One of the best classes I have taken at UCLA. The subject matter is endlessly fascinating and Professor Young curates a fantastic approach to studying it. The class examines the concepts of "Africa" and the "Middle East" what those terms mean, and how do we come to understand these two regions. I learned so much history that I never knew about and would think about some of these topics for hours. The reading materials and lectures were both so good. In terms of workload, it's not that much other than reading, although I hated doing discussion posts because they were just busy work. However it's worth it to have Professor Young, he made this course special. He designed the course, he's the perfect person to teach it, and you also happen to be in the presence of a genius, just one of the smartest people I've ever met, and he's super nonchalant about it too. But the genius is there, one can't help but notice it, and he is also has a very good sense of humor, his small talk at the beginning of lecture can be really funny and he has good stories. If you take this class the one thing I say to you is engage, engage as much as you can with him. You don't have to, if that's not your thing — most people in my class didn't and still did very well, but I truly think it's to anyone's benefit to have the pleasure of learning with Professor Young and getting to know him in office hours. I am certainly setting high expectations for him, but truly I just loved my experience in this class and I cannot recommend it enough.

Coming in to the class I was really scared because there was no reviews on Bruin Walk for this professor. I thought that I could potentially be going into a really hard class to pass, but that wasn't true thankfully. Professor Young is an awesome Professor! He really cares about his students and the guest speakers he brought to class were awesome too! He uploaded a pre recorded lecture for Tuesdays and had an optional (not mandatory!) class on Thursdays. The optional lectures were so helpful because some students couldn't attend these and it wouldn't hurt them. Again, he really does care about his students! Also they were helpful because they were more of just a review and went into more depth about the content we read and his lecture for Tuesday.
For this quarter there was 3 exams. They were short responses to a couple of questions. They were easy to answer as long as you read the readings, which wasn't hard because literally all of the readings were so interesting and eye opening. Make sure to go to discussion. Even discussion was super interesting. The TA's were all really cool and mine was really, really helpful and accommodating.
This class was so interesting and I'm so glad I took it. Professor Young is a great professor and hopefully I'll be able to take another class with him again!

This is a great class and I recommend taking it. Dr. Alden is a good and clear lecturer, though he does talk a bit slowly sometimes. There is a lot of reading required for this class, but most of it is interesting, so it's not too much of a burden. We had to do weekly discussion posts (took maybe half an hour) and we had two midterms and a final. The exams were all take home exams with paragraph and short-essay length responses.

Khyla Horton was my TA and she's great, so if you can take her section I recommend it. The discussions in this class aren't too structured, but they're quite interesting and it's an environment most people feel comfortable speaking in.

Dr. Young is a great orator and knows how to engage students, but it would be much appreciated if he recorded lecture or had more information on his slides bc sometimes it is hard to follow him in lecture and go back and study the lecture slides. Overall a great professor, but his TA were something. They were nice and I recommend Sunny but the amount of readings was crazy. Hard class, but very interesting.