About the Speaker

Isabella Hammad was born in London. Her writing has appeared in Conjunctions, The Paris Review, The New York Times and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and a 2019 O. Henry Prize. Her first novel The Parisian (2019) won a Palestine Book Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors in the UK. She is also the author of the novel “Enter Ghost”, which won the 2024 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and “Recognizing the Stranger”(Grove Atlantic, 2024), which was long-listed for the 2024 NBCC Award for Criticism. Hammad was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, and has received literary fellowships from MacDowell and the Lannan Foundation.

Hammad will be signing copies of her books beginning at 5:00 PM before the lecture titled “Standing on the Rubble”.

About the Lecture 

The Mahmoud Darwish Lecture is an annual distinguished speaker lecture sponsored by CMES and its New Directions in Palestinian Studies research initiative.

Please join us for a talk by Rune Nyord, Associate Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology at Emory University, on Wednesday, February 19, at 5:30 p.m. in Rhode Island Hall (Room 108). He will discuss topics from his forthcoming book Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Paradise lost? The past, present, and future of the ancient Egyptian afterlife

The ancient Egyptians have been famous for their elaborate afterlife beliefs since long before the decipherment of hieroglyphs. The details are still familiar: The Egyptians believed they would be judged after death, leading either to damnation or to salvation and eternal life as reward for a virtuous life on earth. As I show in my new book Yearning for Immortality, the similarity of this picture to popular early modern and 19th-century versions of Christian doctrine is no accident, but the result of often quite systematic efforts to interpret Egyptian religion in ways that made sense to European scholars and their readers. Moreover, these efforts can be traced almost seamlessly both before and after Champollion’s decipherment of the hieroglyphic script, contradicting the widespread Egyptological idea of the decipherment marking a new, entirely empirical approach to the ancient culture. If the model still prevalent in Egyptology and popular culture alike was thus developed without input from ancient Egyptian sources on anything other than a surface level, where does that leave the study of Egyptian mortuary religion and funerary culture today? And how might we best go about exploring this central cultural phenomenon in the future?

Rune Nyord is Associate Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology at Emory University, where he is also Director of the Program in Ancient Mediterranean Studies. His research focuses on conceptions and experiences of images and personhood especially in funerary culture, as well as the history and concepts of the discipline of Egyptology. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of several books, the most recent being the monographs Seeing Perfection: Ancient Egyptian Images beyond Representation (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Made Possible by the Peter Green Lectureship Fund on the Modern Middle East
Cosponsors:
 Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women

About the Event:
A panel conversation on the release of “Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe” (University of Edinburgh Press, 2024) with editors Tunay Altay, Nadje Al-Ali, and Katharina Galor, and panelist Elizabeth Berman.

About the Book:
“Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe” provides an empirically grounded exploration of different case studies on anti-LGBTQ and anti-gender mobilizations of the far-right in Europe and the Middle East. The contributions engage with multilayered histories of gender and sexuality politics that connect the Middle East and Europe, informed by histories of colonialism, racism, and border controls. A second, underlying objective of this volume is to contribute to decolonized knowledge productions by de-centering Europe and simultaneously de-exceptionalizing the Middle East. The contributors commit to respecting the heterogeneity and complexity of these regions by focusing on grounded and life experiences. Ultimately, this volume illustrates a conceptualization of the broad spectrum of far-right politics and queer feminist critiques as manifested in a wide array of contexts, including academia, politics and everyday lives.

About the Speakers:
Nadje Al-Ali is Robert Family Professor of International Studies and professor of anthropology and Middle East studies. Her main research interests revolve around feminist activism and gendered mobilization, mainly with reference to Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and the Kurdish political movement. Her publications include What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (2009, University of California Press, co-authored with Nicola Pratt); Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (2007, Zed Books), and Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East(Cambridge University Press 2000.

Tunay Altay is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology and gender studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. His research focuses on queer migration and sexual politics in Germany, Turkey, and the broader contexts of Europe and the Middle East. He has published in top-ranked journals, including Sexualities and Ethnic and Racial Studies. He co-chairs the Gender and Sexuality Research Network at the Council for European Studies.

Elizabeth Berman is a Ph.D. student in the department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She was a Fulbright scholar and lecturer at Humboldt, where she taught on topics ranging from queer theoretical philosophies of death and reproduction to Germany’s imperial history and the afterlives of the Shoah. In her research and teaching, she interrogates theories of trauma, repair, and disability through engagement with postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories; psychoanalysis; and philosophies of technology.

