Past Event Category: MES Lecture Series
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Feb 3Race and Islam in Historical PerspectiveOnline via Zoom
Professor El Hamel discusses the emergence and evolution of ideas of race and color in the Middle East and North Africa. This lecture is mainly interested in racial constructs built around notions of color and lineage. It traces distinct genealogies of race and racism to the beginning of the Islamic empire.
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Dec 2Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi ArabiaOnline via Zoom
Rosie Bsheer of Harvard University explores the increasing secularization of the postwar Saudi state and how it manifested in assembling a national archive and reordering urban space in Riyadh and Mecca.
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Nov 11Everyday Choices: The Role of Competing Authorities and Social Institutions in Politics and DevelopmentDrawing on findings from existing literature and the author’s research, it puts forth an institutional approach that takes membership in multiple, often competing communities into account, explaining how the salience of various arenas of authority associated with communities, and of nature of the social institutions within these arenas, affect politics and development.
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Nov 4“‘All culture is originally colonial’: Derrida, Algeria, and the Latin Empire”Ingraham 120
Adam Stern, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, will discuss a reading of Jacques Derrida’s writing on Algeria, Jewishness, and colonialism.
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Oct 28Cultural Administration in Postcolonial Egypt: The Case of the Mass Culture InstituteThis talk examines everyday cultural administration in Nasser’s Egypt. Based on a wider historical and ethnographic study of the Ministry of Culture, El Khachab argues that low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats working in the cultural sector saw their task as a “mission” (risala) and a “responsibility” (mas’uliyya).
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Oct 14Layla Murad, the Jewish-Muslim Star of EgyptProfessor Hammad discusses the life and legacy of Layla Murad, one of the most beloved and remembered Arab singing stars in the twentieth century, to analyze politics of sexuality, ethnicity, socio-cultural interaction between Muslims and Jews, and the crucial role popular culture played in constructing an exclusive Arab-Islamic Egyptian identity.
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Sep 30Perceived Discrimination and the Integration Paradox in Stigmatized NeighborhoodsIngraham 120
Residents of “European Banlieues,” or stigmatized neighborhoods in urban peripheries across Europe, are frequent subject targets of discrimination. But little research has systematically examined the attitudes of these neighborhoods’ residents. We fill this gap and ask how much discrimination immigrant residents of the most deprived neighborhoods in Sweden perceive, and whether perceived discrimination matters for their political incorporation.
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Apr 18Using Discourse to Incentivize Cooperation in Arab-Muslim Culture: Experimental Evidence from EgyptMazen Hassan, Professor of Comparative Politics at Cairo University, will discuss two questions: how could high contributors to public goods be encouraged to sustain their contributions against a defecting crowd? Second, how can low contributors be lured to increase their contributions without expensive institutional interventions or major structural transformations?
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Mar 7From Erasure to Remembrance: Affective Memories of Egyptian FeministsThis lecture will shed light on the political and intellectual trajectory of a pioneer suffragette in the history of Egyptian feminism, Duriyya Shafik, with the aim of exploring the processes of remembrance and forgetfulness of dissonant feminist voices in cultural memory.
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Feb 28The Ottoman Transition to Print: Technology, Aesthetics, and Textual AdministrationBuilding upon my book, "Letters of Light: Arabic Script in Calligraphy, Print, and Digital Design" (2017, Harvard University Press), this talk explores Ottoman print adoption in comparative perspective.