Monday, April 12th
- Michigan State: The Covid-19 Pandemic and Its Impacts in Muslim-Majority Contexts
Tuesday, April 13th
- University of Michigan: Dr. Steed Davidson: “Archiving Words. Contesting Space: The Interruptions of Postcolonial Languages and Ephemera in an Archive of the Bible”
- 10:00 AM (EST)
- Objects form the critical deposits of museums and archives. This becomes obviously true in the case of biblical museums and archives that desperately rely upon material remains to bring the Bible to life. These archives have been central to Biblical Studies and the maintenance of the Bible as a product of imperial modernity. The Bible as a text and archive plays a critical role in the production and maintenance of the narratives of racial capitalism, a central aspect of Western modernity. By examining the language and ephemera of contemporary readers, who have been racialized by imperial logics that produce Bible translations and narrativize objects in archives, this presentation situates the geography of contemporary racialized readers as the site from which to develop an archive of the Bible. Local geographies, both the specific geography of the context of the Bible and the geography of a modern reader, are seen as productive challenges to the universalizing myths of modernity. Greater attention to contextual languages and experiences offer opportunities to unmask the cultural and geographical boundedness of stories, objects, and lives that form the core deposit of the Bible.
- Click here to attend this event.
Wednesday, April 14th
- Indiana University: Night and Day
- 2:00 PM (EST)
- Night and Day, a novel by Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon, was published in English in 2019. Translator Chris Fort will be featured for a discussion of this 1936 novel.
- Click here to register for this webinar.
- University of Michigan: Dr. Steed Davidson: “Archiving Words. Contesting Space: The Interruptions of Postcolonial Languages and Ephemera in an Archive of the Bible”
- 4:00 PM (EST)
- Objects form the critical deposits of museums and archives. This becomes obviously true in the case of biblical museums and archives that desperately rely upon material remains to bring the Bible to life. These archives have been central to Biblical Studies and the maintenance of the Bible as a product of imperial modernity. The Bible as a text and archive plays a critical role in the production and maintenance of the narratives of racial capitalism, a central aspect of Western modernity. By examining the language and ephemera of contemporary readers, who have been racialized by imperial logics that produce Bible translations and narrativize objects in archives, this presentation situates the geography of contemporary racialized readers as the site from which to develop an archive of the Bible. Local geographies, both the specific geography of the context of the Bible and the geography of a modern reader, are seen as productive challenges to the universalizing myths of modernity. Greater attention to contextual languages and experiences offer opportunities to unmask the cultural and geographical boundedness of stories, objects, and lives that form the core deposit of the Bible.
- Click here to attend this event.
Thursday, April 15th
- University of Iowa: Virtual International Entrepreneurship Summit
- 12:00 PM (CST)
- We invite you, your colleagues, and friends to join us virtually for the annual International Entrepreneurship Summit hosted by The Institute for International Business (IIB) at the University of Iowa. The IIB International Entrepreneurship Summit is known for facilitating discussions about international business and global issues, and it brings speakers and panelists who are experts in their fields to engage with the State of Iowa campus community. This year, we have two themes:
- Click here to register for this event.
- University of Michigan: The Past, Present, and Future of Christianity in Science Fiction
- 7:00 PM (EST)
- Science fiction has engaged with religious ideas and topics throughout its history. It also has unique ways of approaching a religion such as Christianity with its strong historical focus. On the one hand, time travel technology means that one can visit the first century to look for Jesus or attempt to witness the resurrection. On the other hand, stories of humanity’s distant future among the stars allows reflection on where our past and present trajectories might take our religious traditions. Stories set in the very near future also provide opportunities to explore possible reactions to new technologies or alien encounters. This presentation will provide a survey of treatments of these topics as we consider how the history of science fiction provides insights on the history of Christianity.
- Click here to attend this event.
- Northwestern: Glimpses of Iranians in Wander-land: Threshold Literature and the Satire of Survival
- 10:00 AM (CST)
- Please join the Colloquium for Global Iran Studies for an event in which the critically acclaimed novelist and writer Bahiyyih Nakhjavani will be reading from her latest work Us&Them and will explore the satire of survival in the Iranian diaspora. A moderated Q&A by Emrah Yildiz will follow the reading.
- Click here to register for this event.
Sunday, April 18th
- Northwestern: “In-Between”: Arab-Jews in Palestine/Eretz Israel at the Turn of the 20th Century
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- 11:00 AM (CST)
- Speakers: Abigail Jacobson a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies of The Hebrew University; Yuval Evri, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow of King’s College London; Lital Levy an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature of Princeton University; İpek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Northwestern University.
- Click here to register for this event.
Monday, April 19th
- University of Wisconsin: Steven Brooke: “Mosques and Islamist Activism: Spatial Evidence from Interwar Cairo”
- 12:00 PM (CST)
- Why do Islamists mobilize in some mosques, but not others? We answer this question by matching a list of mosque-based lectures, sermons, and collections carried out by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in interwar Cairo with a geo-referenced 1:5,000 scale map series from the same time period. Our results suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood was more likely to operate in mosques where they enjoyed prior relationships and that were located in close proximity to transport networks. Mosques in areas lacking both government health services and other Islamic associations were also more likely to host Islamist activism. A supplementary analysis shows that the Muslim Brotherhood was more likely to establish health services in areas that had previously seen mosque activities. These findings deepen our understanding of the conditions under which certain mosques become sites for Islamist mobilization, and demonstrate how historical spatial data can be utilized to study political activism.
- Click here to register for this event.
Tuesday, April 20th
- University of Illinois: The Literary Qurʾan
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- 12:00 PM (CST)
- Click here to register in advance for this webinar.
- Speaker: Hoda El Shakry, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago
Wednesday, April 21st
- University of Illinois: Conducting Research in Middle East Studies in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic
- 12:00 PM (CST)
- Click here to register in advance for this webinar.
- Speakers: Ms. Anaïs Salamon, Associate Librarian, Head, Islamic Studies Library, McGill University and Prof. Laila Hussein Moustafa, School of Information Sciences, U of I
- Rutgers University: Can Ultimate Reality Change? Controversies Regarding the Yogic Practice School’s Path to Awakening (John Powers, Deakin University, Australia)
- 7:00 PM (EST)
- The Yogic Practice School (Yogācāra) is one of the two main traditions of Indian Buddhist philosophy. Its luminaries made significant contributions to epistemology and logic, and they developed a sophisticated vision of the path to awakening aimed at transforming pathological mental patterns and developing attitudes conducive to more skillful engagement with other beings and the world. One of the most important Yogācāra doctrines is the “three natures”: the imputational, the other dependent, and the ultimately real. The first refers to false notions imputed to the phenomena of experience; the second involves viewing phenomena as arising in dependence on causes and conditions, which is correct on the conventional level but mistaken from an ultimate perspective. The ultimately real nature is how sages view things: without the false overlay of the imputational and free from subject-object dichotomy. I will begin with an overview of the three natures and how they function within the Yogācāra soteriological system, and will then discuss how the third—the ultimately real—has largely been mistranslated and misconstrued by contemporary scholars who work on the tradition. This is more than just termininological quibbling because correct understanding of the ultimately real is crucial to the entire Yogācāra project, and it has ramifications for Buddhist practice more generally.
- Click here for information on how to register for this event.
Friday, April 23rd
- University of Maryland: Anna Julia Cooper Workshop: “When did We Become an Us: The Origins of Black Culture as an Idea during Slavery.”
- Rutgers University: Department of AMESALL Spring Seminar Series presents: DR. GREGORY GOULDING South Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania
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- 11:30 AM (EST)
- Click here to register for this event.