Awarded the International Society for Intellectual History's Charles Schmitt Prize* Mīrzā Fatḥ 'Alī Ākhūndzāda's Letters from Prince Kamāl al-Dawla to the Prince Jalāl al-Dawla (1865) is often read as a Persian attempt to introduce European Enlightenment political thought to modern...

Linking the increasing emphasis in public higher education on student enrollments to the decline of robust core curriculums, particularly in US public universities, I argue for a more rigorous and global core than is at present available at the majority of US universities. Student enrollments...

The Pankisi Gorge is often associated in the public imagination with terror. This essay contests such stereotypes through ethnographies far removed from media headlines. Rejecting facile reductions of Pankisi to a site for breeding terror, it situates Chechen (Kist) belief systems within the...

Discusses gender stereotypes in Georgian, Daghestani, and Chechen-Ingush cultures, with a particular focus on how these stereotypes pertain to the ideal of female virginity, and how gendered expectations affect women's' lives

Focusing particularly on rape in the context of the Chechen war, and as reflected in twentieth-century Georgian literature (K. Gamsaxurdia, M. Javaxishvili) this contribution discusses sexually-motivated violence against women in the Caucasus

This essay examines the graffiti that covers the portion of the West Bank’s segregation wall that traverses Bethlehem. That the majority of the representations covering the wall are intended for international rather than local consumption complicates the prevalent tendency in the literature on...