Archive of Past Events
2022
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Monday, November 7, 2022 Literature Program Salon
Elizabeth Holt, Associate Professor of Arabic,Co-Director, Middle Eastern Studies, Bard College Olin Language Center, Room 115 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Please join us for another Literature Program Salon where we’ll have the pleasure of discussing current research by Prof. Elizabeth Holt. When British Petroleum was looking to have their 1955 film The Third River translated into Arabic, they turned to Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, a Palestinian refugee who worked in Baghdad as an editor for the Iraq Petroleum Company's influential in-house industry and culture publications. Better remembered as a novelist, memoirist, painter, and translator of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury into Arabic, Jabra also advised the architects of networks of United States Cold War culture projects, such as Franklin Books and the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom, with his letters appearing frequently in the CCF's 1950s and 1960s archives. Constellating these sources, the production of a global boom in Faulknerian and Eliotic petro-modernism comes into view, allowing us to see how pipelines and energy infrastructures curate the global canon. All students interested in Literature are encouraged to attend! |
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Thursday, October 27, 2022 Arabs, Jews, and the Critique of Modernity
Professor Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth CollegeReem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:15 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Starting in the 1830s, Jews in Europe became prominent scholars of the Qur'an and early Islam. Emphasizing parallels between the Qur’an and rabbinic writings, they developed affirmations of Islam that differed considerably from their more negative views of Christianity. Their scholarship continued, albeit with some changes in tone, until the 1930s, and then migrated to other parts of the world. Theirs was a unique Orientalism that is recognized until today with having established the field of Islamic Studies and viewed Islam as a treasury of profound and helpful insights and as a signal of Judaism’s centrality in the construction of the West. “White Jesus, Black Jesus, Christian Jesus, Jewish Jesus” Sunday, October 30, 2022 at 4:00pm Sixth Street Community Synagogue, 325 E. 6th Street, New York, New York Was Jesus a Jew or a Christian? Theologians on both sides have depicted Jesus either as a pious Jew seeking to reform Judaism or as the first Christian who introduced unique ideas and a new way of being a religious person. The debate between Jewish and Christian theologians over the religious identity of Jesus grew in intensity throughout the course of the nineteenth century and played an important role in the Nazi period. My lecture will review both sides of the debate and ask where we stand in our contemporary debates, including over Jesus as a person of color. Does Christology change if Jesus was Jewish, Black, or Asian? Free and open to the public. |
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Thursday, September 29, 2022 Erased, _____ Ascent of the Invisible, طِرسْ، _____رحلة الصعود إلى المرئيّ
Film screening and discussion with director Ghassan HalawaniUpstate Films, Rhinebeck 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 “Thirty-five years ago, I witnessed the kidnapping of a man I know. He has disappeared since. Ten years ago, I caught a glimpse of his face while walking in the street, but I wasn’t sure it was him. Parts of his face were torn off, but his features had remained unchanged since the incident. Yet something was different, as if he wasn’t the same man.” Director Ghassan Halawani takes the viewer on a forensic chase, uncovering, layer by layer, the darkest chapters of Lebanese history on walls, in documents and urban architecture. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Sabine El Chamaa, filmmaker and a current CHRA research fellow. The event is free and open to the public. Copresented with the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Bard. Download: CHRA_Web_Poster_Ghassan_Halwani_v6.pdf |
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Tuesday, September 13, 2022 Human Rights Project Events: Eyal Weizman, Five or Six Doors
Campus Center, Multipurpose Room 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4During the pandemic, Forensic Architecture undertook a process of transformation. Rather than growing to meet the intensity of the challenges they faced, the agency instead decided to morph into an interlinking structure of smaller, situated, activist groups located in different parts of the world and working in solidarity with local political actors. This lecture will present some recent cases undertaken by these groups. Coincidentally, they had all to deal with doors: open when they needed to be closed, locked when they needed to be unlocked. These doors stand for the collapse of the social order which they promised to maintain, and point to systemic racism and the ghosts of our colonial past. Eyal Weizman is a professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and founding director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2010 he founded the research agency Forensic Architecture and has directed it ever since. Forensic Architecture is an interdisciplinary team of researchers that produce evidence for presentation in national and international courts, human rights forums, parliamentary inquiries, truth commissions, people’s tribunals, and also in art and cultural forums. |
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Wednesday, April 13, 2022 A Reading and Conversation with Iman Mersal
Campus Center, Weis Cinema 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet, essayist, translator and literary scholar, and Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the author of five books of Arabic poetry, selections from which have been translated into numerous languages. In English translation, her poems have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Parnassus, the Paris Review, the Nation, American Poetry Review, among others. A selection of Mersal’s poetry, entitled These Are Not Oranges, My Love, translated by the poet Khaled Mattawa, was published in 2008 (Sheep Meadow Press, NYC). Another selection is forthcoming in Spring 2022 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, translated by Robyn Creswell. Her most recent publications include Kayfa Talta’im: ‘An al-Umuma wa Ashbahiha (Kayfa Ta and Mophradat, 2017), translated into English by Robin Moger as How to Mend: Motherhood and its Ghosts (Kayfa Ta and Sternberg Press, 2018. Fi Athar Enayat al- Zayyat (In the Footsteps of of Enayat al-Zayyat, 2019) has been translated into French by Richard Jacquemond, as Sur les traces d’Enayat Zayyat, Actes Sud. The book was awarded the prestigious Shaykh Zayed award for literature in 2021. Readings will be in both Arabic and English and copies of How to Mend: Motherhood and its Ghosts will be available in both languages. The conversation will be moderated by Dina Ramadan. This event is co-sponsored by the Literature, Written Arts, and Gender and Sexuality Studies programs, the Human Rights Project, the Center for Curatorial Studies, the Bard Translation and Translatability Initiative, as well as the John Ashbery Poetry Series. Masks required. |
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Thursday, March 31, 2022 – Friday, April 1, 2022 Forms and Functions of Islamic Philosophy
with keynote sessions by Dr. Lara HarbOnline Event “Forms and Functions of Islamic Philosophy” seeks to highlight how Islamic philosophy (falsafa/ḥikma) was practiced “in conversation”—between scholars, with various audiences, and with different disciplines, approaches, and rhetoric. Islamic philosophy was composed not only in traditional forms of treatises and commentaries but also through narratives written in poetry and prose. For example, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī penned a panegyric poem written in Persian in praise of logic, physics, and metaphysics, alongside his many philosophical prose treatises. Ibn al-ʿArabī’s philosophical mysticism includes prose that reads as Aristotelian commentary alongside succinct poems highlighting his key philosophical concepts through mystical metaphors. In reference to Ibn Sīnā’s allegorical treatise, Ibn Tufayl’s famous Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān provides an intriguing narrative and philosophical thought experiment. What do story-telling, poetry, narrative, metaphor, and allegory reveal about the nature and purpose of philosophy? The conference is organized in conjunction with the “Islamic Philosophy in Conversation” working group. The conference aligns itself with the goals of the working group, and therefore seeks to highlight the work of a diverse group of scholars, including emerging scholars of Islamic philosophy, as well as those who identify as female, non-binary, or as belonging to a historically-marginalized group. On Thursday, March 31, from 5-6:30 pm, Dr. Lara Harb will lead a discussion of a primary source text (sections 38 and 39 from Averroes' commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics). If you would like to join the discussion, please contact Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed ([email protected]) for the meeting link. For the full program and details on how to attend see our website. |
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Monday, March 14, 2022 MES Open House
Reem-Kayden Center 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4Interested in moderating in Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College? Curious about the program? Come join us Monday, March 14 at 4:30 pm on the RKC 220 Terrace to find out more about our courses and faculty. Or just stop by for some sweets from Damascus Bakery in Brooklyn! Professors Dina Ramadan and Elizabeth Holt, MES codirectors. For more information please contact Dina at [email protected] or Beth at [email protected]. |
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Tuesday, February 22, 2022 Examining the Colonial Assemblage in Rural Palestine
Wassim GhantousOnline Event 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Over the last two decades, the Israeli regime of colonization and control in Palestine has multiplied significantly. In its expansion, public, hybrid, and civilian actors and institutions come to form an overall settler colonial assemblage. This talk aims to shed light on how such a diffuse regime of colonization operates today in rural areas of the West Bank by attending to Palestinians’ everyday encounters with the Israeli army, settler vigilante groups and organizations, and privatized security bodies and agents. In particular, the talk will highlight the modes of violence produced by the colonial assemblage, the ways in which they affect Palestinians’ everyday life, as well as Palestinians’ manoeuvring efforts to evade them as means to remain steadfast in their homeland. Wassim Ghantous is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University, New York. His academic research cuts across the fields of political geography and international relations, and the sub-fields of critical security studies, surveillance studies, settler colonial studies, and Palestine studies. Previous to his academic career, he worked in several Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, most notably at the BADIL Resource Center and B’Tselem. This lecture will be delivered virtually via Zoom. Please join via the link below. Join Zoom Meeting: https://bard.zoom.us/j/81354083579 Meeting ID: 813 5408 3579 |