I have the class online because of the pandemic. Dr. Green is a fantastic lecturer and wants you to enjoy the materials. The grades however depend on your Ta because your letter grade depends on three essays only. So, if you meet a harsh Ta it will NOT be an easy A. In my case I have Ha as my TA who is fantastic and lenient!

This class is graded based on three essays and nothing else. In the syllabus, it states that attendance and participation in discussion sections are mandatory, but they are not included in the grade composition, so I am unsure how it is enforced. Participation in discussions is probably important to get to know your TAs, though, who determine your entire grade. Lectures, which are podcasts recorded by the professor, are not required and are not needed to get a good grade from my experience. I personally did not have this issue, but because the grade is entirely based upon the grading difficulty of the TA's, you have to kind of get lucky with which TA you get to get a good grade. The class workload is very light, which is nice, but no extra credit or grade fluffing assignments are offered so you have to be a good essay writer to get a good grade in this class.

Disclaimer: this was during COVID-19. I came into this class expecting it to have a heavily workload, but it honestly was pretty light. There was no “busy work” nor tests in the class – our entire grade was determined by three essays. On top of that, we had to watch podcasted lectures, read the textbook, and read primary source documents every week. Discussion sections were mandatory, but if you have a good TA these are extremely helpful for midterm essay preparation.

The lectures were very engaging. Each 80-minute-podcast was accompanied by a PowerPoint filled with visual aids. Honestly, I didn’t read the textbook because the lectures and supplemental readings covered most of the material. Definitely read the primary sources though because your essay grades were predicated on your understanding and explication of these materials. The midterm essays (4-pages double spaced) required us to select a visual source (essay 1) or textual source (essay 2) from a select time-frame and write about their historical contexts and speculate about their purposes. The final essay asked us to synthetise textual and visual material to discuss religion in an 8-page paper. Don’t panic though, my TA was very lenient in grading the papers – far easier than say an APUSH essay in high school.

You need to take one of his classes, bottom line.

Professor Green is an incredible lecturer, and this is coming from someone who DREADS going to class. But, his lectures are very well organized, easy to understand, and he himself is such a chill person. I loved 185B so much that I decided to take a seminar (191N) with him too. While he does want you to do the reading, you don't have to. But DO go to all of his lectures, pay attention, and write everything that he does on the board. Also, he gives you the essay questions for the midterm and final in advance. This allows you to make a clear and structured essay, memorize your outline, and deliver on the day of the test. Awesome, awesome guy, and both classes were really great.

Grading: Midterm is in class essay. Final is take home paper. You get the questions for both on the first day of class. Keep in mind, the final paper is 10 pages (double space). The midterm isn't difficult per se, but if you are like me and have terrible memory make sure you make a timeline/outline essay that you can memorize and then dump on exam day. Got an A in the class, and Prof. Green is great! I was very surprised to see a British professor speaking and reading Farsi and Arabic like it was nothing! Lectures can be kind of long, but if you like architecture, history, and art you will enjoy them. Make sure you do the readings and annotate a few things as it will help for your final paper.

Professor Green is a really engaging professor who really wants his students to do well. For this class the grade was made up of 50% midterm, 50% final, but he took attendance every class.

For the midterm, the thursday before he gave us the midterm question prompts- and told us we we would get to choose two questions for the midterm. He doesn't surprise you at all, he just really wants you to prepare your answers beforehand. I didn't put that much effort into the preparation and only got a B- on this.

For the final, he gives you the prompt in week 1 of the quarter, and it's a 10 page paper due in Finals week covering the theme of the whole course. I wrote this paper in 24 hours before it was due, and received an A- in the class. He really wants to make sure you show that you've done the reading for this class, so as long as you incorporate at least 1 or two readings from each week into your paper you should be fine.

Professor Nile was a great professor and interesting lecturer. Definitely recommend this class!

Lectures can be boring and redundant, but Professor is extremely nice and willing to answer in depth questions. Only take if you're actually interested in topic.

Great professor. All lectures were audio recordings (podcast-like). Supporting slides and lectures together were informative and taught me a lot about the course. The course material itself is quite interesting and relates the history of many places. You begin to realize the global roots of many cultures and the surprising influences of other cultures on yours. Overall, a fun and exciting class.

There were 3 papers in total (25% + 25% + 50%) and were not that difficult. You had to analyze some ancient object or script. TAs are amazing and discussions were fun so participate if you can! Shoutout to Madeline Grimm for being a great TA.

I took this class during Covid-19 and it was relatively easy. Professor Green is awesome and the content is super interesting. This class is conducted asynchronously and there isn't weekly graded homework. The only thing thats iffy is the grading, which is based entirely on 3 essays. They are interesting to write and as long as you just read that section then you should be fine. Its great if you want a class where you simply do all the work on your own time.

This class was not bad but my TA definitely made it more difficult than necessary. Basically, your grade depends on two papers and a final paper. So, there's not a lot of room for messing up even tho you might be on top of readings and participate a lot in class. I did learn a lot in this class but I wish I was graded easier on the papers.