Date: Monday, December 9 
Time: 3:00 PM - 8:15 PM
Location: Maison Française, Buell Hall, 515 W 116th St

Organized by The Platform, in association with Ifriqiyya, Columbia University-based initiatives dedicated to promoting discussion and reflection on contemporary global issues. Co-sponsored by The Middle East Institute, and the Department of Anthropology.

This series focuses on Palestine and the arts, aiming to historicize the enduring legacies of poetry, literature, music, art, and theatre, while also showcasing new works that address themes of displacement and settler-colonial violence. Focusing on Columbia’s Morningside campus, Harlem, and the broader New York community, the series invites audiences to engage with artistic representations of Palestine—not as a counter to war imagery but as a lens to understand why art is a threat to empire. Second, the series itself is a way of reclaiming space - to speak about Palestine. After a year of living under the Palestinian exception, where rules were changed, cops were called, students were suspended and arrested, we offer this platform as a way of healing. 

Convened by: Mahmood Mamdani and Shayoni Mitra 
Poster Art: Layal Srouji 

Program

3:00-4:15: Writing and Teaching in Gaza: Dr. Refaat’s Legacy
Moderated by Thea Abu ElHaj
Jehad Abusalim
Yousef Aljamal
Eman Bashir

4:15-4:45:Coffee and Readings
Reading by CU, BC students
Coffee by Qawwah House

4:45-6:00: Black Palestine and Transnational Solidarities
Moderated by Frank Guridy
Marc Lamont Hill
Maytha Alhassen
Ali Mir

6:00-7:00: Dinner service by Abu Ras

7:00-8:15: Writing Against Disappearance: Contemporary Writers
Moderated by Bahia Munem
Yahya Ashour
Hind Shoufani
Jumana Manna

Participants’ bios

Jehad Abusalim - Jehad Abusalim, originally from Deir el-Balah in the Gaza Strip, is the Executive Director of the Institute for Palestine Studies-USA in Washington, DC. He co-edited Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire (Haymarket Books, 2022). His work has been featured in The Washington Post, Al-Jazeera, The Nation, and more, and he has appeared on platforms like Al-Jazeera, CNN, and Democracy Now!

Maytha Alhassen - Maytha Alhassen is a Writer/PRoducer, journalist, professor and a pop Culture collaborative senior fellow  (authoring the HAQQ AND HOLLYWOOD: ILLUMINATING 100 YEARS OF MUSLIM TROPES AND HOW TO TRANSFORM THEM (2018) report) Who appeared as a CO-HOST on the Young Turks’ “main hour” + as a guest co-host and digital producer on Al Jazeera English’s “The Stream.” Alhassen is a Co-Executive producer, writer, and social impact advisor for Hulu’s award-winning series “Ramy,” a stanford lecturer in comparative studies in race and ethnicity, a 2021-2024 havard religion and public life fellow in Art + Pop Culture, executive Producer of the docu-series “American Muslims: A history revealed,”  a pillars muslim narrative change fellow, a USC 2022-23 Civic Media Fellow, host of new educational web series "Key terms” (part of “Office hours” series), Co-Host of Amazon Music and salt audio meditation podcast BECOME, and a former Ted resident (2017).

Yousef Aljamal - Yousef Aljamal is the Gaza coordinator at the Palestine Activism Program at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Aljamal is a refugee from Al-Nusierat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He recently received his PhD at the Middle East Institute at Sakarya University in Turkey.

Yahya Ashour - Yahya Ashour | يحيى عاشور is an exiled Gazan poet and awarded author, born on April 22, 1998, based in the US. He is an honorary fellow at the University of Iowa and the author of the e-book “A Gaza of Siege & Genocide” (Mizna, 2024). Ashour's portfolio also includes poetry collections, children's books in Arabic, and contributions to global anthologies and journals, including MQR and ArabLit. He has received multiple scholarships and fellowships and has read poetry at over 50 U.S. organizations and universities, including Princeton, Stanford, UPenn, and UCLA. His poetry has been translated into several languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese, and Bengali. Ashour studied Sociology & Psychology and worked as a creative writing mentor.

Eman Bashir - Eman is a writer, researcher, and former English teacher from Gaza. She is a mother of three and a published author whose work has appeared in Vice Magazine, Electronic Intifada, The Washington Post, and Vittles. Currently pursuing her academic interests, she focuses on Palestinian narratives, cinematography, and the intersections of identity and resistance in visual storytelling.

