February 2023
Race and Islam in Historical Perspective
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.
Find out more »Sovereignty and Autonomy in the Late Ottoman Empire
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.
Find out more »March 2023
Iran, Russia, Turkey: The Anti-Democracies of the 21st Century
Professor 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.
Find out more »Natives Against Nativism: Palestine and the Movement for Migrant Rights in Postcolonial France
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.
Find out more »April 2023
Mapping the Real and Imagined Geographies in Naguib Mahfouz’ Novels
Atef Moatamed is a professor of physical geography at Cairo University and founder/director of the House of Geography for geographic studies.
Find out more »Women’s Political Representation in Iran and Turkey: Demanding a Seat at the Table
Professor 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.
Find out more »Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent
In this talk based on her new book, "Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent" (Stanford University Press, 2022), Jillian Schwedler considers how space and geography influence protests and repression, and, in challenging conventional narratives of Hashemite state-making, offers the first in-depth study of rebellion in Jordan.
Find out more »MESP Annual Conference: Minority and Ethnic Politics in and from the Middle East
You are cordially invited to attend our conference featuring outstanding scholars from around the US discussing the historical background, sociopolitical realities, and challenges facing religious, ethnic, and other minorities in the MENA region.
Find out more »