This course surveys 19th and 20th century events in the Middle East to examine the interplay between nationalism and gender in early modernist debates, anticolonial movements, and state building in Egypt and Iran. Critical reading of primary sources is used to navigate historiography on women in Iran's 1906 Constitutional Revolution, Egypt's 1919 Nationalist Revolution, the 1936 Arab Revolt in Palestine, Arab nationalism, Islamism, and the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Themes of 'cultural authenticity' and 'politics of dress' are unpacked to ask how women used their roles as 'cultural carriers' to strike bargains with changing patriarchal forces in their societies? Pahlavi reforms and Arab membership in the International Alliance of Women feature to illustrate how notions of 'westernization' and neocolonialism complicated these bargains. Highlighting the role of myth and memory in defining national identity, stories that did not fit dominant narratives of the time are explored to ask how do we 'decolonize content' to ensure that we do not replicate some of these inequalities in our own studies?