Programming – Summer 2021

May 10th

Michigan State: We Stand Together in Faith: Interfaith dialogue on perceptions and practices of faith and mental health

  • 12:00 PM (EST)
  • Interfaith dialogue on perceptions and practices of faith and mental health
  • Click here to register for this event.

Northwestern: MENA Graduate Student Colloquium

  • 9:00 AM (CST)
  • Jesús C. Muñoz (Ph.D. Student, Comparative Literary Studies/MENA Program) presents “Poetics of Glowing Histories in Flesh and Art: Witnessing the Lives of the Armenian Collection at the Arab Image Foundation.” Lizzie Howell (Ph.D. Student, Department of History/MENA Program) presents “Muslims in Central Europe, Religion and Migration, 1960—Present.” 
  • Click here to register for this event.

May 11th

Michigan State: We Stand Together in Faith: Interfaith dialogue on perceptions and practices of faith and mental health

  • 12:00 PM (EST)
  • Interfaith dialogue on perceptions and practices of faith and mental health
  • Click here to register for this event.

May 12th

Minority Politics: Special panel on China’s Uyghur Genocide

  • 9:00 AM (CST)
  • Click here to register for this event.

May 14th

University of Nebraska: Homerathon 2021: The Homeric Hymns

  • 6:00 PM (CST)
  • Beginning with the posting of the recorded video on May 13th, the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at UNL is running its fourth annual Homerathon online in light of Covid-19 restrictions. Watch the video at your own leisure on Thursday, May 13, at the website below. A Q&A session will follow today. All detailed information will be found on the website. This year’s Homerathon will be a reading of the Homeric Hymns spanning a couple of hours to match the virtual format. As with previous years, there will be guest speakers reading passages. The intention of this year’s event is to continue bringing ancient texts to life for the community while continuing the momentum of the past years.
  • Click here to register for this event.

May 17th

Northwestern: MENA Languages Monday—Turkish Edition | Street Animals & their Place in Turkish Culture: A Conversation about the Film STRAY

  • 12:30 PM (CST)
  • Please join us for this conversation on the place of street animals in Turkish history and culture, with special emphasis on Istanbul, between Oya Topçuoğlu, Assistant Professor of Instruction in Turkish in the MENA Languages Program at Northwestern, and Kimberly Hart, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Buffalo State University. This conversation is organized as part of Professor Topçuoğlu’s new course “Istanbul: Gateway Between the East and West” and accompanies a virtual screening of the documentary film Stray. The film will be available for viewing from Monday, May 10 until Monday, May 24.
  • Click here to register for this event.

May 20th

University of Nebraska: Health Equity Speaker Series – Monnica Williams

  • 10:00 AM (CST)
  • We are pleased to invite you to the Minority Health Disparities Initiative Health Equity Speaker Series event on “Racial Microaggressions in Academic Spaces: Scope & Impact,” presented by Dr. Monnica Williams. Dr. Monnica T. Williams is a board-certified licensed clinical psychologist and associate professor at the University of Ottawa, in the School of Psychology, where she is the Canada research chair in mental health disparities. She is also the clinical director of the behavioral wellness clinic in Connecticut, where she provides supervision and training to clinicians for empirically supported treatments. This event is FREE and OPEN to the public. We will be live streaming and recording the talk.
  • Click here to register for this event.

Northwestern: The Colloquium for Global Iran Studies Presents: A Panel on Iranian Diaspora Studies

  • 4:00 PM (CST)
  • As scholars and educators, we continually trouble the boundaries of Middle East Studies and Asian American Studies, carving out a space to consider transnational histories of empire, migration, assimilation, racism, gender, and sexuality that emerge from U.S. interventions, and popular movements for self-determination, in West Asia. At the same time, we are invested in the frameworks developed in Asian American Studies and other interdisciplinary fields in the humanities, which provide crucial tools for thinking about how Iranian bodies in North America (and Europe) are hyper-visible and invisible at the same time, positioned as threatening but also as assimilable, as the ultimate other and as symbols of racial progress and exceptionalism. We hope to explore the ways in which an interdisciplinary engagement with Asian American Studies and the humanities more broadly has opened new pathways for thinking about Iranian diasporas in research and teaching. How do we change curricula, redefine concepts, add new layers of meaning and otherwise change the story of who Asian Americans are, how they come to be in North America and what their presence means for politics and culture? What Asian American scholarship has been particularly generative for us and where have we had to innovate and adapt to find concepts and frameworks that work for the populations we study? How do Iranians fit into our picture of the histories of empire, racialization, assimilation, the global division of labor, extractive capitalism, neoliberalism, wars and revolutions–and the gender and sexual politics of racialized identity–that have been major concerns for Asian American Studies? This panel brings together Persis Karim, Neda Maghbouleh, Amy Malek and Farzaneh Hemmasi in conversation in an attempt to unpack the importance of humanistic inquiry in Iranian diaspora studies.
  • Click here to register for this event.

May 23rd

Northwestern: Performance and Conversation with Tair Haim, Acclaimed Soloist of the band A-WA

  • 11:00 AM (CST)
  • Tair Haim is a Yemenite Israeli singer and songwriter, and a founder of the internationally acclaimed group A-WA.
  • Click here to register for this event.

May 24th

Northwestern: Solidarity When: A MENA Conversation

  • 12:00 PM (CST)
  • This conversation will bring together scholars working on connected political and social movements both within the MENA region and between movements inside the region and outside of it, to help us think critically about the long history of solidarity politics and practice as well as its future. What can we learn from historical examples of connected movements in order to understand what solidarity does or should look like today, whether in helping define new modes of political practice or by revising or revisiting historical ones? How do activists or scholars address the tension in translocal solidarities between local specificities and singularities on the one hand, and shared or cognate experiences and structures on the other? Is “solidarity” the most accurate or even desirable term to describe such diverse movements as they exist in the long history of connected struggles, from tricontinentalism to BDS?
  • Click here to register for this event.

May 30th

Northwestern: Arab-Jewish Intersecting Identities: Gender, Protest, and Politics

  • 11:00 AM (CST)
  • Click here to register for this event.

June 13th

Northwestern: Performance and Conversation with Ziv Yehezkel, Renowned Israeli Singer and Composer

  • 11:00 AM (CST)
  • Ziv Yehezkel is an acclaimed Israeli singer and composer who sings in both Arabic and Hebrew. He is a unique multicultural performer of classical Arabic music.
  • Click here to register for this event.