Archive of Past Events
2013
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Monday, December 9, 2013 Arabic Language Table
Every MondayKline, President's Room Join us for weekly language practice. All levels welcome! Come for as little or as long as you would like. |
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Monday, December 2, 2013 Middle Eastern Studies Fall Reception
Kline, President's Room If you are interested in concentrating in Middle Eastern Studies, learning more about our upcoming course offerings and events, studying Arabic, or just hanging out with MES faculty and students, join us this Monday!We are meeting a couple of days before Advising Day to give you chance to learn about your options whether you want to concentrate in MES or are just considering signing up for one class. This is also the only time this semester that Bard’s growing MES community can all get together in an informal friendly setting outside of class or MES academic events (not to say that our classes and events are not friendly!). All current and potential MES “concentrators” are encouraged to attend. There will be snacks and refreshments. |
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Monday, December 2, 2013 Arabic Language Table
Every MondayKline, President's Room Join us for weekly language practice. All levels welcome! Come for as little or as long as you would like. |
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Monday, November 25, 2013 Arabic Language Table
Every MondayKline, President's Room Join us for weekly language practice. All levels welcome! Come for as little or as long as you would like. |
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Monday, November 18, 2013 Arabic Language Table
Every MondayKline, President's Room Join us for weekly language practice. All levels welcome! Come for as little or as long as you would like. |
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Monday, November 11, 2013 Arabic Language Table
Every MondayKline, President's Room Join us for weekly language practice. All levels welcome! Come for as little or as long as you would like. |
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Wednesday, November 6, 2013 Revisiting Gezi Protests and Authoritarianism in Turkey
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium Aslı Iğsız Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York UniversityThe Gezi Park protests, and the state response to them, have ignited questions and debates on various issues such as the institutionalization of neoliberalism, centralization of powers, cronyism, an increasing tendency of authoritarianism, minority governmentality, and encroachment on professional independence and labor rights. This talk will address these dynamics with a special focus on the rise of authoritarian surveillance in the context of the high security neoliberal nation states in general, with Turkey as a particular instance.Aslı Iğsız is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Her teaching and research interests include cultural representation and cultural history, narratives of war and displacement, and dynamics of heterogeneity in late Ottoman and contemporary Turkish contexts. Her current book project, Humanism in Ruins: Habitus, Memory, and the 1923 Greek-Turkish Compulsory Religious Minority Exchange, explores the habitus of recollecting remnants of the ruins of modern nation states and dynamics of diversity in contemporary Turkey. |
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Monday, November 4, 2013 Arabic Language Table
Every MondayKline, President's Room Join us for weekly language practice. All levels welcome! Come for as little or as long as you would like. |
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Monday, October 28, 2013 Arabic Language Table
Every MondayKline, President's Room Join us for weekly language practice. All levels welcome! Come for as little or as long as you would like. |
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Monday, October 21, 2013 Arabic Language Table
Every MondayKline, President's Room Join us for weekly language practice. All levels welcome! Come for as little or as long as you would like. |
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Wednesday, October 16, 2013 Abou Naddara: Screening and Discussion
Ottaway Film Center Charif Kiwan, spokesperson for the acclaimed Syrian film collective, Abou Naddara, will come to Bard to screen a series of short films and give a talk.“We committed to making a short film every Friday as a contribution to the revolution. But we didn’t film our revolution in the way that you might see it on youtube through unbearable chaotic images. Rather we sought to understand it through the stories of individuals who are on the other side of the news. For us it is a question of making an immediate cinema without succumbing to the tyranny of the news, of making a political cinema without succumbing to facile denunciation.” |
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Monday, October 14, 2013 Arabic Language Table
Every MondayKline, President's Room Join us for weekly language practice. All levels welcome! Come for as little or as long as you would like. |
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Monday, October 7, 2013 Arabic Language Table
Every MondayKline, President's Room Join us for weekly language practice. All levels welcome! Come for as little or as long as you would like. |
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Monday, September 30, 2013 Middle Eastern Studies Speaker Series
Olin Humanities, Room 102 AMAHL BISHARA"The Routes of Knowledge: Driving in Israel and the West Bank" Amahl Bishara is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. She is the author of Back Stories: US News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford University Press, 2012). Find us on Facebook |
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Tuesday, September 10, 2013 Egypt: Revolution, Evolution or Coup
Campus Center, Multipurpose Room With Omar Cheta, Assistant Professor of Historyand James Ketterer, Director of International Academic Initiatives, CCE (and former Director of Amideast, Egypt) |
