Past Events
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Apr 4World Cinema Day: “Yasmeen’s Element”Barrymore Theater: 2090 Atwood Ave, Madison, WI 53704
World Cinema Day brings middle and high school students and teachers to Madison for a special free screening of a high-quality, international film with an introduction before the film and a Q&A/discussion after the film. Advance registration is required for this event. This is an annual event sponsored by WIRC, and in conjunction with the Wisconsin Film Festival.
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Mar 21Lecture: “The Logic of Protection”Room 202/204 Bradley Memorial Building
This talk will introduce the life and work of Ilan Halevi (1943-2013), best known as the first Jewish member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). It will set his writing on Jewish history and memory against the background of contemporary debates about Zionism and settler colonialism.
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Mar 17Projecting Anxiety: Lebanon, Africa, and the Diasporic ConditionIngraham 206
Ghenwa Hayek (University of Chicago) engages with critical contemporary scholarship in diaspora studies by using the Lebanese case to consider how the diaspora is imagined from within the homeland; and, further, how specific diasporic imaginaries and entanglements have been used to conceptualize national identity domestically.
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Mar 5The China-Morocco Relation: From Third World Internationalism to Strategic HedgingIngraham 336
Zaynab El Bernoussi is an associate professor of political science at The Africa Institute specializing in dignity politics, international relations, and the international political economy.
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Feb 27Being Sufi in Central AsiaVan Hise Hall, Room 1418, 1220 Linden Dr., Madison, Wisconsin
Benjamin Gatling draws on ethnographic fieldwork to examine how Tajikistan’s Sufis have adapted since 2010. It discusses how murids cope with missing pirs, closed teaching circles, and limited ritual opportunities, while highlighting resilient expressions of Sufi piety, such as pilgrimage practices and narratives.
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Feb 24Palestine and Arab-Israeli PeaceIngraham 206
This presentation will cover Arab-Israeli peace initiatives and their impacts following the 1994 Oslo Accords. The focus will be on American-led peace initiatives under both the Trump and Biden administrations, with a discussion of projected American foreign policy under a second Trump term.
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Feb 10Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in PalestineIngraham 206
Professor Bhungalia demonstrates how US empire operates as a topological formation that projects security and war power through opaque arrangements and blended genres of rule—in this case contracted relationships of aid—that render Washington’s counterterrorism regime intimately embedded in the lifeworlds of those afar.
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Feb 10Egyptian Author Youssef Rakha will discuss his latest book “The Dissenters”Ingraham 206
Youssef Rakha will be discussing his new book, The Dissenters (the first novel he has composed in English, amidst a career of writing Arabic novels and English nonfiction), as well as his critique of the landmark Egyptian neorealist film The Mummy.
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Feb 7Establishing Authenticity: Language, Style, and Theorizing the Qurʾānic MiracleThis talk examines this under-studied link between the idea of Qurʾānic authority and the linguistic ‘proof’ of its divine source.
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Feb 7Working Women in Jordan: Education, Migration, and AspirationOnline via Zoom: go.wisc.edu/niceonzoom
Dr. Fida Adely will discuss her new book which examines the internal migration of university-education women in Jordan for work.