Archive of Past Events
2016
|
Wednesday, December 21, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
|
|
Wednesday, December 14, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
|
|
Wednesday, December 7, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
|
|
Wednesday, November 30, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
|
|
Wednesday, November 23, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
|
|
Wednesday, November 16, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
|
|
Wednesday, November 9, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
|
|
|
Thursday, November 3, 2016 Roshmia
Salim Abu Jabal, Palestine, 2014, 70minsArabic subtitled in English Campus Center, Weis Cinema 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Since 1956, 80-year-old Yousef has lived in a shack in Roshmia Valley with his wife Amna. Life is quiet until the municipality of Haifa endorses a new road project across the valley which will result the demolition the shack. Aouni, who looks after the couple, acts as a middleman between them and the municipality; negotiations lead to tension among the three characters. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the director. This event is co-sponsored by the Human Rights Project and Film and Electronic Arts Program. |
|
Wednesday, November 2, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
|
Wednesday, October 26, 2016 Big Beards on the Small Screen: Shtisel
Discussion & Snacks(Israeli Television, 2013-2016) Olin Humanities, Room 102 7:45 pm EDT/GMT-4 Come watch Shtisel, an Israeli television drama series that follows the intersecting story-lines of a large ultra-Orthodox Jewish family living in the present-day Jerusalem, followed by comments from Yuval Elmelech (Sociology), Cecile Kuznitz (History), and Shai Secunda (Religion). Meet other Jewish Studies faculty and students, hear about spring courses, and enjoy a snack. |
|
Wednesday, October 26, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Wednesday, October 19, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Monday, October 17, 2016 The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Communication, Translation, and Networks
Muhsin al-MusawiProfessor of Arabic Studies, Columbia University Olin Humanities, Room 102 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Wednesday, October 12, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Wednesday, October 5, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Tuesday, October 4, 2016 Migrant Labor in the Middle East
Anjali KamatOlin Humanities, Room 102 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Non-citizen Asian and African migrants constitute a significant portion of the working classes in many parts of the Middle East, particularly in the countries that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council as well as Jordan and Lebanon. Primarily from South Asia, they fill low-wage temporary contract jobs in the construction, garment, and service sectors, including domestic labor in people’s homes. They are the labor behind the gravity-defying towers and the endless malls, luxury hotels, museums, university campuses, football stadiums, and other monuments to late capitalism that dot the oil-rich cities of the Arabian peninsula. As the Persian Gulf became the fulcrum of American military power in the region, a section of this migrant population also found service jobs in the rapidly expanding war economy, particularly on military bases—first in Iraq and Afghanistan, and soon across the wide expanse of the United States Central Command. Despite their significant contributions, the voices of migrant workers are all but absent from discussions about the Middle East —except, in recent years, as hapless victims of trafficking and abuse. Anjali Kamat will discuss her research on this vast underclass of migrant workers and the challenges of reporting on their lives and struggles to organize for basic rights and live with a measure of dignity. She will screen the Emmy-nominated documentary she co-produced for Fault Lines: "America's War Workers" Anjali Kamat is an award-winning journalist based in New York. A former correspondent and producer for Democracy Now! and Al Jazeera's current affairs documentary series Fault Lines, she has covered US foreign policy, corporate accountability, the Arab uprisings, and struggles for racial, economic, gender, and environmental justice in the United States and beyond. She is now writing a nonfiction book about South Asian migrant labor in the Middle East. Anjali is on the editorial committee of MERIP and has an MA in Near Eastern Studies from NYU and a post-graduate diploma in journalism from the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai, India. This event is co-sponsored by Human Rights Project at Bard College and Center for Civic Engagement. |
|
|
Wednesday, September 28, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Wednesday, September 21, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Wednesday, September 21, 2016 Understanding Extremism in South Asia
Shehriar Fazli Olin Humanities, Room 201 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 While extremism in South Asia has been a major focus of debate since the 9/11 attacks, in media, academic, and policymaking circles, there remain common misdiagnoses and weak or incomplete explanations about the key drivers of recruitment, radicalization, and violence. This has in turn yielded inadequate policy responses. Fazli will draw from his experiences covering extremism and politics in South Asia for over a decade, to discuss causes and trends of extremist violence in the region, and examine the successes and failures of both state and civil society efforts to address it. Shehryar Fazli is a Pakistan-based political analyst and author. He is Senior Analyst and Regional Editor, South Asia at The International Crisis Group, and the author of the novel Invitation (2011), which was the runner-up for the 2011 Edinburgh International Festival's first book award. |
|
|
Wednesday, September 14, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Wednesday, September 7, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Wednesday, May 18, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
|
Sunday, May 15, 2016 Misah Ivrit: A Hebrew Mass and the Intersection of Worlds
