Upcoming Events
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4/24Thursday5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Kline, College Room
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5/01Thursday5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Kline, College Room
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5/08Thursday5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Kline, College Room
Archive of Past Events
2017
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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-5Kali 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! |
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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 |
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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 |
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Monday, November 6, 2017 Feminisms in Post-Invasion Iraq: Between Militarization, NGOization and the Struggle for a Civil State
Zahra AliAssistant 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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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] |
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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 |
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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] |
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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 |
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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 |
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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-4Juris 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* |
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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 |
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Monday, October 2, 2017 "Genocide Survivors into Religious Minorities: Armenians in the Turkish Republic"
Lerna EkmekciogluAssociate Professor of History, Massachussets Institute of Technology Olin Humanities, Room 202 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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Wednesday, May 17, 2017 Middle Eastern Studies
Kline, Faculty Dining Room 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4Open House 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. |
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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 |
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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 |
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Monday, May 1, 2017 Shafer House Social with Alaa Al-Aswany
Kick back after Advising Day and enjoy some snacks and conversation with Written ArtsShafer 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. |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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Wednesday, March 29, 2017 A Conversation with Distinguished
moderated by Dinaw MengestuWriter in Residence Alaa al-Aswany Olin Humanities, Room 102 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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Wednesday, March 8, 2017 Home and the Thresholds of Exile in
Shareah Taleghani, Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies & ArabicLiwaa Yazji's Haunted 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 |
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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 |
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Wednesday, March 1, 2017 Haunted
dir. Liwaa Yazji, Syria/Germany, 2014112 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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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. |
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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 |