Fall 2018

LECTURE I: “Travel in Reverse: Mughals in Safavid Iran” given by Sunil Sharma, Boston University

Friday, September 21st (4:45 PM – 6:00 PM), 301 Wilson Hall

Sunil Sharma is a Professor of South Asian, Persianate, and Comparative Literature in the World Languages and Literatures department at Boston University. His research interests include poetry and court cultures, history of the book, and travel writing. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, he is the author of Persian Poetry at the Indian Frontier: Masud Sad Salman of Lahore (2000), Mughal Arcadia: Persian Poetry in an Indian Court (2017). He is currently working on a book project, titled Veiled Voyagers: Muslim Women Travelers from Asia and the Middle East with the support of the Leverhulme Trust (UK) with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley (Sheffield University, UK) and Daniel Majchrowicz (Northwestern University).

LECTURE II: “The City in the Medieval and Modern Arabic Narrative” given by M.J. Musawi, Columbia University

Friday, October 12th (4:00 PM – 5:30 PM), 301 Wilson Hall

M.J. Musawi is a Professor at Columbia University, a world-renowned literary critic, a novelist, and a scholar of classical and modern Arabic literature and comparative cultural studies. He is editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature and the author of numerous books including, Scheherazade in England (1981); The Society of One Thousand and One Nights (2000); Anglo-Orient: Easterners in Textual Camps (2000); The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (2003); Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition (2006); Reading Iraq: Culture and Power in Conflict (2006); The Islamic Context of the Thousand and One Nights (2009); Islam in the Street: The Dynamics of Arabic Literary Production (2009) and The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction (2015). He is also the editor of and a contributor to Arabic Literary Thresholds: Sites of Rhetorical Turn in Contemporary Scholarship (2009) and Arabic Literature for the Classroom: Teaching Methods, Theories, Themes and Texts (2017).

LECTURE III: “Rethinking Egyptian Jews’ Cosmopolitanism, Belonging, and Nostalgia in Cinema” given by Yaron Shemer, UNC Chapel Hill

Friday, November 30th (4:00 PM – 5:30 PM), 301 Wilson Hall

Yaron Shemer is the Levine/Sklut Scholar in Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of Israel Cultural Studies and Modern Hebrew in the Department of Asian Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. His areas of research are ethnic studies, cultural studies, Israeli culture and society, and Middle Eastern cinema. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, he is the author of Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel (2013). He is currently working on a book project titled, Neighboring Identities: The Jew in Arab Cinema.

Co-Sponsored by the Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures, Asian Cosmopolitanisms, the Center for Global Inquiry & Innovation, the Department of French, the Department of English, the Program in Medieval Studies, the Global Studies Program, Media Studies, the Corcoran Department of History, the Jewish Studies Program, and the Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures.