Raed Charafeddine, First Vice Governor, Bank of Lebanon
Moderated by Patricia Mosser, Columbia SIPA
With comments by Guillermo Calvo, Professor of International and Public Affairs

Please register here.

Sherene Seikaly, University of California, Santa Barbara
In conversation with Timothy Mitchell, Columbia University
Moderated by Brinkley Messick, Columbia University

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the editor of Arab Studies Journal, co-editor at the Journal of Palestine Studies, and founding co-editor of Jadaliyya. Her first book, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (2016) explores how Palestinian "men of capital" and British colonial officials in the Thirties and Forties forged ideas of economy, property and accumulation in relation to broader currents in modern Arab thought, and in response to wartime austerity. Professor Seikaly's work draws on diverse sources to illustrate how this under-studied group of thinkers sought to shape concepts of frugality, scarcity, law, the home and the body, territory and region, ultimately constituting modern notions of "social man" in Palestine.

This day-long event is the third of a three-piece series that focuses on the movement of people across and along the Mediterranean and the emergence, re-signification, and use of sites of memory. It is organized by Seth Kimmel and Naor Ben-Yehoyada. Bringing together a mix of panelists from the humanities and social sciences, the day will include work by the following scholars: Avi Astor (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Nina Zhiri (UC San Diego), Isolina Ballesteros (CUNY), Eric Calderwood (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), and Charles Hirschkind (UC Berkeley).

Please note that this event has required registration. Please visit the Eventbrite page here to register, and to look at the full schedule: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sites-of-religious-memory-in-an-age-of-exodus-western-mediterranean-tickets-44486264615 

Islamic Legal Canons as Interpretive Precedent: The Curious Case of Bughaybigha, 661-882

Intisar A. Rabb is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a director of its Islamic Legal Studies Program. She also holds an appointment as a Professor of History at Harvard University and as Susan S. And Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Film screening and Q&A with Avi Mograbi, director, and Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Profesor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literatures.

Introduction by Brinkley Messick, director of the Middle East Institute.

Avi Mograbi and Chen Alon meet African asylum-seekers in a detention facility in the middle of the Negev desert where they are confined by the state of Israel. What leads African refugees to leave everything behind and go towards the unknown? Why does Israel refuse to take into consideration the situation of the exiled, thrown onto the road by war, genocide and persecution? Can the Israelis working with the asylum seekers put themselves in the refugees' shoes?

You can watch the Q&A session here.

Ghost Hunting. A film by Raed Andoni.
Screening and Q&A with the director and Professor James Schamus.

Katharina Otto-Bernstein Screening Room, Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University

Director Raed Andoni places a newspaper advertisement in Ramallah. He is looking for former inmates of the Moskobiya interrogation centre in Jerusalem. In his ad he asks that the men should also have experience as craftsmen, architects or actors. After a casting process that almost feels like role play, he arranges for a replica of the centre’s interrogation rooms and cells to be built to scale inside a hall – under close supervision from the former inmates and based on their memories. In this realistic setting the men subsequently re-enact their interrogations, discuss details about the prison, and express the humiliation they experienced during their detention. Using techniques that are reminiscent of the so-called ‘theatre of the oppressed’ they work together to dramatise their real-life experiences. Their reconstruction brings long repressed emotions and undealt with trauma to the fore. Working on the film takes its toll on the men – both physically and mentally. The director also appears in front of the camera; not only is he creating a stage for his protagonists, he is also coming to terms with his own fragmented memories of imprisonment in Moskobiya thirty years previously.

Views and Voices: The Contemporary Middle East and North Africa
In collaboration with Columbia Global Centers

Join SIPA's MENA Forum for a conversation with Salam Fayyad, economist and former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, on regional developments and the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Moderator: Safwan Masri, Executive Vice President for Global Centers and Global Development at Columbia University.

Tuesday, March 27th @4:30PM
IAB 1501
Food will be provided

Seven- years after the Arab uprisings seemingly shook the Arab nation-state order that was left behind in the wake of the end of formal British and French imperial presence in the region, the content and the form of that order has been both entrenched and reconfigured. In view of this, this discussion asks two interrelated questions that pertain to an understanding of these realities as they have come to impact Arab societies: first, what would a sociology of colonial critique as emanating from the Arab world entail today, and what would its relevance be to an understanding of the changed colonial and neocolonial realities of the region? Second, what would such a critique provide by way of a contemporary sociology of the Arab world and the Global South more broadly?

Anaheed Al-Hardan is the Arcapita Visiting Professor of Arab Studies at the Middle East Institute and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (Columbia University Press, 2016).

Stathis Gourgouris from Columbia University will serve as interlocutor

Jerusalem Lives was the title of the inaugural exhibition (opened August 2017) at the new Palestinian Museum in Birzeit. We are pleased to bring to Columbia Reem Fadda, the internationally recognized curator of Jerusalem Lives, Emily Jacir, a leading Palestinian artist whose work was featured, and Professor Beshara Doumani, Brown University, an historian who was instrumental in setting the course for the Palestinian Museum. They will explore the challenges to current politics of this innovative and hard-hitting exhibit that brought together artists, scholars, and community groups inside and outside of the museum.

The Buyid Period, Fada'il Literature and the Transitional 4th/10th Century
Islamic History Workshop with Nancy Khalek, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University

This day-long event is the second of a three-piece series that focuses on the movement of people across and along the Mediterranean and the emergence, re-signification, and use of sites of memory.

Ottoman Venality, or Tax Farming of Judicial Offices in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1700-1839

Jun Akiba specializes in Ottoman history during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a focus on the judiciary, judicial administration and related educational institutions. His current projects include a book on Ottoman sharia courts and, with Cemal Kafadar, a study of Ottoman self-narratives. Forthcoming articles treat girls schools and female teachers in pre-Tanzimat Istanbul and sharia judges in the nizamiye system.