Skip to main content.
  • Faculty + Staff
  • Alumni/ae
  • Families
  • Students
Bard
  • Bard
  • Academics sub-menuAcademics
    • Academics
      • Programs and Divisions
      • Structure of the Curriculum
      • Courses
      • Requirements
      • Academic Calendar
      • Faculty
      • College Catalogue
      • Bard Abroad
      • Libraries
      • Dual-Degree Programs
      • Bard Conservatory of Music
      • Other Study Opportunities
      • Graduate Programs
      • Early Colleges
  • Admission sub-menuAdmission
    • Applying
      • Apply Now
      • Financial Aid
      • Tuition + Payment
      • Campus Tours
      • Meet Our Students + Alumni/ae
      • For Families / Para Familias
      • Join Our Mailing List
      • Contact Us
      • Link to Instagram @bardadmission
  • Campus Life sub-menuCampus Life
    • Living on Campus
      • Housing + Dining
      • Campus Resources
      • Get Involved on Campus
      • Visiting + Transportation
      • Athletics + Recreation
      • Montgomery Place Campus
      • Current Students
      • New Students
  • Civic Engagement sub-menuCivic Engagement
    • Bard CCE The Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) at Bard College embodies the fundamental belief that education and civil society are inextricably linked.

      Take action.
      Make an impact.

      • Get Involved
      • Engaged Learning
      • Student Leadership
      • Grow Your Network
      • About CCE
      • Our Partners
  • Newsroom sub-menuNews + Events
    • News + Events
      • Newsroom
      • Events Calendar
      • Press Releases
      • Office of Communications
    • Special Events
      • Commencement + Reunion
      • Fisher Center + SummerScape
      • Family and Alumni/ae Weekend
      • Athletic Events
    • Join the Conversation
      • Link to Facebook @bardcollegeny  Link to Twitter/X @bardcollege   Link to Instagram @bardcollege  Link to Threads @bardcollege  Link to YouTube @bardcollege

  • About Bard sub-menuAbout Bard
    • About Bard College
      • Bard History
      • Campus Tours
      • Employment
      • Visiting Bard
      • Support Bard
      • Inclusive Excellence
      • Sustainability
      • Title IX and Nondiscrimination
      • Board of Trustees
      • Bard Abroad
      • Open Society University Network
      • The Bard Network
  • Give
  • Search
Bard Middle Eastern Studies
Main Image for Events

Events

MES Menu
  • Requirements
  • Faculty
  • Languages
  • Study Abroad
  • Scholarly Resources
  • Students + Alumni/ae
  • Events
  • News
  • Home
Arabic and Hebrew language tables occur weekly during the semester. Join us for Hebrew every Monday at 6:00 p.m. in the President's Room at Kline, or for Arabic every Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. in Kline Commons. Middle Eastern Studies also sponsors special academic and social events and encourages students to attend other campus events relating to the Middle East.

Archive of Past Events

2025
  
2024
  
2023
  
2022
  
2021
  
2020
  
2019
  
2018
  
2017
  
2016
  
2015
  
2014
  
2013
  
2012
  
2009


2017

  Wednesday, December 13, 2017
Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Wednesday, December 6, 2017
Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Wednesday, November 29, 2017
Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Tuesday, November 21, 2017
Engaged Ethnography in Iraq with Kali Rubaii, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Kline French Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Kali Rubaii is Charlotte Newcomb Fellow at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her dissertation, Counterinsurgency and the Ethical Life of Material Things in Anbar Iraq, documents the impacts of the Global War on Terror on farming families in Iraq.

In 2014 and 2015, at the height of militia struggles among ISIS and other subnational militias over Anbar province, Kali lived and travelled with farming families as they traversed war-pocked landscapes to access their crops and livestock; sought alternative methods of conceiving children, fertilizing date trees, and supplementing soil; and interacted with militias, drones, and toxic military waste. She later conducted fieldwork with counterinsurgency operatives in the United States, Jordan, Denmark, and Kurdistan, who work frequently in Iraq.

