Spies of Empire/Empire of Spies

This course will be run as a seminar, focusing on the writings and lives of four major "spies of Empire." Three of them - TE Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and Dame Freya Stark (roughly contemporaneous with each other) - represented/worked for British imperial interests in what is today termed the Middle East or more accurately, the SWANA region. The fourth, Isabelle Eberhardt, a Swiss-Russian woman masquerading often as a man, supplied intel about Algeria to French colonial administrators through her writings.