Katharina Galor is the Hirschfeld Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies at Brown, and an affiliate member of the Center of Middle East Studies and Urban Studies. She has published widely on Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian visual and material culture, from antiquity through present times. Among her books are Finding Jerusalem: Archaeology between Science and Ideology (University of California Press, 2017), The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press, 2000; co-authored with Sa’ed Atshan) ), and Jewish Women: Between Conformity and Agency(Routledge, 2024).

University of Edinburgh press discount code NEW30

About the Event
This talk draws on Prof. Mostafa Minawi’s latest book , Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialist and the End of Empire (Stanford University Press), which offers an intimate history of the empire following the rise and fall of a generation of Arab-Ottoman imperialists living in Istanbul. He shows how these men and women negotiated their loyalties and guarded their privileges through a microhistorical study of the changing social, political, and cultural currents between 1878 and the First World War. He invites us to reconsider current tragedies in the Middle East and the massive population displacement in Syria, Turkey, and Palestine in the context of a long multi-cultural history of intimacies amongst the regions’ populations who converged in the former imperial capital, Istanbul.

Drawing on archival records, newspaper articles, travelogues, personal letters, diaries, photos, and interviews, Losing Istanbulshows how the loyalties of these imperialists were questioned and their ethnic identification weaponized. As the once diverse empire comes to an end, they are forced to give up their home in the imperial capital. An alternative history of the last four decades of the Ottoman Empire, Losing Istanbulframes global pivotal events through the experiences of Arab-Ottoman imperial loyalists who called Istanbul home, on the eve of a vanishing imperial world order.

About the Speaker
Mostafa Minawi is an associate professor of history and the director of Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies at Cornell University. His first book, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy from the Sahara to the Hijaz (Stanford University Press, 2016), was translated into Turkish and Arabic, and his latest, Losing Istanbul, was the co-winner of the Albert Hourani Book Prize in 2023 and was translated to Turkish and is currently being translated to Arabic. He works on questions of imperialism, race, and belonging in Ottoman spaces from Istanbul to the Horn of Africa. He is currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center, working on his latest project on Ottoman-Ethiopian relations in the context of intensified inter-imperial competition in the Horn of Africa.

Host and moderator:
Faiz Ahmed is the Joukowsky Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Brown University. He specializes in the late Ottoman Empire, legal and constitutional history, and the historical interconnectivity of modern world regions, from the Middle East and South Asia to the Americas.

Jennifer Johnson is an Associate Professor of History at Brown University. Her research and teaching focus on the Maghreb, decolonization, state building, public health, gender and modern African History.

Cosponsors
Department of History

Made Possible by the Peter Green Lectureship Fund on the Modern Middle East

(Lunch provided)

Smuggling is typically thought of as furtive and hidden, taking place under the radar and beyond the reach of the state. But in many cases, governments tacitly permit illicit cross-border commerce, or even devise informal arrangements to regulate it. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the borderlands of Tunisia and Morocco, Max Gallien explains why states have long tolerated illegal trade across their borders and develops new ways to understand the political economy of smuggling. His book, “Smugglers and States – Negotiating the Maghreb at its Margins” examines the rules and agreements that govern smuggling in North Africa, tracing the involvement of states in these practices and their consequences for borderland communities. It demonstrates that, contrary to common assumptions about the effects of informal economies, smuggling can promote both state and social stability. States not only turn a blind eye to smuggling, they rely on it to secure political acquiescence and maintain order, because it provides income for otherwise neglected border communities. More recently, however, the securitization of borders, wars, political change, and the pandemic have put these arrangements under pressure. Gallien explores the renegotiation of the role of smuggling, showing how stability turns into vulnerability and why some groups have been able to thrive while others have been pushed further to the margins.

Audience Q & A will follow.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Max Gallien is a political scientist specialising in the politics of informal and illegal economies, the political economy of taxation and the modern politics of the Middle East and North Africa. He is a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and a Research Lead and the International Centre for Tax and Development. He is the author of “Smugglers and States – Negotiating the Maghreb at its Margins” (Columbia University Press, 2024).

Pulitzer Prize-Winning author Nathan Thrall will discuss his book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.”

About the Book
Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for the school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem.

Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge: a kindergarten teacher and a mechanic who rescue children from the burning bus; an Israeli army commander and a Palestinian official who confront the aftermath at the scene of the crash; a settler paramedic; ultra-Orthodox emergency service workers; and two mothers who each hope to claim one severely injured boy.