In approaching the Global War on Terror as a concerted effort to preempt organized armed resistance by making Anbar’s social and physical landscapes docile, Kali’s ethnographic methods highlight the turmoil underlying a study of violence and harm. When we begin to examine a concept like war or counterterrorism, where do we find ourselves looking for answers? What does participant observation mean in a study of harm: to what degree does an ethnographer participate in harming and being harmed? What kind of conversation happens when we speak to people who kill the people we love? What is the role of fear in limiting our capacities to know things? And what are our obligations to distant or even unknown others over a lifetime?

The workshop will be informal, so students, faculty and staff interested are welcome to come (and bring your lunch!) for any amount of time they can. See you there!


  Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Wednesday, November 8, 2017
Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Monday, November 6, 2017
Feminisms in Post-Invasion Iraq: Between Militarization, NGOization and the Struggle for a Civil State
Zahra Ali
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University

Olin Humanities, Room 202  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk will explore Iraqi women’s social, political activism and feminisms relying on an in-depth ethnography of post-2003 women’s rights organizations and a detailed historical study of women’s social, economic and political experiences since the 1960s. Through a transnational/postcolonial feminist approach Ali will look particularly at the context following the US-led invasion and occupation and analyse the realities of Iraqi women’s lives, political activism and feminisms especially the challenges posed by sectarianism, militarism and “global” interferences.

Zahra Ali is a sociologist whose research explores dynamics of women and gender, social and political movements in relation to Islam(s) and the Middle East and to contexts of war and conflicts with a focus on contemporary Iraq. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers university. Her book “Women and Gender in Iraq: between Nation-building and Fragmentation” is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press (2018). She also edited Féminismes Islamiques, the first collection on Muslim feminist scholarship published in France (La Fabrique editions, 2012), and translated and published in German (Passagen Verlag, 2014).


This event is co-sponsored by Human Rights Project, the Sociology Program, and Gender and Sexuality Studies


  Wednesday, November 1, 2017
Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Wednesday, October 25, 2017
Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Thursday, October 19, 2017
Till we have built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City
Adina Hoffman 
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Award-winning essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman will discuss her book, Till We Have Built Jerusalem, which is a gripping and intimate journey into the lives of three very different architects who helped shape modern Jerusalem.  A powerfully written rumination on memory and forgetting, place and displacement, the book uncovers multiple layers of one great city's buried history as it asks what it means, in Jerusalem and everywhere, to be foreign and to belong. 
             
Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century, and, with Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which won the American Library Association's prize for the best Jewish book of 2011. The Los Angeles Times called her most recent book, Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, “brave and often beautiful,” and Haaretz described it as “a passionate, lyrical defense of a Jerusalem that could still be.” A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and one of the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell Literary Prizes, she divides her time between Jerusalem and New Haven.
 
 
Praise for Till We Have Built Jerusalem
“A fascinating synthesis that manages to distill biography, history, politics, aesthetics, religion and psychology into one illuminating, lively, witty text. This is one of the finest books I’ve ever read on the difficult, fragile arts of architecture and city-making.” - Phillip Lopate
 
“Adina Hoffman does for Jerusalem what great writers have done for Paris, London, and New York: with charm, skill, and originality, she weaves together a vivid social and architectural history of one of the fabled cities of the world.” - Vivian Gornick
 
“Adina Hoffman is that very rare writer who moves lightly across vast realms of knowledge, transmuting the most intransigent material into illuminating and affecting narratives. Here is a book about the making of a city that is as emotionally potent as it is intellectually bracing.” - Pankaj Mishra

For more info please contact [email protected]


  Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Hymns & Qualms
A reading by poet and translator Peter Cole (Yale University)
 

Weis Cinema  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
MacArthur winner Peter Cole reads from his new book, Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations. Praised for his “prosodic mastery” and “keen moral intelligence” (American Poets), and for the “rigor, vigor, joy, and wit” of his poetry (The Paris Review), Cole has created a vital, unclassifiable body of work. His poetry, writes Ben Lerner, “is remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigor with delight in surface, for how its prosody returns each abstraction to the body, linking thought and breath, metaphysics and musicality. Religious, erotic, elegiac, pissed off – the affective range is wide and the forms restless.”
 
