Past Event Category: Sponsored by MESP
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Apr 12Women’s Political Representation in Iran and Turkey: Demanding a Seat at the TableProfessor Mona Tajali will discuss how religious and cultural norms, attitudes, institutional structures, and voter behavior affect the representation of women and quality of democracy in Muslim contexts, with a comparative focus on Iran and Turkey.
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Apr 7Place and Placelessness in the Novels of Najib MahfouzWithin the scope of cultural geography, Mahfouz’ novels and short stories can be viewed as a source of understanding and re-analyzing of the social geography of Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century, and the transformations underwent by this society during the transitional period from monarchy to the republican regime post-1952.
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Mar 24Natives Against Nativism: Palestine and the Movement for Migrant Rights in Postcolonial FranceIngraham 206
Against the erasure of the central role of the Palestinian question in the emergence of grassroots antiracist discourses in postcolonial France, Professor Olivia Harrison mines the journals, tracts, photographs, and video fragments that constitute the incomplete and fragmented archive of these movements for evidence of a distinctly transcolonial form of antiracist activism, grounded in anticolonial solidarity with Palestinians.
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Mar 3Iran, Russia, Turkey: The Anti-Democracies of the 21st CenturyProfessor Hamit Bozarslan will discuss these three regimes. They are not the only anti-democratic ones that exists in the contemporary world, but they share some features that one cannot easily find elsewhere.
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Feb 17Sovereignty and Autonomy in the Late Ottoman EmpireIngraham 206
This talk traces the Ottoman roots of the post-imperial political order in the Middle East through an analysis of the inter-imperial contest over Ottoman autonomous provinces.
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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).