Immersive and gripping, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine that offers a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.

About the Author
Nathan Thrall received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” (Metropolitan Books, 2023). The book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, Time, The Economist and fifteen other publications. Thrall is also the author of the critically acclaimed essay collection “The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine” (Metropolitan Books, 2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books and been translated into more than twenty languages.

Thrall has received grants and fellowships from the Open Society Foundations, Middlebury College Language Schools, and The Writers’ Institute. His commentary is often featured in print and broadcast media, including the Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Democracy Now!, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, PRI, Reuters, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. 

Thrall is the former director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, where from 2010 until 2020 he covered Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel’s relations with its neighbors.

Please join us for this book launch event, featuring Prof. Amer Meziane, “The States of the Earth: A Conversation About How the Disenchantment of Empires Led to the Climate Crisis”

in conversation with Holly Case (Professor of European History), Bathsheba Demuth (Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society, Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative), Leela Gandhi (Director of the Pembroke Center, John Hawkes Professor of the Humanities and English), Adi Ophir (Visiting Professor of Humanities and Middle East Studies), Thangam Ravindranathan (Professor of French and Francophone Studies) and David Wills (Professor of French and Francophone Studies) [moderator] on Friday, October 4 at 4pm in Rm 110 at Andrews House, 13 Brown St. 

Did disenchantment lead to climate change? The States of the Earth argues that European empires have become secular as they were entering the age of coal and using orientalism as a way of racializing colonized subjects. While industrial States started colonizing parts of Asia and Africa in the aftermath of the French Revolution, massive conversion of natives to Christianity morphed into the civilizing mission. The book contends that “the critique of Heaven has overturned the Earth” through empire and racial capitalism. Our globalized civilization has not been able to get rid of Heaven but has decided to look for it on Earth by accumulating growth through the devastation of nature. Is the “secular age” an age of coal? Is the Anthropocene, a Secularocene? Far from defending a return to religion against a disenchanted modernity, this book sketches a new materialist of critique of religious formations, suggesting that they might partly be seen as effects of imperiality and secularization once the latter is not reduced to a mere decline of religion or the sacred. Religions themselves have adapted to a world in which steam and railways were sometimes considered as divine.

Mohamed Amer Meziane holds a PhD in Philosophy and Intellectual History from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. After a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Columbia University’s Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, he joined Brown University as an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies, with an affiliation with the Center for Middle East Studies. He is the author of The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization. Winner of an Albertine Prize for non-fiction in 2023, the book was published in English in April 2024 by Verso Books, and has been reviewed in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

New Directions in Palestinian Studies at Brown University is proud to host Palestinian novelist and poet, Ibrahim Nasrallah and Professor of Arabic Literature, Huda Fakhreddine, who will jointly deliver the inaugural Mahmoud Darwish Lecture, “Palestinian: Every time They Erase us, We Become Clearer.”

Launching their forthcoming limited-edition chapbook, “Palestinian” (World Poetry Books), Nasrallah and Fakhreddine will present a bilingual poetry reading followed by a conversation in which they reflect on their collaboration and discuss poetry, translation, history, and writing in a time of genocide.

“Palestinian” can be purchased here. $10 from the sale of each copy ordered before October 1 will be donated to KinderUSA, the leading American Muslim organization focused on the health and well-being of Palestinian children.

About the Speakers
Ibrahim Nasrallah is a poet and novelist; to date he has published 15 poetry collections and 25 novels, including 15 novels within the project “The Palestinian Tragicomedy” covering 250 years of modern Palestinian history. He has won several awards, including The Arabic Booker for his novel “The Second War of the Dog,”and the Jerusalem Prize for Culture. He succeeded in summiting Mount Kilimanjaro in a venture with two Palestinian amputee adolescents and wrote about this journey the novel “The Spirits of Kilimanjaro,” which was awarded the Katara Prize for Arabic Novels. He won the Katara Prize again for his novel “A Tank Under the Christmas Tree.” His work has been translated into many languages and has been published in more than 40 editions.

Huda Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of “Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition” (Brill, 2015) and “The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice” (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and the co-editor of “The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry” (Routledge, 2023). Her book of creative non-fiction titled “Zaman s̩aghīr taḥt shams thāniya” (“A Brief Time Under a Different Sun”) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut, in 2019. Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Asymptote, and Middle Eastern Literatures, among many others. She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.

