Archive of Past Events
2018
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Wednesday, December 19, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Monday, December 17, 2018 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Wednesday, December 12, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Monday, December 10, 2018 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Wednesday, December 5, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Tuesday, December 4, 2018 Naila and the Uprising: Screening and Discussion
Campus Center, Weis Cinema 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5Join us for a screening and discussion with Daniel Nerenberg, Ph.D., Communications Manager for Just Vision. Sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center and the Middle Eastern Studies Department at Bard College. Date: Tuesday, December 4th Time: 6:30 pm Location: Weis Cinema, Campus Center on Bard College campus (map) Naila and the Uprising is the newest documentary from Just Vision, the award-winning creators of Budrus and My Neighbourhood. Naila and the Uprising chronicles the remarkable journey of Naila Ayesh whose story weaves through the most vibrant, nonviolent mobilization in Palestinian history -- the First Intifada in the 1980s. When a nation-wide uprising breaks out in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, a young woman in Gaza must make a choice between love, family, and freedom. Undaunted, she embraces all three, joining a clandestine network of women in a movement that forces the world to recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination for the first time. You can watch the trailer here. Naila and the Uprising had it's world premiere in November 2017 at DOC NYC, followed by its International Premiere at IDFA and its Middle East Premiere at the Dubai International Film Festival in December. The film was then featured on opening night of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London on the occasion of International Women's Day and showcased at the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH) in Geneva to another sold-out audience. Since, the film has screened at the Seattle International Film Festival, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and numerous other festivals in the Netherlands, Italy, Brazil, the UK, Lebanon, Turkey and beyond. It has earned numerous awards including, Special Jury Mention for the Golden Butterfly Human Rights Award at the Movies that Matter Festival in the Hague, Special Jury Prize from the It's All True Documentary Festival in Brazil, the Justice Matters Award from Filmfest DC and both the Jury Award and Audience Award for Best Documentary from the Mizna Arab Film Festival. Free and Open to the Public |
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Monday, December 3, 2018 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Wednesday, November 28, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Monday, November 26, 2018 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Wednesday, November 21, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Monday, November 19, 2018 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Wednesday, November 14, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Tuesday, November 13, 2018 ‘Yearning to See You’: Friendship and Alliances between Iranian and Indian Zoroastrians
Dr. Daniel Sheffield, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton UniversityOlin Humanities, Room 203 4:45 pm – 6:15 pm EST/GMT-5 In 1478, an Indian Zoroastrian named Nariman Hoshang arrived in the village of Turkabad in central Iran, reconnecting the previously isolated Indian and Iranian Zoroastrian communities with one another. Over the course of the next three hundred years, dozens of letters were exchanged between the communities of Gujarat and Iran, along with gifts, ritual materials, and religious manuscripts. In this talk, I will examine the affective dimensions of friendship expressed through letters in constructing a Zoroastrian community. By situating the trade partnerships and networks of patronage that formed between Indian and Iranian Zoroastrians within the framework of friendship, I will try to sketch out new approaches to the formation of transregional communal identity in the pre-colonial period of Indian Ocean history. Finally, the talk will briefly discuss transformations in the connected ideas of friendship and sovereignty that ensued among Zoroastrian intellectuals of the early nineteenth century. |
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Monday, November 12, 2018 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Wednesday, November 7, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Monday, November 5, 2018 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Monday, November 5, 2018 Capitalism in Arabic | الرأسمالية بالعربية
Olin Language Center, Room 115 1:15 pm – 3:00 pm EST/GMT-5Please join the Middle Eastern Studies Department Panel on Capitalism in Arabic Panelists: Nader Atassi, History, Columbia Omar Cheta, History and MES, Bard Ziad Dallal, Arabic and MES, Bard Elizabeth Holt, Arabic and MES, Bard Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Anthropology and MES, Bard |
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Thursday, November 1, 2018 The Postcolony Is a Cold War Ruin
Bhakti Shringarpure, Assistant Professor of English, University of Connecticut and editor-in-chief of Warscapes magazineOlin Humanities, Room 203 5:35 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 The postcolony can be viewed as a Cold War ruin. As the Cold War unleashed onto the postcolonial world, it left behind abandoned bunkers, weapons wedged amongst weeds, obsolete computers, cracked and faded slabs of Brutalist buildings, tattered proxy war landscapes, desecrated monuments, and the tortured and debilitated body. But the ruin was not just physical; it was also an affective structure. It was the melancholy and anguish that comes from feeling ruined. As euphoric futures imagined by decolonial dreams were crushed by the Cold War, failure became a fixture within postcolonial ontology. Yet the connection between postcoloniality and the Cold War is not always made visible. If we were to apply what Svetlana Boym has called the “ruin gaze,” it would be possible to excavate the ways in which the Cold War has embedded material, corporeal and affective structures of these failed futures in the postcolony. Theorizing the postcolony as Cold War ruin moves away from indulgent nostalgia. Ruin work is active and enables reconstruction and excavation. This talk re-engages sites that embody such ruins - postcolonial literature of disillusionment, landscapes still riddled with landmines, leftover cars, phones and television sets, and delectable residues of secrets, rumors and conspiracies. The ruin, after all, half buries and half reveals. It is through this tension that new genealogies can emerge to claim that the postcolony was fundamentally shaped by Cold War dynamics. Bhakti Shringarpure is Assistant Professor of English at University of Connecticut, editor-in-chief of Warscapes magazine, and a graduate of Bard College. Her book Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital is forthcoming in 2019. |