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Tuesday, May 7, 2013 Between Global Capitalism and Global Warming: Saudi Arabia, the US and the Ends of the Arab Spring
Campus Center, Weis Cinema In 1945 the State Department declared that the young kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s oil resources constituted “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” The United States, which emerged as the preeminent global power after World War II, forged a lasting alliance with the house of al-Saud. That alliance has been shaken on more than one occasion, but grew particularly tight after the 1973/74 “energy crisis.” This talk will probe key aspects of the evolving partnership between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Why have successive U.S. presidents committed the country to “energy independence” but failed to deliver, despite the threats posed by global warming? What does Saudi Arabia and the oil wealth of the Arabian Gulf have to do with the ascendance of finance within global capitalism? How have the strains between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia after 9/11 manifested in their respective approaches to the so-called Arab Spring? What does the alliance mean today for Americans and for the pro-democracy movements of the Middle East? Charles Anderson is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bard College. Charles was trained at New York University in the joint program in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and History. He is broadly interested in the social and political history of the modern Middle East. Charles has articles and reviews published or forthcoming in Arab Studies Journal, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Review of Middle East Studies, and is a member of the editorial team of the Arab Studies Journal. Supported by: The Human Rights Project, The Middle Eastern Studies Department, and Students for Justice in the Middle East |
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Monday, May 6, 2013 Candidate for the One Year Visiting Position in Islamic Studies
Kline, College Room Irfana M. HashmiNew York University will give a talk Religion, Ethnicity, and the Economy of Space: Locating al-Azhar in Ottoman Cairo |
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Thursday, April 18, 2013 Jens Hanssen Lecture
Translating Revolution: Hannah Arendt and Arab Political CultureOlin Humanities, Room 205 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Hannah Arendt has famously lamented in On Revolution (1963) that the revolutionary tradition of the United States was lost on the “‘revolutionary’ countries in the East” and the United States alike. On Revolution has received more attention in Arab translation circles than any of her other works – including her Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) which overshadowed On Revolution in the West. In the context of a wider Arab reception history of Arendt, this paper examines two Arabic translations - Khayri Hammad’s critical translation Ra’i fi al-thawrāt (1964, republished in excerpt in Cairo, 2012) and Abdel-Rahman Bushnaq's Franklin Foundation-endorsed translation of her favorite book, Between Past and Future, in 1974 - in order to discuss 'Lesser-evilism', Arab authoritarianism and the current uprisings against both. Jens Hanssen is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history at the University of Toronto. His book publications include “Fin de Siècle Beirut” (Oxford, 2005) and two co-edited volumes: “Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire,” (Beirut, 2002); and “History, Space and Social Conflict in Beirut” (Beirut, 2005). He has recently published in “The New Cambridge History of Islam” (2010), in the “International Journal of Middle East Studies” (2011), “Critical Inquiry” (2012) and an article “Reading Arendt in the Middle East” (http://www.perspectivia.net/content/publikationen/orient-institut-studies/1-2012/hanssen_hannah-arendt). He is co-editing the “OUP Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History” and “Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age.” During his visit to Baghdad in June 2003, he filmed a short documentary (posted on youtube.com) on academic life in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. He is currently conducting research on intersections between German-Jewish and Arab intellectual histories. He also investigates the legacy of the 19th-century Arabic revival and reform movement on contemporary political developments. |
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Tuesday, April 16, 2013 An Evening of Central Asian Culture and Cooking with AUCA-Bard Staff
Robbins Join the AUCA-Bard staff for an evening of Central Asian culture and cooking! Learn to make Eurasian favorites like plov and manti or just enjoy the food and company.Held in Robbins House kitchens and common room. Download: Central Asian Cooking Nights.pdf |
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Monday, April 15, 2013 Etgar Keret at Bard: In Conversation
Campus Center, Weis Cinema 4:00-4:45 pm Jewish Stories and Israeli Culture Today 4:45-5:30 pm Writing and Film Making: Creativity and Play 6:30 pm Keret reads from his work, followed by Q&A Etgar Keret is one of the most popular and influential writers in Israel today. Keret's work has been published in twenty-two languages and adapted in over forty films. His directorial debut, Jellyfish, won the coveted Camera d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival 2007. Copies of Keret's latest work, Suddenly, A Knock on the Door, are available at the Bard bookstore. For more information about Keret, and samples of his work see www.etgarkeret.com. To read his columns for Tablet Magazine, see www.tabletmag.com/author/ekeret. A selection of his stories is available athttp://reservesdirect.bard.edu/reservesViewer.php?reserve=87844 This event is made possible by the generous support of the Posen Foundation. Press Release: View |
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Friday, April 12, 2013 Etgar Keret at Bard: Film Screening of Jellyfish