Olin Hall 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4World premiere of Noach Lundgren's Misah Ivrit. An unprecedented approach to the Mass, yet one deeply rooted in it's origins, Misah Ivrit presents a full setting of the Mass text in Biblical and Modern Hebrew, along with supplemental texts taken from Jewish liturgy. Conducted by Noach Lundgren Performed by Students of Bard College and Conservatory, Bard alumni, and members of the area community Preceded by new solo music performed by the composer and a guest appearance by local trio Waterdove. |
|
Wednesday, May 11, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Wednesday, May 4, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
|
Thursday, April 28, 2016 Weaponized Architecture from Palestine
Leopold Lambert, editor of The Funambulist magazine and author of the books Topie Impitoyable and Bulldozer Politcs.to the Paris Suburbs Campus Center, Weis Cinema 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Architecture is a political weapon. Its elemental form, the wall, organizes (sometimes violently) bodies in space both at the domestic and geographical levels. This lecture will introduce instances of such violence through the two examples of Palestine and the French banlieues (suburbs). The case of Palestine will be presented in terms of the role of architecture in the current situation and with reference to a post-apartheid vision for the future. The French banlieues are the dwelling places of a post-colonial population who must cope with both segregative urbanism and an antagonistic relationship with the police, which has been exacerbated during the present state of emergency in France. In both cases, a political and architectural interpretation of the situation will be presented through cartography and photography. Free & open to the public |
|
Wednesday, April 27, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Wednesday, April 20, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Wednesday, April 13, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
|
Monday, April 11, 2016 Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World
Katherine ZoepfOlin Humanities, Room 202 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 For more than a decade, Katherine Zoepf has lived in or traveled throughout the Arab world, reporting on the lives of women, whose role in the region has never been more in flux. Only a generation ago, female adolescence as we know it in the West did not exist in the Middle East. There were only children and married women. Today, young Arab women outnumber men in universities, and a few are beginning to face down religious and social tradition in order to live independently, to delay marriage, and to pursue professional goals. Hundreds of thousands of devout girls and women are attending Qur’anic schools—and using the training to argue for greater rights and freedoms from an Islamic perspective. And, in 2011, young women helped to lead antigovernment protests in the Arab Spring. In Syria, before its civil war, Zoepf documents a complex society in the midst of soul searching about its place in the world and about the role of women. In Lebanon, she documents a country that on the surface is freer than other Arab nations but whose women must balance extreme standards of self-presentation with Islamic codes of virtue. In Abu Dhabi, Zoepf reports on a generation of Arab women who’ve found freedom in work outside the home. In Saudi Arabia she chronicles driving protests and women entering the retail industry for the first time. In the aftermath of Tahrir Square, she examines the crucial role of women in Egypt's popular uprising. This reading will illuminate some of the voices Zoepf showcases in her book. Katherine Zoepf lived in Syria and Lebanon from 2004 to 2007 while working as a stringer for The New York Times; she also worked in the Times's Baghdad bureau in 2008. Since 2010, she has been a fellow at New America. Her work has appeared in The New York Observer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, among other publications. She is a graduate of Princeton University and the London School of Economics. |
|
Wednesday, April 6, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Tuesday, April 5, 2016 Making Archaeology Work in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
Professor Brian Boyd is Lecturer in the Discipline of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia UniversityOlin Humanities, Room 102 6:15 pm EDT/GMT-4 Much discussion on historical memory in Palestine-Israel has focused on the political appropriation of archaeological material in the creation of narratives relating to nationalist interests and colonial settlement. The appropriation of archaeology has been traced by foundational texts such as Whitelam (1996), Abu El-Haj (2001), and Finkelstein & Silberman (2001), which in turn have informed often-polarized debates within and outside the discipline. This work has established the political capital in harnessing archaeological narratives in Palestine-Israel, in particular their role in the construction of claims to land and to history over the course of the 20th century. However, in the post-9/11, post-Bush, post-Second Intifada worlds, archaeology finds itself in a very different political, academic - and physical - landscape. The reality on the ground has changed. What kinds of archaeologies have emerged from the changed historical conditions of the last fifteen years? How does archaeology now inhabit those changed conditions? This seminar discusses a joint Columbia University-Birzeit University Museum Anthropology project in the West Bank town of Shuqba, in the Wadi en-Natuf. The Wadi en-Natuf is currently undergoing a process of destructive landscape alteration, partly through Israeli settlement and road construction, and partly through the large scale dumping and burning of (possibly toxic) industrial and municipal wastes by Israeli and Palestinian agencies. In the face of all this, the local community and archaeologists (faculty and students) are making archaeology work: landscape survey, oral histories/memory maps, and museum/heritage initiatives. |
|
|
|
Monday, April 4, 2016 World as (Arabic) Text:
