September 2017
MES Lecture Series: “Islamic Constitutionalism: What Was It? What Might it Be?”
Presenter: Asifa Quraishi-Landes, Law School, UW-Madison This presentation will explain the history of constitutional structures in Muslim lands before the modern period, and explain how insights from these structures could solve some of the biggest political challenges for Muslim-majority…
Find out more »October 2017
MES Lecture Series: “IRAN’S COMPULSORY HIJAB: From politics and religious authority to fashion shows”
Presenter: Faegheh Shirazi, Department of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin This presentation will be looking into the recent history of the hijab in Iran: (1) the hijab and women’s emancipation in Reza Khan’s…
Find out more »November 2017
MES Lecture Series: “Jerusalem, on the Moving Edge of Israeli Colonial Rule”
Presenter: Tom Philip Abowd, Tufts University This presentation will analyze how colonialism and colonial urbanism remain a crucial component of contemporary Palestinian and Israeli realities. It seeks to illuminate everyday life as well as the broader institutional forces that…
Find out more »December 2017
MES Lecture Series: “Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation and the Postfrancophone Lyric”
Presenter: Yasser Elhariry, Dartmouth College This talk tells the story of a unique literary and linguistic development: over the past one hundred years and at least since the second French colonial era beginning in 1830, Franco-Arab…
Find out more »February 2018
MES Lecture Series: Aili Mari Tripp
Title: “Women's Rights Reform in Algeria: Why the Maghreb Differs from the Middle East” The talk looks at women's rights reforms in Algeria since the Black Decade (1992-2002) to show how Algeria is converging with Tunisia and Morocco…
Find out more »MES Lecture Series: Philip Hollander
Title: "Postmodernism Doesn’t Equal Post-Zionism: Hanokh Bartov and the Advent of Israeli Postmodernist Fiction" In this lecture, I contest the scholarly view that Israeli postmodernist fiction emerged alongside post-Zionism, an intellectual movement that challenges major…
Find out more »March 2018
MES Lecture Series: Bican Sahin
Title: "An Assessment of Democracy in Turkey from A Liberal Perspective" The presentation will consist of an analysis of the current state of democracy in Turkey from the perspective of liberal democratic values such as the principle…
Find out more »MES Lecture Series: Jennifer Pruitt
Title: "Rebuilding Islamic Jerusalem, ca 1035" Professor Pruitt will present her research into the Fatimid dynasty's rebuilding of Jerusalem in ca. 1035. Focusing on the restorations of the Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the…
Find out more »April 2018
MES Lecture Series: Geoffrey Levin
Title: "The Palestinianization of American Jewish Anti-Zionism, 1942-1977" About the presenter: Geoffrey Levin is a PhD candidate in Hebrew & Judaic Studies and History at New York University. His dissertation, titled "Another Nation: Israel, American Jews,…
Find out more »Africa at Noon: “Portrait of Rural Egyptian Women: Peaceful Voices from Siwa Oasis, Upper Egypt and Nubia”
Note: This is an event by the UW-Madison African Studies Program. Presenter: Manal Kabesh The rural women in the highly traditional societies of the Siwa oasis, Upper Egypt, and Nubia live according to centuries-old traditions.…
Find out more »MES Lecture Series: Katrina Thompson
Title: "Categorizing Muslims: Tactics of Intersubjectivity in a Progressive Muslim Community of Practice" Drawing on data from a multi-sited linguistic ethnography of progressive Muslims, I explore how participants labeled themselves and others through talk-in-interaction and…
Find out more »MES Lecture Series: Ahmed El Shamsy
Title: "Islamic reform and print, 1880-1920" Half a century after the large-scale adoption of print in the Arab world, Muslim reformers began to make use of the new technology for their own purposes. They published…
Find out more »September 2018
MES Lecture Series: Doris H. Gray
“Transitional Justice in Tunisia: The Forgotten Victims” Six years after the uprising, who are the winners and the losers? Since the 2011 uprisings, Tunisia has taken several major steps to address historic, systematic human rights…
Find out more »October 2018
MES Lecture: Susan Friedman – A Clash of Civilizations?
“A Clash of Civilizations? East-West Migrations, Islamophobia, and the Cosmopolitanism of Mohja Kahf and Marjane Satrapi” In the face of rising Islamophobia in the West, how have diasporic women writers of Muslim background negotiated their…
Find out more »MES Lecture: Nell Gabiam – Stay in Turkey or Continue Toward Europe?
