wide array of registers: aesthetic, economic, sexual, historiographic, and metaphysical. These modernists take up the baroque vision of the world as a grand theater organized around a divine center, and radically transform it to suit a modern awareness of performance’s pervasiveness in everyday life. Their modernist baroque functions not as an official style of hegemonic power— such as the absolutist state or counterreformation church—but as a deconstructive force, one that extends the baroque’s afterlife into the contemporary theater and theory of our present time.

In late medieval Europe, suspicions arose that minority groups wished to destroy the Christian majority by poisoning water sources. These suspicions caused the persecution of different minorities by rulers, nobles and officials in various parts of the continent during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The best-known case of this kind of persecution was attacks perpetrated against Jewish communities in the German Empire between 1348 and 1350. At this time, the Black Death devastated the continent, and Jews were accused of intentionally spreading the disease by poisoning wells. A series of terrifying massacres ensued, destroying many of the major Jewish communities in Europe. This was not, however, the only case in which such charges led to persecution. In 1321, lepers in south-western France were accused of attempting to spread their particular illness by poisoning water sources. These accusations evolved to include the idea that the plot was initiated by Muslim rulers and aided by the Jews of France. As a consequence, both Jews and lepers suffered violent fates, from expulsion or isolation to execution by fire. Similar, albeit less widespread, cases can be traced up until the fifteenth century. Often Jews were the victims, but lepers, Muslims, paupers, mendicants and foreigners also fell victim to persecution justified by allegations of well poisoning. This dissertation presents a thorough analysis of the subject of well-poisoning accusations and describes why and how they were adopted in the late Middle Ages. The study describes the origins of this phenomenon, how it spread through medieval Europe and its eventual decline. It asserts that in order to explain this process, one must first understand the factors within medieval society, culture and politics that made the idea of a well-poisoning threat convincing. It shows that these accusations were created to justify and drive the persecution and marginalization of minorities. At the same time, it claims that well-poisoning accusations could not have caused such major political and social shifts unless contemporaries genuinely believed the charges were plausible, convincing and threatening.

This dissertation argues that Seneca’s philosophical program and literary artistry are jointly coordinated to address and redress the pervasive experience of subverted expectations, i.e. the experience of paradoxicality, attributed to the unwise by Seneca’s Stoic philosophy. With a focus on Seneca’s Epistulae Morales, I suggest that Seneca’s oft-noted paradoxical style reveals and is meant to reflect our fundamentally inconsistent (and thus dissatisfying) experience engendered, in his view, by the incoherency of our worldviews. While, as Seneca explores, our minds’ operations hide this distressing contradiction from our attention, Seneca’s subtle but steady exposure of it and its source attempts to work against this self-deception. The intended result for the reader is the recognition of their own role in their dissatisfaction and the resulting commitment to its remedy through philosophical training.

This dissertation analyzes the interplay between imperial messaging or self-representation and legal activity in the Roman Empire under the Severan dynasty. I discuss the unusual historical circumstances of Septimius Severus’ rise to power and the legitimacy crises faced by him and his successors, as well as those same emperors’ control of an increasingly complex legal bureaucracy and legislative apparatus. I describe how each of the four Severan rulers—Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Elagabalus, and Severus Alexander—employed different approaches to imperial legislation and adjudication in accordance with their idiosyncratic self-presentation and messaging styles, as well as how other actors within Roman legal culture responded to Severan political dynamics in their own work. In particular, this dissertation is concerned with a particularly—and increasingly—urgent problem in Roman elite political culture; the tension between theories of imperial power that centered upon rulers’ charismatic gifts or personal fitness to rule, and a more institutional, bureaucratized vision that placed the emperor at the center of broader networks of administrative control. While these two ideas of the Principate had always coexisted, the Severan period posed new challenges as innovations in imperial succession (such as more open military selection of emperors) called earlier legitimation strategies into question. I posit that Roman law, with its stated tendency towards regularized, impersonal processes, was a language in which the Severan state could more easily portray itself as a bureaucratic institution that might merit deference without a given leader being personally fit to rule. This dissertation begins by discussing the representational strategy of Septimius Severus, who deployed traditional imperial messaging tropes in strikingly legalistic forms. I then explore how this model of law as a venue for or language of state communication might explain otherwise idiosyncratic features of the constitutio Antoniniana, an edict promulgated by Septimius Severus’ son Caracalla that granted citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Empire. I next discuss two unusual features of the corpus of rescripts issued by Severus Alexander, the last Severan emperor: specifically, the relabeling of rescripts issued by Elagabalus, Alexander’s cousin and predecessor, as products of Alexander’s reign; and the idiosyncratic frequency with which rescripts issued under Alexander’s authority cite prior imperial (and particularly Severan) precedent. Finally, I discuss how jurists responded to Severan (and particularly late Severan) political and legal culture: late Severan jurists are particularly inclined to justify their legal decisionmaking in terms of the desirable consequences of a given decision’s universal promulgation, and similarly likely to justify their opinions by citing to an impersonal ‘imperial authority’ rather than to named figures. I argue that these changes reflect both state and scholarly attempts to wrestle with increasingly unstable imperial selection processes, and to articulate a vision of Roman governance that might function in the new world of the third century C.E.

This dissertation considers Aeschylus’ Persae and portions of Herodotus’ Histories as attempts to shape memories of the Greco-Persian Wars by invocation of material evidence at very different moments in the fifth century BCE. Given the literary and archaeological nature of our surviving Greek evidence, this consideration is a necessary part of the larger project towards which I work: a history of Persian interactions with Greek sanctuaries during the Greco-Persian Wars. Greek archaeological evidence offers one set of comparative perspectives on these interactions. I attempt to place Aeschylus and Herodotus in dialogue with this evidence in chapters two and three. Herodotus, unlike Aeschylus, depicts respectful Achaemenid behavior at Greek sanctuaries during the Greco-Persian Wars. To contextualize this depiction, I examine earlier sources from the western Achaemenid Empire in chapter four. In so doing, I build on methodology demonstrated in the introductory chapter to consider a second set of comparative perspectives. Close reading of Herodotus in parallel to these sources provides a basis for fully examining types of behavior which have often been explained away in previous scholarship on the historian. Notably, Herodotus’ depiction, unlike our surviving earlier sources from the western Achaemenid Empire, often considers how such behavior relates to more violent aspects of conquest, and as such provides a contrast to these surviving earlier sources. I suggest that this contrast—Herodotus’ depiction of both sacrilege and respectful behavior—can be understood in his historical moment. And yet this suggestion is but a beginning.