“Hymns & Qualms is a majestic work, a chronicle of the imaginative life of a profoundly spiritual consciousness.”
—Harold Bloom
 
 
 
 
 
For more info please contact [email protected]
 


Monday, October 16, 2017
Promising Beginnings and Arrested Developments: Early Arabic Translations of the Novel in Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine
Maya Issam Kesrouany, Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Literature, New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD)
 

Olin Humanities, Room 202  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This talk looks at specific texts that borrow from three European novels through creative translation, effectively transforming the originals, but maintaining their original alienness from the new reading culture they find themselves in. Such creative appropriation can tell us a lot about the early borrowing of fictional narrative precisely as a form of negotiation and not full reproduction. Comparing the different ways translators engaged with the original novels also complicates what they thought of as “modern,” “fiction” and how they theorized the “worlds” of their works. 

Maya Issam Kesrouany, Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, is an assistant professor of Modern Arabic Literature at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). Her book manuscript "Prophetic Translation: The Promise of European Literature in the Egyptian Imaginary" is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. Her research interests include nationalism and political imaginaries; civil society formations and the public sphere; critical translation theory; the politics of language, literary form and genre. She has taught at Emory University, the American University of Beirut, and the American University of Sharjah.

co-sponsors: Literature Program and the Translation Initiative 


  Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Thursday, October 5, 2017
Muslims in Diaspora: Navigating the Politics of Old and New
Bard Hall (NYC)  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Juris Pupcenoks of Marist College will discuss his new book, "Western Muslims and Conflicts Abroad: Conflict Spillovers to Diasporas," which looks at the ways different Muslim immigrant communities respond to political upheaval and violence in their homelands and in their new communities. He will be in conversation with BGIA director James Ketterer.

This event is part of the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series, which is supported by Foreign Affairs. 

This event is free and open to the public by RSVP. 

*Please note this event will not be held at BGIA's main office*


  Wednesday, October 4, 2017
Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Monday, October 2, 2017
"Genocide Survivors into Religious Minorities: Armenians in the Turkish Republic"
Lerna Ekmekcioglu
Associate Professor of History, Massachussets Institute of Technology

Olin Humanities, Room 202  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Wednesday, September 20, 2017
Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Wednesday, September 6, 2017
Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Middle Eastern Studies 
Open House 
Kline, Faculty Dining Room  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Come celebrate the end of the year with fellow MESers. Meet faculty, hear about exciting new courses, study abroad programs, senior projects, and a number of incredible iniatives MES students are working on. Snacks will be served. All are welcome.


  Wednesday, May 10, 2017
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 3, 2017
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, May 1, 2017
Shafer House Social with Alaa Al-Aswany
Kick back after Advising Day and enjoy some snacks and conversation with Written Arts
Shafer House  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Monday, May 1, at 6:00 p.m., the Program in Written Arts welcomes all Bard students, faculty, and staff to an informal get-together celebrating our Spring 2017 distinguished writer in residence, the Egyptian novelist Alaa Al-Aswany, at the program's Shafer House headquarters on south campus opposite the Annandale Triangle. 

Come take a load off after your advising meetings to snack and relax with your student colleagues, Alaa, and other members of the Written Arts faculty. 


  Wednesday, April 26, 2017
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 19, 2017
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 12, 2017
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 5, 2017
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 3, 2017
Before the Arab Revolutions: Art, Dissent, and Diplomacy in Amman, Beirut, and Ramallah.
Hanan Toukan 
Brown University

Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This talk is about the relationship between contemporary art, dissent, cultural diplomacy and cultural politics in the Arab Middle East. Since the start of the Arab revolutionary process and the violence that has accompanied it, the culture and arts domain has come to play an ever more crucial role as mobilizer, witness, and archivist of historical events. As a result the domain has enjoyed an exponential growth in the technical and financial support it receives from US and EU funding bodies. This growth has provoked intense debates within policy circles and a plethora of academic literature on what the role of visual and cultural practices are and should be in violent warfare, political change, and the study of politics and culture in the region.