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Wednesday, October 31, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, October 29, 2018 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, October 29, 2018 "Life-Affirming Endurance": Decolonial Feminisms in Iran and Beyond
Catherine Z. SamehUniversity of California, Irvine Olin Humanities, Room 102 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 The anti-colonial thrust of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Iran has been narrated largely through key male theorists and politicians, primarily Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Shariati. Decolonial scholarship tends to resurrect this voice through its often uncritical and romanticized engagement with Shariati as the sole anti-colonial voice of Iran. Inviting attention to Iranian women’s rights activists as theorists in their own right, this talk will elaborate an alternative decolonial voice, one characterized by decoloniality’s very commitment to gendered analysis and unrelenting challenge to binary ways of thinking. |
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Wednesday, October 24, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, October 22, 2018 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Wednesday, October 17, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, October 15, 2018 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Wednesday, October 10, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, October 8, 2018 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Tuesday, May 15, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Tuesday, May 8, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Tuesday, May 1, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Thursday, April 26, 2018 Middle Eastern Studies Documentary Film Festival
Preston 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4Wednesday, April 25 *Taste of Cement, dir. Ziad Kalthoum (2017) 85 min.youtube.com/watch?v=lO93i9OYZIM *Maid for Each, dir. Maher Abi Samra (2016) 77 min.youtube.com/watch?v=k6tBB24TZK4 Thursday, April 26 * A Feeling Greater than Love, Mary Jirmanus Saba (2017) 98 min.youtube.com/watch?v=hyAI4dWI0Js All screenings will take place in Preston Theater. This event is cosponsored by the Film Program and the Human Rights Project. For more information contact Dina Ramadan [email protected] |
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Wednesday, April 25, 2018 Middle Eastern Studies Documentary Film Festival
Preston 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4Wednesday, April 25 *Taste of Cement, dir. Ziad Kalthoum (2017) 85 min.youtube.com/watch?v=lO93i9OYZIM *Maid for Each, dir. Maher Abi Samra (2016) 77 min.youtube.com/watch?v=k6tBB24TZK4 Thursday, April 26 * A Feeling Greater than Love, Mary Jirmanus Saba (2017) 98 min.youtube.com/watch?v=hyAI4dWI0Js All screenings will take place in Preston Theater. This event is cosponsored by the Film Program and the Human Rights Project. For more information contact Dina Ramadan [email protected] |
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Tuesday, April 24, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Tuesday, April 17, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, April 16, 2018 An Undefined Line Between Celebration and Mourning in Post-Revolutionary Iran
Dr. Candance MixonOlin Humanities, Room 204 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Using some key concepts in Bruce Lincoln's Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion After September 11 (Chicago, 2003), this talk will examine commemorations of violent events in modern Iranian and sacred Shi’a history (such as the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Iran-Iraq War, and martyrdom of the family of the Prophet Muhammad). It reviews both Iranian and American reporting of holidays marked in the Islamic Republic of Iran to ask how the presentation of commemorations (especially in calendars, media, rituals) uses careful rhetoric and historical contextualization to walk the fine line between celebration and mourning or blur the line between nationalism and religious practice. |
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Tuesday, April 10, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Friday, April 6, 2018 Found in Translation: Archiving Modern Arab Art
Sarah Rogers and Dina RamadanOlin LC 118 10:00 am – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 10:00 am – 11:30 am Session I: Viewing the Exhibition 11:30 am – 1:00 pm Session II: Accounting for the June 1967 War In these workshops students will be reading and discussing primary documents in translation, in relation to artistic production from the period. Primary documents will include exhibition guest-book entries from the early 1930s, exhibition reviews from the 1950s, and an artistic manifesto written in response to the June 1967 Wa, as well as artists’ interviews and roundtables. All readings will be in English and will be sent to students in advance. Students can participate in one or both workshops. Please register by emailing Dina Ramadan [email protected] and state which session you wish to join. This event is cosponsored by the Center for Curatorial Studies, the Human Rights Project, and the Art History program. |
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Thursday, April 5, 2018 Manifestos, Debates, and Other Discursive Energies of Modern Arab Art
Sarah Rogers, coeditor of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary DocumentsCenter for Curatorial Studies, Room 102 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 This talk discusses the motivations and research and translation processes involved in the production of the forthcoming publication Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents. A compendium of critical art writings by 20th-century Arab intellectuals and artists, the publication brings together and translates into English, for the first time, manifestos, essays, transcripts of roundtable discussions, diary entries, exhibition guest-book comments, letters, and more. Traversing empires and nation-states, diasporas, and speculative cultural and political federations, these documents bring light to the formation of a global modernism, through debates on originality, public space, spiritualism and art, postcolonial exhibition politics, and Arab nationalism, among many other topics. Sarah Rogers is an independent scholar. In 2008, she earned her PhD from the History, Theory, and Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the dissertation “Postwar Art and the Roots of Beirut's Cosmopolitanism.” Her scholarship has been published by Parachute, Art Journal, and Arab Studies