Past Events
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Nov 8Arab Fairy Tale Feasts: A Delicious Way to Explore Arab Culture, with author Karim AlrawiOnline via Zoom
Award-winning writer and storyteller, Karim Alrawi, draws on his personal knowledge of Arab culture to create original stories that are a feast for young minds. Told with intriguing details, the tales take young readers on a delicious cultural journey and invite them to consider an Arab perspective on food and the fantastical.
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Oct 25Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, with Sophia Stamatopoulou-RobbinsBased on Sophia’s book, this talk offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it begins with the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians forge their lives, naming that context a “waste siege".
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Oct 22How to Study Humanism and the Representations of Islam? A Dispatch from the Fronts of Today’s French ‘Culture Wars’French House
Join the UW French House for a guest lecture from Professor Tristan Vigliano (University Aix-Marselle) on Friday, October 22 at 4pm.
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Oct 11The struggle for Salafism in the Egyptian Transition (2011-2013)Salafism was the religious language that dominated Egypt’s aborted political transition in the wake of the fall of Mubarak. The leading and most vocal political actors of the moment all mobilized strands of Salafism in a a religious fight for legitimacy against each other: the Salafi Call and its political party al-Nour (with its internal divisions), Hazim Abu Isma’il and his revolutionary Salafis, and even the Muslim Brotherhood, whose religious references had earlier been distinct from Salafi ones. Why was that the case? And how does this shed light on some of the transition’s dynamics (and eventual shortcomings)?
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Oct 4Stories on Afghan Women, Art, and Everything in Betweenhttps://uwmadison.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIudOmsrjMuE9xJPajsh1tBSR3nIoHrm0E
Our community continues to be touched by Middle East displacements and conflicts with the latest development in Afghanistan and the ongoing Afghan refugee crisis. Given the urgency of this issue, we are honored to host this meaningful and pressing panel.
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Sep 27Time Will Be the Judge: Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taha Husayn, and the Competing Factions of 1930s EgyptRather than identifying the essence of Egypt, these authors asked their readers to understand national identity as a contingent construction that could be altered. In plays, interventions in public debates, letters, and a jointly written novel, al-Hakim and Husayn sought to distinguish the eternal realm of mythology and art from the constantly altering world of human affairs.
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Sep 13Arab Americans: We’re Not White, with Comedian and Professor Amer ZahrOnline via Zoom
Amer Zahr, founder and producer of the annual 1001 Laughs Ramallah Comedy Festival, is a rising star in both the US and the Middle East. Amer is an Arab-American comedian, speaker, political activist, writer, and adjunct professor at the University of Detroit, Mercy School of Law
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Sep 13Arab Americans: We’re Not White, with Comedian and Professor Amer ZahrWe will discuss Amer’s upbringing as an Arab American, how comedy and law intersect, and how it is possible to reconcile multiple identities. We will also talk about how American society and politics affect the lives of immigrants in general and Arab-Americans in particular.
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Jul 30APTLI Friday Feature: Oud Instrument with Rahim AlhajThis lecture is offered as part of the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish Language Institute (APTLI) and is open to to students and the public.
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Jul 24APTLI Lecture: Reading Middle Eastern and North African Voices in Translation- What Literature can teach us in a Global Pandemic with Esra TaşdelenIn this talk, Dr. Tasdelen will draw from prominent examples of works by Middle Eastern and North African authors writing in Arabic and Turkish to show how reading translated literature will help shape our understanding of the world in a global pandemic and the new reality we have been facing in the past year.