2024
9/9/24 Neil Ketchley (University of Oxford): Infrastructures of Revolt: Mass Politics and Anti-Colonial Revolutions in the Middle East
4/12/24 MESP Conference: Environment and Climate Change in the Middle East
3/18/24 Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (Bard College): Siege Creep: Waste, Airbnb, and Speculation between Israel/Palestine and Athens (video recording)
2/26/24 Jessica Barnes (University of South Carolina): Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt (video recording)
2/14/2024 Jeannie Sowers (University of New Hampshire): War, Environment, and Infrastructure: Lessons From Middle East and North African Conflicts
2023
11/6/23 Teresa Pepe (University of Oslo): Climate Change and the Future of the City in Contemporary Arabic Dystopian Fiction
10/30/23 Leila Zakhirova (Concordia College): Rise, Decline, and Ultimate Demise of the Middle East: 15,000 Years of Recurring Climate Crises
10/16/23 Nevine El Nossery (UW Madison): Arab Women’s Revolutionary Art: Between Singularities and Multitudes (video recording)
9/18/23 Karen Rignall (University of Kentucky): Afterlives of Extraction in Morocco’s Renewable Energy Transition (video recording)
4/21/23 Jillian Schwedler (City University of New York): Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent
4/12/23 Mona Tajali (Agnes Scott College): Women’s Political Representation in Iran and Turkey: Demanding a Seat at the Table (video recording)
4/7/23 Atef Moatamed (Cairo University): Place and Placelessness in the Novels of Najib Mahfouz (video recording)
3/24/23 Olivia C. Harrison (University of Southern California): Natives Against Nativism: Palestine and the Movement for Migrant Rights in Postcolonial France
3/3/23 Hamit Bozarslan (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales): Iran, Russia, Turkey:
The Anti-Democracies of the 21st Century (video recording)
2/17/23 Aimee Genell (University of West Georgia): Sovereignty and Autonomy in the Late Ottoman Empire
2/3/22 Chouki El Hamel (Arizona State University): Race and Islam in Historical Perspective
2022
12/2/22 Rosie Bsheer (Harvard University): Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia
11/11/22 Ellen Lust (University of Gothenburg): Everyday Choices: The Role of Competing Authorities and Social Institutions in Politics and Development (video recording)
11/4/22 Adam Stern (University of Wisconsin-Madison): “‘All culture is originally colonial’: Derrida, Algeria, and the Latin Empire”
10/28/22 Chihab El Khachab (University of Oxford): Cultural Administration in Postcolonial Egypt: The Case of the Mass Culture Institute (video recording)
10/14/22 Hanan Hammad (Texas Christian University): Layla Murad, the Jewish-Muslim Star of Egypt (video recording)
9/30/22 Nazita Lajevardi (Michigan State University): Perceived Discrimination and the Integration Paradox in Stigmatized Neighborhoods
4/18/22 Mazen Hassan (Cairo University): Using Discourse to Incentivize Cooperation in Arab-Muslim Culture: Experimental Evidence from Egypt (video recording)
3/7/22 Hoda El Sadda (Cairo University): From Erasure to Remembrance: Affective Memories of Egyptian Feminists (video recording)
2/28/22 J. R. Osborn (Georgetown University): The Ottoman Transition to Print: Technology, Aesthetics, and Textual Administration (video recording)
2/23/22 Nevine El Nossery (UW-Madison): When Comics Dismantle Taboos in Morocco
2/7/2022 Daniel Williford (UW-Madison): Moral Matter: Property, Piety, and the Politics of Repair in Protectorate-Era Casablanca
2021
12/6/2021 Katrina Daly Thompson (UW-Madison): Queer-Jewish-Muslim: Constructing Hyphenated Religious Identities through Tactics of Intersubjectivity (video recording)
11/22/2021 Nadje Al-Ali (Brown University): Gendering Protest and Revolutionary Moments: the significance of body politics in the Middle East (video recording)