Journal. She is co editor of Arab Art Histories: The Khalid Shoman Collection (2014) and coeditor of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (forthcoming, Museum of Modern Art). She is a founding member and president elect of the Association of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Turkey, and Iran. Her current manuscript examines modern art in Lebanon within the international context of the cold war. Workshop Found in Translation: Archiving Modern Arab Art Sarah Rogers and Dina Ramadan Friday, April 6, 2018, Olin LC 118 10:00 am – 11:30 am Session I: Viewing the Exhibition 11:30 am – 1:00 pm Session II: Accounting for the June 1967 War In these workshops students will be reading and discussing primary documents in translation, in relation to artistic production from the period. Primary documents will include exhibition guest-book entries from the early 1930s, exhibition reviews from the 1950s, and an artistic manifesto written in response to the June 1967 War, as well as artists’ interviews and roundtables. All readings will be in English and will be sent to students in advance. Students can participate in one or both workshops. Please register by emailing Dina Ramadan [email protected] and state which session you wish to join. This event is cosponsored by the Center for Curatorial Studies, the Human Rights Project, and the Art History Program. |
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Tuesday, April 3, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Tuesday, March 27, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Tuesday, March 20, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Tuesday, March 13, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Tuesday, March 6, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Monday, March 5, 2018 Shared Activities and Communal Bodies: Sports in Late Ottoman Istanbul
Murat C. YıldızAssistant Professor of History, Skidmore College Olin Humanities, Room 203 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 By the early 20th century, gymnastics, athletics, and team sports, particularly soccer, had developed into a wildly popular set of activities and pastime for many residents of the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Because of the global popularity of sports during the period and the diverse threads through which they spread throughout Istanbul, sports were envisioned as a shared civic activity. At the same time, young men from an expanding middle class treated these civic activities as the means through which they could build a fraternity of like-minded (and bodied) men from the same ethnoreligious community. Sports clubs, which were almost exclusively male spaces, were ethnically and religiously homogeneous private institutions. Muslims, Christians, and Jews joined them in order to train their bodies, exercise, and compete, as well as to socialize and build ethnic-based solidarity. Multilingual periodicals projected both civic and ethnoreligious ties, too. Together, the institutions and discourses of sports demonstrate that civic and exclusive ties were often mutually constitutive rather than exclusive in the Ottoman Empire. Drawing on a diverse array of primary sources, such as sports club records, memoirs, novels, government reports, newspapers, periodicals, and unpublished letters, written in Ottoman Turkish, Armenian, Armeno-Turkish, French, English, German, and Greek, this talk will focus on the implications of using sports as a lens through which to study urban centers, communal boundaries, public space, and fun in the Middle East. Murat C. Yıldız is assistant professor in the department of history at Skidmore College. He is currently working on a book manuscript that focuses on the making of a shared physical culture among Muslims, Christians, and Jews in late Ottoman Istanbul. |
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Friday, March 2, 2018 Working Papers: On Historical Method and Innovation
Finberg Library 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5Ebony Coletu Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies, Penn State “Chief Sam and the Undocumented Origins of African American Migration to Ghana” Carina Ray Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies, Brandeis University “Africa as a Refuge” Abosede George Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies, Barnard College “Death of a Building: Unearthing the Politics of Modernity and Migration Histories in Architectural Conservation Projects in Lagos” Please join us for the workshop and lunch. Due to limited space, RSVP is required. RSVP to [email protected]. |
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Tuesday, February 27, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Monday, February 26, 2018 A Reading by Karan Mahajan
The Bard Fiction Prize winner and National Book Award finalist Karan Mahajan reads from his work.Campus Center, Weis Cinema 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5 On Monday, February 26, at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center, novelist Karan Mahajan reads from his work. Presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, and followed by a Q&A, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. Karan Mahajan studied English and economics at Stanford University before earning an M.F.A. in fiction from the Michener Center for Writers. His first novel, Family Planning (2012), was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs (2016), won the Bard Fiction Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, and the NYPL Young Lions Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, in addition to being named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Esquire, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and others. In 2017, Mahajan was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. PRAISE FOR KARAN MAHAJAN “The Association of Small Bombs is wonderful. It is smart, devastating, unpredictable, and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout. . . . Mahajan is the real deal.” —Fiona Maazel, New York Times Book Review “A voracious approach to fiction-making . . . Mahajan has a cinematic attunement to the spectacle of disaster.” —New Yorker “Mahajan is an incredibly assured stylist. . . . Hugely promising.” —Jay McInerney, Daily Beast “Even when handling the darkest material or picking through confounding emotional complexities, Mahajan maintains a light touch and a clarity of vision.” —London Review of Books “Mahajan . . . has already developed an irresistible voice with a rich sense of humor fueled by sorrow.” —Washington Post Book World |
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Tuesday, February 20, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Tuesday, February 13, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Tuesday, February 6, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Tuesday, January 30, 2018 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |