ACTUAL COURSE: ANE 15, Women and Power in the Ancient World

She is one of the best professors I've had at UCLA. Her lectures are so entertaining and more importantly, engaging. Whenever we got to a fact or trend that she found interesting or confusing she'd always open up the class for discussion, which would often take a good 15-20 minutes and sometimes put us off schedule. In that case she just changed the schedule/syllabus instead of trying to cram things in last minute. She really tried to make the class as interesting as possible, and it showed. We compared the systems of several different ancient societies as well as some discussion of the modern world.

There's one midterm, one final, a research paper, and some discussion section points. The midterm and the final are both 2 essays, the prompt of which she sent out about a week in advance. She would give us 3-4 options, but my friend and I correctly guessed which ones she would choose based on what she focused on in lecture. Everything you need for them is in her lectures, powerpoints, and assigned readings. Also, the TA's made it very clear what they were looking for in terms of formatting and structure, so you had some idea of how to approach each prompt. The paper was 10 pages and was very broad, allowing for virtually any topic in relation to women and the ancient world to be discussed. Our TA's kept us on track by having little assignments due every few weeks, like a general summary of your topic, or a bibliography/outline, etc. All of the grading was done by the TAs. It wasn't the easiest thing to write but the TAs are very fair about grading if you understand what they are looking for.

If she ever teaches this class again, I would DEFINITELY recommend it! I was taking Physics 6B and LS4 with it, and the workload was totally manageable. It isn't a free A, but you learn so much about the power systems of the ancient world and it's something you shouldn't avoid just because it challenges you to think.