Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/University of Pennsylvania/Food in the Islamic Middle East (Spring 2024)

This seminar approaches past and present Middle Eastern and North African societies through the study of food. The Islamic Middle East claims a rich internal history of scholarship on food, along with an illustrious tradition of cookbook-writing that began with Arabic works like Kitab al-Tabikh (“The Book of Cooking”) by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, who lived in Baghdad more than a thousand years ago. Scholars today are continuing to write in engaging and cutting-edge ways about food in the region, and we will read a broad sampling of new works. Some of our readings will be comparative, focusing on other parts of the world in ways that can help us to think about Middle Eastern parallels. Some will examine history on the world stage, enabling us to see more clearly the Middle East within global networks.

Our studies of food will cover several overlapping topics and themes. These themes include labor (the work behind food production and preparation); religion; gender; nationalism; migration; status, hierarchy, and class; business; contestation and conflict (including identity politics); medicine and health; trade and transport; access and deprivation; environment and agriculture; value, symbolism, and prestige; place (i.e., where food production and consumption happen and reflect local settings); and tradition and authenticity. We will consider the sensory history of food, too, especially vis-à-vis taste and smell, and food’s material history (e.g., the history of objects like forks and teacups).

In this class we will learn how to write for Wikipedia by following tutorials and working together to develop and publish a new article. Goals include (1) making us think about what it means to write in different “literary registers,” striking different tones for different audiences; (2) prompting us to consider what it means to produce “public-facing” scholarship; (3) giving us an opportunity for collaborative research, and practice in improving our writing through revision; and (4) heightening our awareness of what is present and absent on Wikipedia, and of how we can contribute by filling in content gaps.