Campus Center, Weis Cinema Etgar Keret is one of the most popular and influential writers in Israel today. Keret's work has been published in twenty-two languages and adapted in over forty films. His directorial debut, Jellyfish, won the coveted Camera d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival 2007. Copies of Keret's latest work, Suddenly, A Knock on the Door, are available at the Bard bookstore. For more information about Keret, and samples of his work see www.etgarkeret.com. To read his columns for Tablet Magazine, see www.tabletmag.com/author/ekeret. A selection of his stories is available athttp://reservesdirect.bard.edu/reservesViewer.php?reserve=87844 This event is made possible by the generous support of the Posen Foundation. Press Release: View |
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Monday, April 8, 2013 Doomed by Hope: Theater in Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo Today
Campus Center, Weis Cinema Eyad Houssami Founding Director of Masrah Ensemble In a world of screens and speeds so great, theaters are padlocked and threatened with demolition. Live public dialogue, as a literary and artistic practice, remains a luxury – if not an impossible cultural phenomenon – in the Arab Middle East. Decades of invasion, occupation, and internecine conflict have ruptured the intangible and tangible infrastructure requisite for theater. And yet, despite the stifling forces of dictatorship and colonialism, theater endures.In this talk, Houssami narrates the emergence of alternative infrastructures of and for theatrical artistry in such difficult contexts and discusses the opportunities and challenges of establishing an international, multilingual theater company based in Beirut, Lebanon. The interactive presentation incorporates video, excerpts of performances and plays, and extracts from "Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre" to share a story about contemporary theater today.Eyad Houssami makes and writes about theater. He is the founding director of Masrah Ensemble, a nonprofit theater organization in Lebanon, and the editor of English and Arabic editions of "Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre" (Pluto Press and Dar Al Adab 2012). He has performed in dead Byzantine cities in Syria; directed bilingual theater productions that mingle migrant workers with traditional audiences in Lebanon; produced a monodrama in a 13th century Damascene mansion only to be banned from performing; and his play Mama Butterfly received a staged reading at Between the Seas festival (New York 2010). He is the managing editor of Portal 9: Stories and Critical Writing about the City, a bilingual cultural journal published in Beirut. His theater research efforts have culminated in invitations to present at conferences in South Africa and Korea and publication in peer-reviewed journals. He is the recipient of Rotary, Fulbright, Prince Claus Fund, and Young Arab Theatre Fund grants. He studied theater at Yale. |
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Thursday, April 4, 2013 Ancient Music, Modern Myth: History, Antiquity, and Modernity in Traditional Persian Music
Ann Lucas, Candidate for EthnomusicologyLászló Z. Bitó ’60 Conservatory Building |
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Tuesday, April 2, 2013 Birthright Palestine
A Lecture by Dana YahalomiOlin Humanities, Room 102 During the lecture Dana Yahalomi, Public Movement Leader, will present key strategies developed by the movement alongside examples of previous actions. In the last six years, Public Movement has explored the regulations, forces, agents, and policies, formations of identity and systems of ritual which govern the dynamics of public life and public space. The Movement was founded in December 2006 by Omer Krieger and Dana Yahalomi, who later assumed sole leadership in 2011.The lecture will conclude and open into discussion with the recent action SALONS: Birthright Palestine? (February - April 2012, New Museum, NYC) which used the phenomenon of Birthright Israel(1) in order to raise questions about nationality and heritage, as well as about the politics of tourism and branding. In a series of performative public discussions, each adopting existing formats of discursive forums, different publics presented and debated upon related questions and issues that would inform, affirm and/or oppose the proposal to initiate a Birthright Palestine program. Public Movement is a performative research body which investigates and stages political actions in public spaces. It studies and creates public choreographies, forms of social order, overt and covert rituals. Among Public Movement's actions in the past and in the future: manifestations of presence, fictional acts of hatred, new folk dances, synchronized procedures of movement, spectacles, marches, inventing and reenacting moments in the life of individuals, communities, social institutions, peoples, states, and of humanity. Public Movement has taken responsibility for the following actions: "Accident" (Tel- Aviv, 2006), "The Israel Museum" (Tel- Aviv, 2007), "Also Thus!" (Acco Festival, 2007), "Operation Free Holon" (The Israeli Center for Digital Art, 2007), "Change of Guard” (With Dani Karavan, Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, 2008), "Public Movement House" (Bat Yam Museum, 2008), “Emergency” (Acco Festival, 2008), “The 86th Anniversary of the assassination of President Gabriel Narutowicz by the painter Eligiusz Niewiadomski” (Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 2008), "Spring in Warsaw" (Nowy Teatr, 2009), "Performing Politics for Germany" (HAU Berlin, 2009), “Positions” (Van AbbeMuseum, 2009), “First of May Riots “(HAU Berlin, 2010), "University Exercise" (Heidelberg, 2010), "SALONS: Birthright Palestine?" (New Museum, New York, 2012), “Rebranding European Muslims” (Berlin Biennial, 2012, Steirischer Herbst, 2012), “Debriefing Session” (Baltic Circle, Helsinki, 2012), "Civil Fast" (Jerusalem, 2012) and "The Reenactment of the Mount Herzl Terrorist Attack" (Upcoming). The lecture has been supported by Artis www.artiscontemporary.org 1 Birthright Israel is a 10-day free trip for Jews between the ages of 18 to 26 who travel around Israel together on a bus. It was founded in 1999, sponsored by the government of Israel and American Jewish philanthropy. Over 300,000 people have participated in the program since its founding. Birthright Israel was founded in the hope to address the following concerns: detachment of diaspora Jews to the state of Israel, an increase in intermarriages between Jews and non-Jews and a need to sustain the Israeli-American Lobby, which for years served Israel with political advocacy and a great source of funding. |