Hosted by Beshara Doumani, Mahmoud Darwish Professor in Palestinian Studies.

“A tour de force of formal, conceptual, and historiographical innovation, not to mention ethical creativity. This work is a manifestoof repair in times of unconscionable violence.”- Leela Gandhi

Dear friends and colleagues,

Please join us in celebrating the launch of Professor Ariella Aïsha Azoulay latest book The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World (Verso, 2024), on Friday September 20th at Pembroke Hall, Room 305, from 10:00 to 18:00.

16 artists and scholars across departmental and disciplinary affiliations will be engaging with the 16 open letters/chapters composing the book, in the form of epistolary/theoretical responses, narrative and historical speculations, anticolonial imaginaries, and more. The symposium will consist of several panels and conclude in a conversation/Q&A with Professor Azoulay, followed by a book signing.

We look forward to seeing you there, and please stay tuned for the full schedule.

About the Event
A talk by Prof. Adam Mestyan (Duke University) about his book, “Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East”(Princeton University Press, 2023). Hosted by Faiz Ahmed, Joukowsky Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, and in conversation with Tiraana Bains, Assistant Professor of History, Prof. Mestyan will argue that the concepts of new imperial history better describe and explain state-making among the post-Ottoman Arab peoples than the old national, imperial, colonial, and postcolonial vocabularies. He will introduce the main terms in the book, such as recycling empire, governing without sovereignty, local states, imperial constitutionalism, and modular (federative) state-making, and then apply this vocabulary to the story of the State of Syria’s formation in the 1920s under the League of Nations class “A” French mandate. Use Discount Code MAK30 for 30% off “Modern Arab Kingship.”

About the Speaker
Adam Mestyan is associate professor of history at Duke University and the director of the Duke Middle East Studies Center and the Duke Islamic Studies Center. Most recently, he was a member in the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). He is the author of “Arab Patriotism” (2017), “Primordial History” (2021), and “Modern Arab Kingship”(2023), and the lead PI of the Digital Cairo and Jara’id digital humanities projects.

About the Host
Faiz Ahmed  is the Joukowsky Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Brown University, where he specializes in the late Ottoman Empire, legal and constitutional history, and the modern Middle East.

About the Commentator
Tiraana Bains is an Assistant Professor of History. Her research is focused on state-formation and ideologies of imperialism across the British Empire in the eighteenth century.

Cosponsors
Department of History

___________

Made Possible by the Peter Green Lectureship Fund on the Modern Middle East

About the Event
In 1896 Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II issued a decree that allowed Ottoman Armenians - and only Ottoman Armenians - to emigrate on the condition that they expatriate and never return. A key step in this process was sitting for a photograph. While these photographs look like family portraits and were often produced by professional Armenian studio photographers, they are binding legal documents of exclusion. These photographic subjects were no longer Ottoman subjects. As emigrants left on steamships from ports on the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, their likenesses entered police files in the empire’s capital, Constantinople where I was to encounter them more than a century later in the Ottoman state archives. Portraits of Unbelonging is a history of mass migration told on an intimate scale that interrogates nationality and subjecthood and the rise of the document-based global security regimes that govern citizenship and mobility today. Drawing from this research, in this talk Prof. Gürsel will trace the story of one family to highlight the gap between the law as it is pronounced by a sovereign and as it is experienced by individuals, families and communities.

About the Speaker
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a media anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (University of California Press, 2016, ISBN 9780520286375), an ethnography of the international photojournalism industry in the 21st century. She is also the director of Coffee Futures (2009), an award-winning ethnographic film that explores contemporary Turkish politics through the prism of the everyday practice of coffee fortune telling. Her current projects investigate the emergence of the global surveillance regimes policing mobility and nationality and the critical role of photography in this history. Her article, “Classifying the Cartozians: Rethinking the Politics of Visibility Alongside Ottoman Subjecthood and American Citizenship,” was awarded a 2023 Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association Article Prize.

This event has now been changed to a webinar. The author will be in conversation with Professor Beshara Doumani, Mahmoud Darwish Chair in Palestinian Studies

About the Book
Transnational Palestine repositions the Palestinian struggle to return to Palestine from 1948 to 1925, when British Mandate forces began unlawfully denying tens of thousands of Palestinian migrants in the Americas their legally protected rights to Palestinian nationality. It therefore simultaneously repositions the exceptional treatment of Palestine in international law from 1948 to the early years of Britain’s thirty-year occupation of Palestine. But in elucidating these historical precedents to 1948, Transnational Palestine shows that the transnational effort to defend the rights of Palestinians also began well before the Nakba. Those migrants who, as of 1925, were left stateless nationals of Palestine across the Americas came together and protested the British policy, firmly demanding their rights to Palestinian nationality in hundreds of periodicals and petitions that reached the desks of European colonial officials and Palestinian nationalists alike.

