Honestly, professor Mousavi has been one of my favorite professors at UCLA. I took him when the pandemic started in Spring of 2019 and he is one of the only professors to make the whole online transitions easy and enjoyable. However, I'm pretty sure by the time you're reading this review you'll be back on campus contemplating to take his course. Take it! Especially if you're a STEM student or someone who will need to balance out a rigorous quarter. Reading is between 15-25 pages a week and your overall grade consist on the midterm and final exam. Both exams are 5 to 6 questions which require short essay answers and if you show up to lecture and read you'll do fine. As the course name indicates, this class examines Iran's archaeological history, its early material culture, and archaeological sites. He does post slides and he will give you a review session before both exams. If you're a stickler about returned emails then you'll probably be disappointed. He does not return emails very often so stick around after lecture for any questions you may have. In all, I would definitely recommend his course.

Overall, not a difficult class at all, but also not a particularly interesting one. It consists of a final exam and a short 5-7 page midterm paper. The paper is on a topic of your choosing related to archaeology, and the final is very very clear, short, and straightforward. You would have to actively try to fail to not get an A in my opinion.

Prof. Mousavi is a little dry and boring, and often too serious, and he has a very strange obsession with proper pronunciation, to the point where he gets upset if you have the slightest American accent when pronouncing an Iranian term, which is ironic because he speaks English with an accent (which is obviously fine, just ironic that he gets so perturbed when somebody doesn’t say something like “Naqsh-e Rostam” perfectly).

Overall, he’s not a bad prof or a bad guy, just stern and sometimes a little strange, and his class is straightforward and fairly easy to get an A. Just attend lectures, take notes, and study the material that he emphasizes in the review.