"Stay in Turkey or Continue Toward Europe? Palestinians Displaced from Syria and the Instability of Exile" According to UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works for Palestine Refugees) an estimated 20% of Syria’s Palestinian refugee population…
Find out more »November 2018
MES Lecture: Irfan A. Omar – Prophet al-Khidr
“Prophet al-Khidr, Between (the Qur’anic) Text and (the Mystical) Tradition” Al-Khidr is uniquely placed in the Qur’an as a figure who at once unites and divides; is a healer of souls and yet hard to…
Find out more »December 2018
Africa at Noon: “Political Transitions in Ethiopia: Human Rights, Democracy, and the Politics of Hope”
Abadir M. Ibrahim After overthrowing an authoritarian regime last April, the new (as of yet unelected) government of Ethiopia has put human rights and democracy at the forefront of its political discourse. While the amount…
Find out more »March 2019
Africa at Noon: Maria Vendetti – “Torture Testimonials of the Algerian War of Independence: Framing the Unseeable”
Maria Vendetti Assistant Professor of French St. Olaf College, MN The Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) is ineradicably connected to the systematic use of torture by the French armed forces. In Algeria, torture was a…
Find out more »MES Lecture: Ghenwa Hayek – “Abu Salim in Africa: Cinema and the Lebanese Emigrant Experience”
Abu Salim in Africa: Cinema and the Lebanese Emigrant Experience Ghenwa Hayek, University of Chicago In this talk, Hayek discusses the role that Lebanese cinema has played in articulating anxieties over emigration by exploring the…
Find out more »April 2019
MES Lecture: Aziza Khazzoom – “A Jewish history of Orientalism and its effect on hierarchies in Israel”
A Jewish history of Orientalism and its effect on hierarchies in Israel Aziza Khazzoom, Indiana University Bloomington (See videos below the text.) Since Europe’s Enlightenment, Jews – in the Middle East as well as Europe…
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MES Lecture: Mohammad Khalil – “Jihad, Radicalism, and the New Atheism”
Jihad, Radicalism, and the New Atheism Mohammad Khalil, Michigan State University For well over a decade, the so-called New Atheists have had a unique and ostensibly significant impact on Western (and to some extent non-Western)…
Find out more »September 2019
MES Lecture: Dr. Molly Patterson and Christopher Mathews, “Arabic Language Acquisition for BVI (Blind and Vision Impaired) and Dyslexic Students
Talk Description: Drawing on personal experiences, Dr. Patterson (who is dyslexic) and Mr. Mathews (who is blind) will discuss some of the joys and challenges they faced learning Arabic as a second language. Mr. Mathews and…
Find out more »October 2019
MES Lecture: Yael Zerubavel, “Desert in the Promised Land”
Yael Zerubavel, “Desert in the Promised Land: The Politics and Semiotics of Space in Israeli Culture" Rutgers University The lecture draws on Zerubavel’s new book, Desert in the Promised Land, published by Stanford University Press (2019).…
Find out more »November 2019
MES Lecture: Daniel Stolz, “The Ramadan Debates”
Daniel Stolz, "The Ramadan Debates: Science, Time, and Islamic Law in the Early Twentieth Century." University of Wisconsin-Madison Talk description: In the early twentieth century, Muslim jurists and activists across the world debated whether…
Find out more »January 2020
MES Lecture: “The Salafi Mystique: The Rise of Gender Segregation in the 20th Century Middle East “
Aaron Rock-Singer (History, UW-Madison). About the talk: In this lecture, I trace the emergence of gender segregation within Salafism, Islam’s fastest growing movement. To do so, I focus on Egypt, examining the interaction between Salafism’s…
Find out more »February 2020
On Barak: “Powering Empire: “How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization”
“Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization” On Barak, Tel Aviv University About the talk: The Age of Empire was driven by coal, and the Middle East—as an idea—was…
Find out more »MES Lecture: “Powering Empire: “How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization”
On Barak, Tel Aviv University. About the talk: The Age of Empire was driven by coal, and the Middle East—as an idea—was made by coal. Coal’s imperial infrastructure presaged the geopolitics of oil that…
Find out more »March 2020
MES Lecture: “Desert Melodies: Bedouin Women’s Oral Ghazal Poetry”
Miral Al-Tahawy, Arizona State University. About the presenter: Miral Mahgoub al-Tahawy is an associate professor of Modern Arabic literature, an award-winning Egyptian novelist and short story writer, and an affiliated member of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative…
Find out more »April 2020
Lecture Cancelled: : “Partial wholes: descriptions of early modern Africa (Leo Africanus, Ramusio, Mármol)”
Steven Hutchison (Spanish and Portuguese, UW-Madison). About the talk: This presentation would look at how Africa, known and unknown, was “described” both in cartography and geographies of that era. About the presenter: Steven Hutchinson…
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