Transnational Palestine was the winner of the 2023 Palestine Book Awards, and of the 2023 Nikki Keddie Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association (MESA)

About the Author
Nadim Bawalsa is a historian of modern Palestine and author of Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948 (2022), winner of the 2023 Nikkie Keddie book award by the Middle East Studies Association and the 2023 Palestine Book Award. Bawalsa is currently the associate editor for the Journal of Palestine Studies. Previously, he was an instructor of History in New York City before serving as commissioning editor at al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. His other writings have appeared in the Jerusalem Quarterly, NACLA Report on the Americas, the Journal of Palestine Studies, al-Shabaka, and in two edited volumes by Routledge on the Middle East mandates and diaspora/migration studies. Bawalsa earned a PhD in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University in 2017, and an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University in 2010. He currently resides in Amman, Jordan.

About the Event
Contrary to the presumption that literary nationalism in the Global South emerged through contact with Europe alone, “Reading across Borders” demonstrates how the cultural forms of Iran and Afghanistan as nation-states arose from their shared Persian heritage and cross-cultural exchange in the twentieth century. In this presentation, Aria Fani will chart the individuals, institutions, and conversations that made this exchange possible, detailing the dynamic and interconnected ways Afghans and Iranians invented their modern selves through new ideas about literature. Fani will illustrate how voluntary and state-funded associations of readers helped formulate and propagate “literature” as a recognizable notion, adapting and changing Persian concepts to fit this modern idea. Focusing on early twentieth-century periodicals with readers in Afghan and Iranian cities and their diaspora, the book exposes how nationalism intensified—rather than severed—cultural contact among two Persian-speaking societies amidst the diverging and competing demands of their respective nation-states. This interconnected history was ultimately forgotten, shaping many of the cultural disputes between Iran and Afghanistan today. 

About the Speaker
Aria Fani is an assistant professor of Persian and Iranian studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. He currently serves as the deputy editor of Iranian Studies and co-investigator of the Translation Studies Hub at the UW. He is the author of “Reading Across Borders: Afghans, Iranians and Literary Nationalism” (University of Texas, 2024).

About the Hosts and Commentators
Faiz Ahmed, Joukowsky Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History
Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities, Professor of History and Religious Studies
Michelle Quay, Lecturer in Persian

Co-Sponsors
Department of Comparative Literature
Department of History
Department of Religious Studies
Islam and the Humanities Initiative
S axena Center for Contemporary South Asia

Join the Watson Institute and Orit Bashkin for an informal discussion on the current events in Israel-Gaza.

Orit Bashkin is the Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Chicago.  She is a historian who works on the intellectual, social and cultural history of the modern Middle East.

Moderated by Faiz Ahmed, Joukowsky Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History

This event is for students, staff and faculty.

Brown University - Please RSVP at the link here. Registration is required and limited.

RISD - Please RSVP at the link here. Registration is required and limited.

See the listing of other current events on Israel-Gaza here.

About the Event
In this talk, Nilay Özok-Gündoğan will examine the rise and fall of Kurdish nobility in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Focusing on one noble Kurdish family based in the emirate of Palu, a fortressed town in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Gundogan provides the first systematic analysis of the hereditary nobility in Kurdistan between 1720 and 1895. The abolishment of the Kurdish nobles’ hereditary privileges and the confiscation of their landholdings in the 1840s triggered a five-decade-long conflict between Armenian financiers, Armenian and Muslim sharecroppers, the Kurdish beys, and an increasingly present Ottoman state over the fertile lands of Palu. Through exhaustive archival research in an untapped body of sources and examining the strategies and actions of these diverse groups, Gundogan sheds light on the complexity of this context, which has been generally dismissed as purely ethnic conflict. Gundogan will examine the historical transformations over a period of two hundred years that changed Palu, the stronghold of this noble family, from a diverse and economically affluent town into an ethnoreligiously homogenized, culturally conservative, and economically deprived place. Prof. Gundogan will be in conversation with Beshara Doumani, Mahmoud Darwish Chair for Palestinian Studies.