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Monday, March 11, 2013 "A is for Arab: Stereotypes in U.S. Popular Culture"
Exhibition OpeningRKC 103 Screening: "Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People" (2006, 50 min) followed by a discussion of the collection with Greta Scharnweber (NYU Kevorkian Center) Ongoing Exhibition Albee Annex Basement March 11-22, 2013, Mostly open 9-5 Contact Ann Seaton, [email protected]This documentary dissects a slanderous aspect of cinematic history that has run virtually unchallenged from the earliest days of silent film to today’s biggest Hollywood blockbusters. It explores a long line of degrading images of Arabs--from Bedouin bandits and submissive maidens to sinister sheikhs and gun-wielding “terrorists”--along the way offering devastating insights into the origin of these stereotypical images, their development at key points in US history, and why they matter so much today. Shaheen shows how the persistence of these images over time has served to naturalize prejudicial attitudes toward Arabs and Arab culture. By inspiring critical thinking about the social, political, and basic human consequences of leaving these Hollywood caricatures unexamined, the film challenges viewers to recognize the urgent need for counter-narratives that do justice to the diversity and humanity of Arab people and the reality and richness of Arab history and culture.A professor, author, and professional consultant for films such as Syriana and Three Kings, Jack Shaheen, with the help of his wife Bernice Shaheen, collected and analyzed materials which depicted Arabs and Muslims as the godless "cultural other." The Jack G. Shaheen Archive now contains nearly 3,000 motion pictures (spanning from late-19th century silent films to contemporary Hollywood productions) and television programs (including comedies, dramas, cartoons, as well as commercials) on DVDs and VHS tapes. Paper ephemera in the archive comprises of editorial cartoons, motion picture posters and stills, comic books, and advertisements. Also included in the archive are movie/TV scripts, law cases, books and magazines, as well as toys and games.Shaheen is the author of several books including The TV Arab (1984), Guilty: Hollywood's Verdict on Arabs after 9/11 (2008), and the award-winning Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2001, 2009), which the Media Education Foundation produced as a documentary in 2006. He has served as an Oxford Research Scholar and as a consultant for the Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, and New York City's Commission on Civil Rights.For more information with the Jack G. Shaheen Archive visit http://neareaststudies.as.nyu.edu/object/kc.media.jackshaheen |
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Monday, February 25, 2013 Military Challenges to American Foreign Policy
The Future of US Relations with IranOlin Humanities, Room 102 An off-the-record discussion of US-Iran relations from a micro and macro perspective. Jonny Cristol, Director, BGIA; and Scott Silverstone, Professor of International Relations, United States Military Academy at West Point; faculty member, BGIA moderated by Michelle Murray, Assistant Professor of Political Studies, Bard College |
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Thursday, February 7, 2013 Non-Movements and the Power of the Ordinary
Olin Humanities, Room 102 Professor Asef BayatUniversity of Illinois This talk explores what the ordinary people (in the Middle East) do to get around and resist the severe constraints the authoritarian polity, neo-liberal economics, and moral authorities on their civil and economic rights. Bayat will discuss the diverse ways in which the subaltern groups--men, women, and the young—resort to ‘non-movements’ to affect the contours of change in their societies, by refusing to exit from the social and political stage controlled by authoritarian regimes, and by discovering or generating spaces within which they can assert their rights and enhance their life chances. He conceptualizes these everyday and dispersed practices in terms of social 'non-movements', and discuss how these ‘non-movements’, by establishing alternative norms in society, become the matrix of broader social change in society, and how they may or may not evolve into larger societal movements. Asef Bayat, the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, teaches Sociology and Middle East at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Illinois, he taught at the American University in Cairo for many years, and served as the director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) holding the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. His research areas range from social movements and social change, to religion-politics-everyday life, Islam and the modern world, and urban space and politics. His recent books include Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford University Press, 2007); (with Linda Herrera) Being Young and Muslim: Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (Oxford University Press, 2010); and Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2010). The revised and extended edition of Life as Politics will be published in May 2013, and so will Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam (Oxford University Press). This event is co-sponsored by the Human Rights Project, the Center for Civic Engagement and the Sociology Program. |