Thea Abu ElHaj - Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Professor of Education at Barnard College, Columbia University, is an anthropologist of education. Abu El-Haj’s research explores questions about belonging, rights, citizenship, and education raised by globalization, transnational migration, and conflict. Funded by the Spencer Foundation, her current research entitled, “Disrupting Dispossession: Teaching Palestine in Exile, 1970-1990” is an oral history project with Palestinian teachers in Lebanon. The project explores Palestinian teachers’ roles as everyday political and civic actors in the anti-colonial movement. She was principal investigator of a US national interview study exploring the civic identities and civic practices of youth from Muslim immigrant communities also funded by the Spencer Foundation. Abu El-Haj is past-President of the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropological Association. Her second book, Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American Youth after 9/11, is an ethnographic account of young Palestinian Americans grappling with questions of belonging and citizenship in the wake of September 11, 2001.

Frank Guridy - Frank Andre Guridy is the Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies. He is also Professor of History and the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia. He is an award-winning historian whose recent research has focused on sport history, urban history, and the history of American social movements.

Mahmood Mamdani - Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government. He was also professor and executive director of Makerere Institute of Social Research (2010-2022) in Kampala, where he established an interdisciplinary doctoral program in Social Studies. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1974 and specializes in the study of colonialism, anti-colonialism and decolonisation. His works explore the intersection between politics and culture, a comparative study of colonialism since 1452, the history of civil war and genocide in Africa, the Cold War and the War on Terror, the history and theory of human rights, and the politics of knowledge production.

Jumana Manna - Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of architecture, agriculture and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruliness of ruination, life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.

Marc Lamont Hill - Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is one of the leading intellectual voices in the country. He is currently the host of BET News, The Grio, Al Jazeera UpFront, and the Coffee & Books podcast. An award-winning journalist, Dr. Hill has received numerous prestigious awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, GLAAD, and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Dr. Hill is a Presidential Professor of Anthropology and Urban Education at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Prior to that, he held positions at Morehouse College, Temple University, and Columbia University.

Shayoni Mitra - Shayoni Mitra is a senior lecturer at the Department of Theatre, Barnard College, Columbia University. She teaches classes on performance studies, feminist theory, political performance and postcolonial drama. She has written extensively on student protests, and her writings appear in various journals and collected volumes. She is currently director of the South Asia Institute at Columbia University, and director of the Barbara Horowitz Scholars of Distinction program at Barnard College. Mitra is a member of the Delhi-based street theatre group Jana Natya Manch. For academic year 2023-24 she convened, with colleagues and students, weekly readings of the Palestine Poetry Collective. 

Ali Mir - Ali Mir is a professor of management at William Paterson University. He is the co-author of “Anthems of Resistance” and a writer and lyricist for Indian films.

Bahia Munem - Bahia M. Munem’s teaching and research interests examine race and ethnicity as they intersect with gender, sexuality, class, nation, religion, and diasporas. Her scholarship bridges the fields of Latinx, Latin American, and Middle East Studies by examining forced transnational migration and gendered and racialized modes of belonging in the Americas.

Hind Shoufani - Hind Shoufani is a Palestinian filmmaker & poet, living in Brooklyn. For over 25 years, she’s worked across the Arab world as a documentary director, producer & editor. She has an MFA in film from NYU.Hind’s poems & essays have been published internationally & her first poetry collection in the US with Diode Editions is forthcoming in 2025.

Layal Srouji - Layal Srouji is a Palestinian artist, student, and memory worker based in New York City. She studies in the School of Arts at Columbia University, where her creative practice and academic work explore themes of resistance, material culture, and the politics of archives. Layal's projects often draw from Palestinian histories and global textiles, weaving together storytelling, advocacy, and visual art.

Date: Friday, December 6 
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Location: Online

Join Rachel Schine, Assistant Professor of Arabic & History at the University of Maryland, and Kristina Richardson, Professor of History and Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia, for a discussion on Schine's book Black Knights. In this work, she explores how the medieval Arabic-speaking world developed distinct racial concepts, shaped by transregional exchanges from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. She examines how racialized blackness became central to envisioning an inclusive Muslim world, drawing insights from Islamic epics, legal, medical, and religious texts to illustrate the fluidity of racial ideas in premodern Islamic societies.

Date: Thursday, December 5 
Time: 7 PM - 9 PM
Location: Brief Histories, 115 Bowery, New York

An experimental sonic performance with:

Amitis Motevalli:Multimedia artist who explores the intersections of class, queerness and gender in grassroots context.

Sarah Khatami: Singer and writer of R&B, pop and Persian music.

Hesam Abedini: A musician and educator who creates works that move along a post-intercultural path.

