Kamran Rastegar will present his current research on visual representations of war and social trauma. By comparing post-war cultural productions in Iran and Lebanon, he will examine the differences between official government sponsored delimitations of memory practices in these two societies and how they have led to very different approaches to the question of remembering their wars.

Monday, October 12
5:00-7:00PM
“A Letter Named Jīm”
Michael Beard
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Dakota
1st Floor Great Room, 19 University Place

There is a no-man’s land, a forbidden zone between popular books about the Middle East and their specialized counterparts.  This lecture is part of a project to occupy that empty zone, a discussion, letter by letter, of the Arabic alphabet – in part a monologue focusing on specialist issues, in part a contemplation of shapes, traditions, stories and etymologies aimed at the listener from outside. The letter is JIM.

Friday, October 30
12:30-1:45PM
“A Genre Without Borders? The Arabic Ghazal and its Persian Cousin”
Dominic Parviz Brookshaw
Lecturer in Persian Studies and Iranian Literature, University of Manchester
Hagop Kevorkian Center Library

This lecture explores areas of commonality and variance between the Arabic ghazal of early ‘Abbasid Baghdad (9th century CE) and the Persian short lyric of the Ghaznavid period (11th century CE), with particular reference to the description of the beloved/object of desire.

Monday, November 16
4:00-6:00PM
“Thou Shalt Not Translate Me”
Abdelfattah Kilito
Professor of French and Arabic Literature, Université Mohammed V, Rabat
1st Floor Great Room, 19 University Place.

His lecture will examine the relationship of Arabic literature, past and present, to European literature in light of questions posed by translation.

Il s’agit d’examiner la relation de la littérature arabe, passée et présente, à la littérarture européenne, par le biais des questions posées par la traduction.

All events are free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, with funding and support from the Humanities Initiative.

Additional support provided by the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies

(special thanks to MEALAC, the Department of French and Romance Philology and the ICLS at Columbia for their co-sponsoring of AbdelFattah Kilito’s event)