About the Speaker
Nilay Özok-Gündoğan is an Assistant Professor of Ottoman and Middle East history at Florida State University. Her research centers on the questions of modern state-making, property regimes, and inter-communal conflict and coexistence in the borderlands of modern empires. She also writes about the question of methodology in Kurdish Studies. Her publications appeared in Jadaliyya, Journal of Social History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, New Perspectives on Turkey, and in edited volumes.

About the Discussant
Beshara Doumani is the Mahmoud Darwish Chair for Palestinian Studies at Brown University and the former President of Birzeit University in Palestine. His research focuses on the social histories of peoples, places, and time periods marginalized by mainstream scholarship on the early modern and modern Middle East. He also writes on academic freedom and the Palestinian condition. He is currently working on a history of the Palestinians through the social life of stone.

REGISTRATION REQUIRED

ABOUT THE EVENT: The Aleppo Rescue Home, established by the League of Nations in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide, recorded the experiences of 1,700 surviving Armenian orphans from different geographical, social, political, and economic environments of the Ottoman Empire, during and after the genocide. In this virtual Book Talk, Dicle Akar, one of the authors of the book entitled Survivors of a Genocide – The Aleppo Rescue Home Orphans, will talk about the recorded data of Armenian orphans, the history of the Aleppo Rescue Home, and the policies pursued toward orphans during the genocide. For the document archive please see thelink.

Registration required.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dicle Akar taught economics and business management at the International School of Berlin. She started and coordinated the 1937/38 Dersim Massacre Oral History Project with Clark University and the Federation of Dersim Associations in Europe. She is currently working on another oral history project about the 1937/38 Dersim Massacre with the USC Shoah Foundation.

ABOUT THE EVENT: The Aleppo Rescue Home, established by the League of Nations in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide, recorded the experiences of 1,700 surviving Armenian orphans from different geographical, social, political, and economic environments of the Ottoman Empire, during and after the genocide. In this virtual Book Talk, Dicle Akar, one of the authors of the book entitled Survivors of a Genocide – The Aleppo Rescue Home Orphans, will talk about the recorded data of Armenian orphans, the history of the Aleppo Rescue Home, and the policies pursued toward orphans during the genocide. For the document archive please see the link.

Registration required.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dicle Akar taught economics and business management at the International School of Berlin. She started and coordinated the 1937/38 Dersim Massacre Oral History Project with Clark University and the Federation of Dersim Associations in Europe. She is currently working on another oral history project about the 1937/38 Dersim Massacre with the USC Shoah Foundation.

About Ummah: A New Paradigm for a Global World

How can we live together without alienation, avoidance, and fear? How can we complement one another such that each of us can uniquely contribute to the making of our societies? To address these and other questions, Katrin A. Jomaa examines the moral, political, and spiritual understanding of the Qur’anic term “ummah”, which is commonly used to refer to the worldwide Muslim community but is employed more broadly in the Qur’an itself. Drawing on theology, history, philosophy, and political science, Jomaa argues that ummah, while often defined as a group of people united by ethnicity or religion, is, in its ideal sense, a community that demands active commitment and a conscious and continuous dedication to the highest moral ideals of that community rather than mere affiliation with a particular set of religious doctrines and practices. Jomaa begins by chronologically and thematically analyzing the word “ummah” in the Qur’an, a comprehensive study currently missing from Islamic scholarship, in order to propose a novel understanding of the term that connects all its different meanings. She then compares this new definition to the Aristotelean polis, which highlights the political features of ummah, thereby situating it within contemporary discourses on liberal politics and community and creating the space for an alternative sociopolitical order to the nation-state, both as a local unit and a global system.

In Jerusalem, what you see and what is true are two different things. The Old City has never had “four quarters” as its maps proclaim. And beyond the crush and frenzy of its major religious sites, many of its quarters are little known to visitors, its people ignored and their stories untold. A new book, Nine Quarters of Jerusalem, lets the communities of the Old City speak for themselves. Ranging from the ancient past to the political present, it evokes the city’s depth and cultural diversity.

Matthew Teller’s highly original “biography” features the Old City’s Palestinian and Jewish communities, but also spotlights its Indian and African populations, its Greek and Armenian and Syriac cultures, its downtrodden Dom Gypsy families, and its Sufi mystics. It discusses the sources of Jerusalem’s holiness and the ideas—often startlingly secular—that have shaped lives within its walls. It is an evocation of place through the story, led by the voices of Jerusalemites.

No registration is required.