Professor Sengul's lectures were very dense and hard to understand. I know other students would make comments about her accent and stuttering but imo that's very ableist and it was never a problem for me. However, she assigned very long and convoluted readings, and because her lectures were so hard to understand, they weren't great. I stopped going to her lectures after her third lecture during fall quarter. She's very very knowledgeable and that's evident through her lectures and everything else but she also speaks very fast during lectures and that makes it hard to understand what she is saying or even to grasp what she wants to convey to students. I respect her a lot and she is a very nice person but I did not enjoy her lectures at all. The other lecturers and TAs in the course are amazing, though, and that made this class my favourite during my first two quarters at UCLA. I would 100% recommend it.

Dr. Sengul is very kind, but lectures very quickly and has very content-dense slideshows. At the beginning of the year, her accent was slightly difficult to understand, but you get used to it after a while. She taught the Armenian Genocide portion of the class, which was very interesting, but for many of us, we were not entirely familiar with the case study before coming into the class. At times, it felt like we needed more background context to understand what was happening and it felt as if we were jumping around to different time periods/people. Her assigned readings were also very dense and difficult to read in their entirety due to their length.

In general, I would definitely recommend this cluster! Regardless of the professor teaching, you do not need to attend lecture for this cluster since they are recorded and you are not tested on any of the information. Your grade depends on essays and discussion participation; there are no exams. The essays are relatively easy and usually ask you to use the assigned readings. Your grade will depend on your TA since they grade your essays and participation. I definitely recommend Yair Agmon! He is a very understanding and kind TA and a fair grader! I took his photography seminar for 48c and it was so much fun!

DO NOT TAKE
I had to stay in the class because literally everything else was full I checked every department to get out of this class but nothing was open.
She will shut you down if you ask questions, she has too many thoughts going on and tries to explain them all at once and you are left just wondering what she is talking about. I literally could not understand what she was saying it was so frustrating. Take this class if you are ready to teach yourself everything and the readings she assigns are heavy and LONG.
Avoid if you can

I have taken two different GS 185 classes with professor Sengul and I would gladly take more!
She is absolutely brilliant, but I've found this is part of why people find her confusing. She asks the class complex, abstract, and philosophical questions that can sometimes be hard to fully comprehend without dissecting each part of the question. While the questions she poses may be challenging she really doesn't ask very much from people and her assignments are not any more challenging than other GS classes. She assigns interesting readings, she uses slides, and she is extremely kind, accommodating, and helpful! In my experience, she enjoys talking with students and is happy to help. She is so passionate about what she teaches and you can tell she really wants students to succeed.

I've gone back to edit this review: I think I made comments about Professor Sengul's accent and stutter that were unfair and mean-spirited, thank you to the other reviewer for calling me out. It's a combination of the fact that Professor Sengul wants to introduce her students to a very high level of concepts in Anthopology and that sometimes her verbiage combined with stutters makes it hard to understand (yes this is still abelist but I find it to be the truth). But you don't need to worry too much about not understanding all of her stuff. My TA Julia did a great job unpacking what she said. This cluster is still a very doable A and probably my favorite experience at UCLA after 2 years in. In regards to Sengul, you will learn so much you didn't know about Late Ottoman history and the Armenian Genocide itself, which is exactly what the class is for. She puts so much text on her slides that reading that alone was enoguh to teach me the concepts neeeded. She is always willing to kindly elaborate and help you in office hours, I think she'd have a fantastic and rigorous seminar if she decides to teach it again.

I know that throughout the quarter, a lot of students ended up entirely skipping Sengul's lectures. When she teaches she frequently just reads paragraphs of text off of her slides. She also has an accent and speaks very fast which makes it hard to understand her. Personally, I felt that I could choose to either write what was on the slides or listen to what she was saying, which made lectures very frustrating. Her performance shouldn't reflect on the experience of the overall class, although she's difficult the rest of the class is very manageable, even if you have no interest in the content

Professor Sengul was a deeply knowledgeable scholar of the subjects she taught, taking care to impart her deep understanding of core issues to her students. An amazing professor and an amazing person.

Professor Sengul has great intentions. You can tell that she is very passionate about what she teaches, but her lectures are almost impossible to understand. She has a very thick accent which is paired at a talking speed which sounds like you're listening to the lecture on 2x. I don't even attempt to attend lecture because I can understand 4 words in each sentence. Her slides are very detailed, so it makes it easy to go back and teach yourself the material. She does not take in any criticism or questions in full.