11/16/2021 Dina Heshmat: “Egypt 1919: The Revolution in Literature and Film”(video recording)
10/25/2021 Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (Bard College): Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (video recording)
10/11/2021 Stéphane Lacroix (Sciences Po): The struggle for Salafism in the Egyptian Transition (2011-2013) (video recording)
9/27/2021 Adam Spanos (University of Chicago): Time Will Be the Judge: Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taha Husayn, and the Competing Factions of 1930s Egypt(video recording)
9/13/2021 Comedian and Professor Amer Zahr (University of Detroit): Arab Americans: We’re Not White (video recording)
5/10/2021 Aaron Rock-Singer: Egypt’s Struggle with the Role of Islam in Contemporary Society (video recording)
4/19/2021 Steven Brooke: “Mosques and Islamist Activism: Spatial Evidence from Interwar Cairo” (video recording)
3/29/2021 Marwa Shalaby: “The Adverse Effects of the Pandemic on MENA Research” (video recording)
3/8/2021 Nadine Naber: “Joint Struggle: A Decolonial, Abolitionist Approach to Middle East Studies” (video recording)
2/22/2021 Nilay Özok-Gündoğan: “A Gordian Knot in the Ottoman East: Kurdish Nobility, the Ottoman State, and the Question of Fiscal Autonomy in the Long Nineteenth Century” (video recording)
2/1/2021 Walid El Khachab: “Mystical Patriotism: Palestine and the Politics of the National Dress” (video recording)
2020
11/30/2020 Christopher Livanos: “Biblicist Bias in Qur’anic Studies from the Middle Ages to the Present” (video recording)
10/5/2020 Nicola Pratt: “Embodying Geopolitics Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon” (video recording)
9/14/2020 Sahar Khamis: “Arab Women’s Shifting Identities, Ongoing Activism(s) and Parallel Struggles”(video recording)
3/9/2020 Miral Al-Tahawy: “Desert Melodies: Bedouin Women’s Oral Ghazal Poetry”
3/6/2020 Mohamad Hafez keynote lecture: “HOMELAND inSECURITY”
2/10/2020 On Barak: “Powering Empire: “How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization”
1/27/2020 Aaron Rock-Singer: “The Salafi Mystique: The Rise of Gender Segregation in the 20th Century Middle East”
2019
11/11/2019 Daniel Stolz: “The Ramadan Debates”
10/28/2019 Yael Zerubavel: “Desert in the Promised Land”
10/24/2019 Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh: The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript from Genocide to Justice
4/8/2019 Aziza Khazzoom: “A Jewish history of Orientalism and its effect on hierarchies in Israel”
3/27/2019 MENA Heritage Month Keynote: Noor Ali
3/25/2019 Ghenwa Hayek: “Abu Salim in Africa: Cinema and the Lebanese Emigrant Experience”
2018
11/19/2018 Irfan A. Omar: Prophet al-Khidr
10/29/2018 Nell Gabiam: Stay in Turkey or Continue Toward Europe?
10/15/2018 Susan Friedman: A Clash of Civilizations?
9/24/2018 Dorks H. Gray: “Transitional Justice in Tunisia: The Forgotten Victims”
4/30/2018 Ahmed El Shamsy: “Islamic reform and print, 1880-1920”
4/24/2018 Hoda Katebi: “On the Politics of Fashion”
4/16/2018 Katrina Thompson: “Categorizing Muslims: Tactics of Intersubjectivity in a Progressive Muslim Community of Practice”
4/2/2018 Geoffrey Levin: “The Palestinianization of American Jewish Anti-Zionism, 1942-1977”
3/19/2018 Jennifer Pruitt: “Rebuilding Islamic Jerusalem, ca 1035”
3/5/2018 Bican Sahin: “An Assessment of Democracy in Turkey from A Liberal Perspective”
2/19/2018 Philip Hollander: “Postmodernism Doesn’t Equal Post-Zionism: Hanokh Bartov and the Advent of Israeli Postmodernist Fiction”
2/16/2018 Nevine El Nossery: “The ‘mal d’archives’ and Tunisian Women Revolutionary Art”
2/5/2018 Aili Mari Tripp: “Women’s Rights Reform in Algeria: Why the Maghreb Differs from the Middle East”