This talk will historicize and contextualize this phenomenon as its focus predates 2011 and grapples with it from its first appearance in the 1990s and until its consolidation in the aftermath of 9/11. Specifically the talk examines the ways in which transnational circuits of visual cultural production are related to how society makes, sees and experiences the political in art and its relevance to the wider publics in Jordan, Lebanon and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I address prevalent debates about the nature of the political in art as well as the role of art and the intellectual in political change. It shows that both are part and parcel of shifting structural dynamics in local and international politics that directly impact the production of culture and how different generations practice them, perceive them and process them. Hence this talk is not is not so much about “art”, as much as it is about the “artworld” from a local perspective, and how culture in it is produced in a global world. It is equally about some of the centers of power that fund and disseminate visual knowledge about the Middle East.

Hanan Toukan is Visiting Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Middle East Studies at Brown University.


This event is co-sponsored by the Human Rights Project and the Art History program

 


  Wednesday, March 29, 2017
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 29, 2017
A Conversation with Distinguished
Writer in Residence Alaa al-Aswany
moderated by Dinaw Mengestu
 

Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Wednesday, March 22, 2017
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 15, 2017
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 8, 2017
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 8, 2017
Home and the Thresholds of Exile in
Liwaa Yazji's Haunted
Shareah Taleghani, Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies & Arabic
Queens College-CUNY

Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Liwaa Yazji's debut film Haunted (Maskoon, 2014) documents the process through which a number of Syrians in the midst of armed conflict make the agonizing decision to leave their homes, join thousands of their fellow displaced citizens, and face an unknown future. Shaded with loss and ambivalence, the literal and figural border zones constructed in the film force the audience to contemplate the continually shifting meaning of home and exile, not just for the film’s participants, but for themselves.

This event is co-sponsored by the Human Rights Project


  Wednesday, March 1, 2017
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 1, 2017
Haunted
dir. Liwaa Yazji, Syria/Germany, 2014
112 mins, Arabic with English subtitles

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
In her first feature documentary film, Haunted (Maskoon), Syrian director Liwaa Yazji explores what it means to flee a war. Yazji meets friends and people previously unknown to her at their homes. Domiciles where they live now, or where they are yet to live. Spaces that have turned into a sought-after commodity. When the bombs arrive, their first instinct is to run away. Later, they remember that they didn’t turn back to capture their last memories of what they were leaving behind. They did not bid farewell to their homes, memories, photographs and identity of a life passed. Haunted is about the Syrian people’s relationship with their homes during the war. What is a home – in a physical and in a metaphorical sense? And how, if one dare ask, do they feel when they are forced to leave?

This event is co-sponsored by the Human Rights Project and the Center for Civic Engagement


  Wednesday, February 22, 2017
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, February 15, 2017
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

Monday, February 13, 2017
Dissent in Iran

Laura Secor
contributor to The New Yorker and
author of 

Children of Paradise
The Struggle for the Soul of Iran

 

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Wednesday, February 8, 2017
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 7, 2017
Running the from the Literary Past: The Case of Hebrew Literature
A conversation with Israeli-American Author, Ruby Namdar ("The Ruined House" - Winner of 2015 Sapir Prize, English translation due out in 2017) and Professor of Hebrew Literature Haim Weiss (Ben Gurion University of the Negev)
Olin LC 115  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This conversation, with a prize-winning Israeli-American novelist and a scholar of Hebrew literature, moderated by Shai Secunda (Bard, Religion and Jewish Studies) will consider universal literary themes of canon and breach, and reflect on the experience of trying to write a contemporary novel in a top-heavy literary tradition like Hebrew literature.


  Wednesday, February 1, 2017
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


Scholarly Resources

  • ArabLit
  • Jadaliyya
Bard College
30 Campus Road, PO Box 5000
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504-5000
Phone: 845-758-6822
Admission Email: [email protected]
Information For
Prospective Students
Current Employees
Alumni/ae 
Families
©2025 Bard College
Quick Links
Employment
Travel to Bard
Site Search
Support Bard
Bard IT Policies + Security
Bard has a long history of creating inclusive environments for all races, creeds, ethnicities, and genders. We will continue to monitor and adhere to all Federal and New York State laws and guidance.
Like us on Facebook
Follow Us on Instagram
Threads
Bluesky
YouTube