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4An Introduction to Islamic Neopythagoreanism Matthew Melvin-Koushki (PhD Yale) Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina Western—i.e., Islamo-Christian—understandings of nature have long been logocentric: the world as text. For medieval and early modern thinkers, this logocentricity was mandated by the common neopythagorean doctrine that the uncreated, all-creative divine Word is expressed in twin Books—revealed scripture on the one hand (the Bible or the Quran) and the book of nature on the other. The commensurability of the two Books encouraged, in turn, the application of the hermeneutical methodologies that scripture elicits to the physical and metaphysical worlds, giving rise in Europe to Newtonian “scientific modernity” in its drive to mathematize the cosmos. This early modern neopythagorean turn is exemplified by the emergence of Christian kabbalah in Renaissance Italy; yet the Arabic science of letters ('ilm al-huruf), or lettrism—the primary expression of Islamic neopythagoreanism—, was even more widespread and intellectually mainstream throughout the contemporary Islamicate world than its Hebrew cognate was in Europe. Due to persistent scholarly positivism and occultophobia, however, this basic problematic has been wholly elided in the literature to date. I therefore introduce lettrism as a primary methodology for mathematizing the cosmos, with a focus on thinkers in 15th- and 16th-century Iran, and propose it as an essential node for comparative early modern Islamo-Christian history of philosophy-science. |
|
Thursday, March 31, 2016 – Saturday, April 2, 2016 Palestinian Film Festival
Preston Thursday, March 315pm Reading by Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad 6:30pm Speed Sisters dir. Amber Fares, 2015, 78 minutes Friday, April 1 5pm Sling-Shot Hip-Hop dir. Jackie Salloum, 2008, 100 minutes 7pm Arna's Children dirs. Juliano Mer-Khamis and Daniel Danniel, 2005, 85 minutes Saturday, April 2 1pm Divine Intervention dir. Elia Suleiman, 2003, 100 minutes 3pm The Time That Remains dir. Elia Suleiman, 2011, 119 minutes 5pm The Wanted 18 dirs. Amer Shomali and Paul Cowen, 2014, 75 minutes Download: Palestinian Film Festival Poster.pdf |
|
|
Wednesday, March 30, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Wednesday, March 23, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Wednesday, March 16, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
|
|
Wednesday, March 9, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
|
|
Wednesday, March 2, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
|
|
Wednesday, March 2, 2016 Law, Ethics and Social Sciences in Contemporary Islamic Thought
Olin Humanities, Room 102 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5Alexandre Caiero Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies Hamad Bin Khalifa University Since the turn of the millennium, state and non-state actors in the Middle East have energetically sought to regulate and reform Islamic authority in order to counter the fragmentation induced by mass literacy, new media technologies and global jihad. Various proposals have been formulated targeting state institutions, religious scholars, and wider publics. The call to incorporate social scientific knowledge into Islamic normative deliberation, notably through what is known as the jurisprudence or understanding of reality (fiqh al-wāqi'), and the emphasis on ethics rather than law have emerged as increasingly popular solutions. In this talk I ask what social scientific insights and conceptions of ethics are invoked in these debates, and how they relate to the modes of reasoning that characterize traditional Islamic law. I argue that the debates prompted by these proposals can be best understood as attempts to move beyond the jurists' methodological individualism in order to account for the impersonal powers of modern institutions. Alexandre Caeiro is Research Assistant Professor at the Center for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies located at Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies. He studied sociology and Islamic studies in France (Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales) and the Netherlands (ISIM). He has taught in the Netherlands, Germany, Egypt and Qatar and is currently working on two book projects. The first deals with jurisprudence of minorities and the integration of Islam in Europe. The second examines debates about the chaos of fatwas in the Arab World. |
|
|
Wednesday, February 24, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
|
|
|
Tuesday, February 23, 2016 The Ottoman Scramble for Africa
Mostafa Minawi Assistant Professor of History, Cornell University Olin Humanities, Room 203 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5 As the inter-imperial competition for territorial expansion in Africa heated up in the last 20 years of the 19th century, Istanbul devised a complex strategy that allowed it to give its imperial counterparts a run for their money. This talk will focus on one aspect of this strategy, which involved building a partnership with the local power brokers in the Eastern Sahara and the Lake Chad Basin. Mostafa Minawi is Assistant Professor of History and the Director of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Initiative (OTSI) at Cornell University. He is currently a visiting research fellow at the Remarque Institute, NYU. His book, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and The Hijaz, will be published by Stanford University Press in May 2016. |
|
Wednesday, February 17, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
|
|
|
Tuesday, February 16, 2016 Security Society in Gaza:
Ilana Feldman, Police Encounters under Egyptian Rule Associate Professor of Anthropology, History, and International Affairs at George Washington University Olin Humanities, Room 102 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 This talk explores the dynamics of policing and security in the Gaza Strip during the period of Egyptian Administration (1948-67). Drawing on a rich and detailed archive, it tracks a range of police encounters. Many such encounters were mundane, including investigation of petty crime. Many were evidently repressive, including the surveillance of political activity and speech. All were part of a broad security milieu that helped to define governance, political action, and life possibilities in Gaza in the years after the loss of Palestine. The analytic lens of “security society” illuminates how policing both operated as a mechanism of governance and control and provided opportunities for action and effect. Criminality, politics, and propriety were all matters of concern for the police and the Gazan public. |
|
Wednesday, February 10, 2016 Arabic Language Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline (back corner, by President's Room) 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |