Past Friday Lectures

September 23, 2022 -  Orit Bashkin (University of Chicago)
"Ottoman Purim: Jewish Memories of an Ottoman Past"

October 14, 2022 - Abdel Razzaq Takriti (University of Houston)
"Reframing Palestine: Towards an Anti-Colonial History "

October 21, 2022 - Heba Gowayed (Boston University)
"Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential"

November 4, 2022 - Mohamad Ballan (Stony Brook University)
"Borderland Hybridities: Genealogical Politics and the Racialization of Religion in Nasrid Granada"

November 11, 2022 - Fahad Bishara (University of Virginia) 
"Monsoon Voyagers: The Indian Ocean and Other Arab Worlds"

January 6, 2023 - Hassan (Husni) Haddad Memorial Lecture - Hanan Hammad  (Texas Christian University)
“Layla Murad: The Jewish-Muslim Star of Egypt”

January 27, 2023 - Dana Sajdi (Boston College)
"A Flower from Every Meadow: The History Collection from the Library of Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar of Acre"

March 31, 2023 - Amidu Sanni (Fountain University)
"The Arabic-Islamic Heritage of Sudanic Africa: Old Sources and New Challenges of a Documentary Tradition"

April 7, 2023 - Farouk Mustafa Memorial Lecture on Modern Arabic Literature -  Samah Selim (Rutgers University)
"A Tale of Two Cities: the Scales of Literary History and the Ends of Comparison"

April 14, 2023 - Charles Hirschkind (University of California, Berkeley)
"Divine Presences and Absences in the Anthropology of Islam"

April 28, 2023 - Ziad Fahmy (Cornell University)
"Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in Modern Egypt"

September 24, 2021 -  Ghassan Moussawi (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
"Beirut, Disrupted: On Fractal Orientalism, Queer Strategies, and Recursive Time"

October 15, 2021 - Mona El-Ghobashy (New York University)
"The Anthropologist as Reader"

November 12, 2021 - Ziad Elmarsafy (King's College London) 
"’Whose Son Are You?’ Saud al-Sanousi’s Treatise on Fathers"

November 19, 2021 - Febe Armanios  (Middlebury College)
"Challenging Archives, Paradigms, and Perceptions: Coptic Egyptian History in the Ottoman Period"

January 21, 2022 - Corisande Fenwick (University College London)
"How to found an Islamic State: the Idrīsids and the transformation of medieval Morocco in the early middle ages"

February 4, 2022 - Devin Stewart (Emory University)
"Uses of the Qur'an for Practical Purposes"

April 8, 2022 - Monica Ringer (Amherst College)
"God's Intent: Islamic Modernism Between Historicism and Re-Enchantment"

April 29, 2022 - Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (Bard College)
"Livability under Siege: Infrastructure's Everyday Worlds"

May 20, 2022 - Hassan (Husni) Haddad Memorial Lecture - Carmen Gitre (Virginia Tech)
“Playing a Part: Twentieth-Century Egyptian Theater and the Politics of Performance”

September 25 -  Naghmeh Sohrabi (Brandeis University)
"Does the 1979 Revolution in Iran Still Matter?A Conversation with Naghmeh Sohrabi, Moderated by Alireza Doostdar"

October 23 - Alyssa Gabbay (UNC Greensboro)
"The Anthropologist as Reader"

November 6 - Giancarlo Casale (European University Institute) 
"Flat-earthers in the Observatory: Mathematical Cartography and the Destruction of Takiyuddin's Rasathane (1573-1583)"

November 20 - Zeynep Tufekci  (University of North Carolina)

January 22 - Nina Safran  (Penn State University)
"The Authority of a Fatwa: Ibn al-Hajj's Opinion on the Construction of New Houses of Worship"

February 19 - Scott Lucas (University of Arizona)
"A Guide that is Clear to Zaydi Tafsir: An Introduction to Qur'an Commentaries from northern Yemen"

April 9 - Farouk Mustafa Memorial Lecture on Modern Arabic Literature - Barbara Romaine (Villanova University)
"On Not Getting it Right: Literary Translation as a Deliberately Imperfect Art"

April 23 - Malika Dekkiche  (University of Antwerp)
“A World of Kings and Realms”

May 21 - Hilary Kilpatrick
"Christian Doctors and Secretaries as Poets in Ottoman Syria (17th and 18th centuries)"

November 22 - Asli Bali (UCLA) 
“From Revolution to Devolution? Reforming the State in the Modern Middle East”

January 24 - Husni Haddad Lecture - Samer El Saber  (Stanford University)
"Palestinian Performance on the Theatrical Front"

February 7 - Dimitri Gutas (Yale University)
"Graeco-Arabic Studies beyond Greek and Arabic: Integrating the Western Humanities Canon"

February 21 - Asli Igsiz (New York University)
"Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange"

September 27 -  Khaled Furani (Tel Aviv University)
"Recovering Khalifa for an Ethics of Fragility: Fragments of a Palestinian Challenge from Within the Leviathan"

November 1 - Brinkley Messick (Columbia University)
"The Anthropologist as Reader"

March 6 - Rochelle Terman (University of Chicago)
"Islamophobia and Media Portrayals of Women’s Rights: A Computational Text Analysis of U.S. News Coverage

April 3 - Shi’a Studies Symposium - POSTPONED 

April 10 - Farouk Mustafa Memorial Lecture on Modern Arabic Literature - Samah Selim (Rutgers University) - POSTPONED

April 17 - Satyel Larson (Princeton University)- POSTPONED

April 24 - James Montgomery (University of Cambridge)
"The Classical Arabic Hunting Poem: A Library of Arabic Literature Project"- POSTPONED

May 8 - Aynur de Rouen (Binghamton University - SUNY)
"The Story of the Vera Beaudin Saeedpour Kurdish Library & Museum Collection" (Co-sponsored by Kurdish Circle)

May 15 - Güneş Murat Tezcür (University of Central Florida)
"Kurdish Studies in North America"" (Co-sponsored by Kurdish Circle)

May 29 - Orit Bashkin (University of Chicago)
"An Old New World: Modernity, Science, and New Islamic Cosmology"