Spring 2019 MESALC Interdisciplinary Lecture Series

January 24, 2019

View the poster here.

LECTURE I: “Orientalism, Arabic, and the Threshold of World Literature”

  • Yaseen Noorani, University of Arizona
  • Friday, January 25th (3:30 PM – 5:00 PM), 301 Wilson Hall

Yaseen Noorani is an Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of Arizona. His research centers on how social norms and ideals such as virtue, nationality, and the public/private division, have been imagined and represented in Middle Eastern culture in both pre-modern and modern eras. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, he is the author of Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East (2010), and the co-editor of Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony (2007).

 

LECTURE II: “(Re)Writing the Narrative of the Iranian Cabaret Dancer (1945-1979)"

  • Ida Meftahi, University of Maryland
  • Friday, February 22nd (3:30 PM – 5:00 PM), 301 Wilson Hall

Ida Meftahi is a Lecturer of Contemporary Iranian Culture and Society at the University of Maryland. She is a historian specializing in modern Iran with a focus on the intersections of politics, gender, and performance. Her first book, Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage (2016) won the prestigious Latifeh Yarshater Award for its original contribution to the literature on Iranian Women's Studies. Meftahi’s scholarship has been published in numerous scholarly journals and volumes including Islam and Popular Arts (2016), Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity (2016), IranNameh (2016), International Journal of Middle East Studies (2016), and the bilingual Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire (2017).

 

LECTURE III: “The Representation of the City in the Strophic Poetry (Azjāl) of Ibn Quzmān”

  • Jean Dangler, Tulane University
  • Friday, March 29th  (3:30 PM – 5:00 PM), 301 Wilson Hall

Jean Dangler is a Professor of Non-Modern Iberian Studies and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University. Her research interests include the history of medicine, the history of the body, the history of the Spanish language, multicultural Iberia, theories of alterity, and globalization and the Middle Ages. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, she is the author of Mediating Fictions: Literature, Women Healers, and the Go-Between in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (2001), Making Difference in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (2005), and Edging toward Iberia (2017).

 

LECTURE IV: “Loss, Corruption, Theft: The Perilous Lives of Texts in Medieval South India”

  • Valerie Stoker, Wright State University
  • Friday, April 12th  (3:30 PM – 5:00 PM), 301 Wilson Hall

Valerie Stoker is the Brage Golding Distinguished Professor of Research at Wright State University. Her principal area of research focuses on late medieval and early modern South Indian Hinduism and her secondary area of research examines religious pluralism in secular democracies. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, she is the author of Polemics and Patronage in the City of Victory: Vyāsatīrtha, Hindu Sectarianism, and the Sixteenth-Century Vijayanagara Court (2016).

 

LECTURE V: “Rap and Revolt in the Maghribi City”

  • Nouri Gana, UCLA
  • Friday, April 26th  (3:30 PM – 5:00 PM), 301 Wilson Hall

Nouri Gana is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He teaches and researches in the intersecting fields of modern and contemporary multilingual Arab literatures and cultures of North Africa and the Middle East; Arab popular music and film; comparative ethnic, Muslim and Arab diasporas studies, namely in Euro-Americas; and postcolonial and modernist comparative cultural studies. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, he is the author of Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning (2011), and the editor of The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English (2015), and The Making of the Tunisian Revolution (2013).

 

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, the Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, and the Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures.