Digital Methodologies in Middle Eastern Studies

About the Course

Digital Methodologies in Middle Eastern Studies is a graduate seminar exploring how digital tools, methods, and questions are reshaping the study of the Middle East and North Africa. The course surveys artistic, academic, and activist digital production across the region while introducing students to Digital Humanities tools and methods for their own scholarship. Moving between critical theory and hands-on practice, it asks what it means to think digitally about the region — and what graduate students stand to gain from engaging seriously with these methods, platforms, and debates.

The course treats the digital not as a neutral toolkit but as a contested terrain — shaped by politics, infrastructure, language, and power. Students examine how digital methods both open new possibilities for scholarship and introduce new forms of bias, exclusion, and distortion. Each module pairs theoretical readings with regional platforms, datasets, and tools, asking students to evaluate methods critically and to develop their own digital research directions.

The course is built to intersect with the Kevorkian Center's Digital Forays public workshop series — a year-long program bringing together scholars, artists, and practitioners working at the intersection of digital technology and Middle Eastern studies. The Digital Forays workshops run in the fall; this class meets in the spring, designed to extend and deepen those conversations into research practice.

First taught at the graduate level at NYU's Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies in Spring 2019. This site presents the syllabus and course platform from the Spring 2021 version of the course.