Date: Tuesday, December 3, 2024
Time: Doors open at 6PM | 6:30PM Event Start
Location: Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall

This is event is at capacity. Unfortunately, registration is closed.

Join us for a conversation between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Rashid Khalidi on Tuesday, December 3, 2024 at 6:30PM. Welcome by Nadia Abu El-Haj.

Speakers
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. His books include The Water Dancer and The Message. He is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department at Howard University.

Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Arab Studies at Columbia University. He has taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Chicago, was co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and served as President of the Middle East Studies Association. His most recent book is The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017.

Welcome
Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies.

Date: Monday, December 2 
Time: 4:10 PM - 6:00 PM
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208

Join James Weaver, Professor at the University of Zurich in the Middle Eastern Studies Department, for a conversation on the historical and theological underpinnings of the doctrine of Waṣiyya (designation) and its role in early Shīʿī thought. To attend this event, please register below to receive the pre-circulated paper.

Date: Friday, November 22
Time: 4:10 PM - 6:00 PM
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208

Join Devin J. Stewart, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Emory University’s MESAS Department, for a conversation on Taqīyah and Tawriyah: Dissimulation and the Art of Ambiguity. To attend this event, please register below to receive the pre-circulated paper.

Date: Tuesday, November 19

Time: 6:10 PM - 8:00 PM

Location: 612 Schermerhorn

From an early date, Islamic writers connected the Qur’anic Thamud with Hegra, an abandoned Nabatean- Roman site in the Northern Hijaz now known, by reason of that association, as Mada’in Salih. The site itself thus forms a kind of bridge across the historical rupture separating Islam from Jahiliyya. What exactly happens to such a site when it becomes “Islamic?” This talk explores how the idea of constructing Islam works as a monumentalizing lens that changes the way we look at pre-Islamic architecture by blurring some features even as it makes others stand out in sharp relief. At Hegra, it will be argued, the effect of this reinterpretation produces rupture where it might have been possible to see continuity in a way that turns Nabatean ruins into an infrastructure for producing Islam.

Date: Friday, November 8

Time: 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Location: Knox Hall, Room 208

Join Amitis Motevalli for a wishmaking and gratitude offering, in honor of the ancestor/martyr Hind Rajab. A secular sofreh to recognize the efforts of those at Columbia supporting Palestinians, to give thanks and make wishes for futures.

Although they date back to ancient Persia, Sofreh’ Nazri are generally Shia ritual gatherings for women. It’s often prompted when someone is making a prayer for a particular outcome and bringing together her community to bring collective energy.

Date: Monday, October 28

Time: 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM

Location: Knox Hall, Room 509

Join us for a discussion with novelist and translator Salar Abdoh on how English-language works and translations shape our understanding of Persophone cultures, particularly in Iran and Afghanistan. Abdoh will explore the complexities of representing gendered life worlds and the politics of translation, as well as emerging literary genres from West and Central Asia.

Date: Friday, October 25
Time: 9:00 AM - 6:15 PM
Location: Online 

Since the early inception of postcolonial inquiry in the late 1970s, with its focus on another way of interrogating colonial history, its rhetoric of empire, and its harrowing practices, many new theoretical explorations have been unfolding in response to a rise in aggressive forms of colonialism. The relative departure from Cold War polarization, and new strategies of proxy wars, along with the devastating impact on societies (environment, lands and people), have recently been impelling scholars to revisit the postcolonial, its early underpinnings, and engagements. This Symposium participates in a rigorous interrogation of specific omissions so as to generate a revised perspective on postcolonialism. The growing role of social media, the presence of photography, televised war reports, and the surge in narratives, canticles, and poetry, provide a set of realities that was not as visible in the late 1970s and 1980s. These realities pose a challenge to the monopoly of corporate media and to the unitary discourse that is the trademark of the rhetoric of war machines.

Date: Thursday, October 24

Time: 6:10 PM - 8:00 PM

Location: Knox Hall, Room 208

Join Nathaniel Mathews, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at SUNY-Binghamton, for a discussion on his first book Zanzibar Was a Country. The book explores Zanzibar's fight for independence, the experiences of its postcolonial diasporas, and the intertwined histories of Zanzibar and Oman.

Date: Wednesday, October 23

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Zoom Webinar (register below)

Join the Middle East Institute and the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University and the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University for an online conversation examining the social and spatial impacts of the regional war in Palestine and Lebanon. The panelists, Lara Deeb, Elias Muhanna, and Ali H. Musleh will examine how the current violence intensifies the existing challenges that communities were already facing, as a result of past wars, conflict and systemic corruption. They will focus particularly on how communities and neighborhoods, across religious, ethnic, gender and class lines, are affected by the escalation of violence and displacement. What is the role of diasporic and global networks in advocating and supporting local communities? What role does the academy have in responding to the effects of violence in these impacted societies?

Date: Saturday, October 19
Time: 2:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Location: Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive, 2nd Floor. Please enter at 411 w. 116th street (Wien Gate).

This event will bring together scholars from Palestine, Israel, South Africa, Rwanda, and Ireland to engage with two key questions: what kind of political future can best end the extreme violence that has so far marked Palestine/Israel? What can we learn from the experiences of South Africa, Rwanda, and Ireland, lands that in the recent past were plagued by extreme violence, including genocide? 

Registration is mandatory due to space limitations as well as restricted campus access. Only registered guests will be admitted. 

Date: Wednesday, October 16

Time: 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM

Location: East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

Please join us for a screening of Moroccan filmmaker Farida Benylazid’s newly-restored 1989 film A Door to the Sky, the first feature film directed by a Moroccan woman. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the director led by film scholar Florence Martin and Columbia Professor Madeleine Dobie.

A Door to the Sky imagines an emigrant’s return to Morocco, where she creates, in her family home, a zaouiya – a site devoted to spiritual study and worship – specifically for women. The film explores themes of exile and return as well as questions of gender and religion, probing the intersections of feminism and Muslim faith.

Farida Benylazid is a pioneering Moroccan film producer, director, journalist and film critic whose career in cinema has spanned close to five  decades. Her body of work explores questions of gender and identity in Morocco since independence.

A specialist of Maghrebi women’s cinema, Professor Florence Martin teaches at Goucher College. Her latest book is Farida Benlyazid and Moroccan Cinema (Palggrave MacMillan, 2024).

Madeleine Dobie is Professor of French & Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a specialist of Maghrebi literature and culture.

The conversation will be in English with translation for Farida Benylazid.

This event has been postponed. Details about the rescheduled date and further information will be shared soon.

Join Professor Sevea Teran, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard University, to discuss his essay Singapore’s Islamic Pasts: Alexanders in an Island Below the Winds, which explores Singapore’s first Islamic king, Iskandar Sahib, a descendant of the pre-Qur’anic prophet Iskandar Dhu al-Qarnayn. The essay traces the thirteenth-century Alexandrian-Abrahamic dynasty through Malay chronicles and oral histories, focusing on Singapore’s Islamic ‘Alexanders’ and the role of both Sufi masters and everyday community members in preserving these histories.

Date: Thursday, October 10

Time: Noon- 1:30 PM

Location: Online

This event will bring together feminist writers, artists, curators and academics who work in the context of South Kurdistan. In their conversation they will centre the question of how artists and activists in the region address issues around body politics, religious conservatism and intimacy.

Particularly since 2014 and the onslaught of ISIS (or daesh), artists have been chronicling the ways in which women’s bodies are being used as a battlefield between competing religious, political and cultural actors. Disillusioned with party politics, women’s NGOs or foreign donor agendas, a new generation of creatives are curating their own exhibitions, cinema clubs, and reading groups. These initiatives to date remain small, local, self-funded and transient, yet they mark a major shift towards a diversification of spaces for critical engagement and imagining a Kurdistan “otherwise”.

THE POETICS OF SPIRITUAL INSTRUCTION

Date: Friday, September 27

Time: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM

Location: Online

Join Austin O’Malley as he discusses his new book, The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction, a study that explores the performative role of didactic poetry through the narrative verse of Farid al-Din ʿAttar. O'Malley highlights how ʿAttar employed frame-tales, meta-poetic commentary, and allegories to engage readers and assert his instructive authority. The book sheds light on the interactive, participatory nature of Sufi didacticism, revealing how reading was understood as a spiritual exercise, imbued with ritual significance aimed at purifying the soul.

Date: Wednesday, September 18

Time: 6:00 - 7:30 PM

Location: East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

Join Susan Slyomovics to discuss her book, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria's French Colonial Heritage  

"Statuomania" overtook Algeria beginning in the nineteenth century as the French affinity for monuments placed thousands of war memorials across the French colony. But following Algeria's hard-fought independence in 1962, these monuments took on different meaning and some were "repatriated" to France, legally or clandestinely. Today, in both Algeria and France, people are moving and removing, vandalizing and preserving this contested, yet shared monumental heritage. 

In her book, Susan Slyomovics follows the afterlives of French-built war memorials in Algeria and those taken to France. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews in both countries, she analyzes the colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm of these works of art. Her book offers a fresh aesthetic take on the increasingly global move to fell monuments that celebrate settler colonial histories.