Public Events

Didem Havlioglu Public Talk
Poetic Voice En/Gendered: Mihri Hatun 's Resistance to “Femininity”
Visiting candidate: Turkish Studies

co-sponsored by Near Eastern Studies

Tara Deubel
Performing the Nation: Sahrawi Identity in Exile

NES Spring Colloquium Series

New Horizons: Obama and the Global Media
One Day Conference

co-sponsored by UA School of Journalism, Department of Anthropology, Department of Near Eastern Studies, and the Technology & Global Islam Project

Symposium on War and Social Sciences *

Sponsored by the UA Department of Anthropology and AGUA (Anthropology Graduate Students at the University of Arizona )

Esther Fuchs, professor in Near Eastern Studies/Judaic Studies
Nation and Narration in the Bible: Feminist Re-readings of Jephthah's Daughter

NES Spring Colloquium Series

Gaza Panel Discussion
Join CMES in a discussion with UA faculty about the background, latest developments, and regional implications of the recent conflict in Gaza

Panelists include:
Charles D. Smith, Professor, Near Eastern Studies
Leila Hudson, Associate Professor, Near Eastern Studies
Asher Kaufman, CMES Visiting Scholar; Assistant Professor, University of Notre Dame, Department of History

Maisa Taha, PhD candidate in linguistic anthropology
Why Hasn't Spain Banned the Veil, Too? Articulating Modes of Womanhood in Spanish Public Discourse

NES Spring Colloquium Series

6.45pm, ILC 130
(early start!)

Maha Nassar, assistant professor, Near Eastern Studies
Pressing for Return: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the 'Right of Return' Discourse, 1948-1958

NES Spring Colloquium Series

Evelyn Early
From Anthropologist "Playing with an Egg and a Stone" to Diplomat Dealing with Digital Diplomacy

Currently a diplomat with the Department of State, Dr. Early serves as Senior State Department Advisor at the Air University in Montgomery, Alabama. She has served as Counselor for Press and Cultural Affairs at embassies in Rabat, Prague, Damascus, and Khartoum. She has also taught anthropology at the University of New Mexico, Notre Dame University, and the University of Houston.

Burcu Karahan Public Talk
The Orphaned Ottoman: Fatherlessness, Love, and Narcissim in the Tanzimat Novel
Visiting candidate: Turkish Studies

co-sponsored by Near Eastern Studies

Asli Igsiz Public Talk
Mapping Turkish Identity: Tracing Conversion and Family Histories to the 1923 Greek-Turkish Population Exchange
Visiting candidate: Turkish Studies

co-sponsored by Near Eastern Studies

Glaire Anderson Public Lecture
Slaves, Women, and Other Aristocrats: Patronage and the Hybrid Elite in Umayyad al-Andalus

Glaire D. Anderson (PhD MIT, 2005) is a historian of Islamic architecture at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She teaches courses on pre-modern Islamic art, architecture, and urbanism; villas, gardens, and court cultures; Orientalism and visual culture, and the Historiography of Islamic Art. Her research focuses on medieval Islamic villa cultures of Iberia and North Africa, as part of a broader history of the villa in the Mediterranean. Anderson has received awards from the College Art Association, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for the Study of the History of Art, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Historians of Islamic Art, and the Barakat Foundation, among others.

This event is sponsored by the UA School of Art

Co-sponsorship by: College of Fine Arts Dean's Fund for Excellence, Visiting Artist and Scholars Committee, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Department of Anthropology, College of Architecture, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Arizona Medieval, Renaissance and Reformation Committee

Zeidan Atashi Public Talk
Majorities and Minorities in Israel and the Complexities in the Middle East

Sponsored by the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies

co-sponsored by CMES

Zeidan Atashi, an Israeli Druze Arab, served in the Israeli Armed Forces from 1961-63. He graduated from Haifa University with a degree in Political Science and Arabic Studies and later received a Masters degree in Political Science from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

 Mr. Atashi served as Consul and Head of Information Affairs at the Israeli Consulate General in New York and as a member of the Israeli delegation to the United Nations from the years 1975-76. In 1989 and 1993 he was a member of the Israeli Mission to the U.N., the first non-Jewish Israeli to hold a diplomatic post. In 1977 Mr. Atashi was elected to the Knesset and played an important role in Israeli Jewish-Arab relations and as a liaison between the Lebanese and Golan Heights Druze communities and the Israeli Government. Mr. Atashi was elected to a second term in the Knesset in 1984, and he became a trusted liaison between the government and the Palestinian leadership. From 1992-96 he held the post of senior advisor to the Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs. He is currently a member of the Board of Governors of Haifa University.

Mr. Atashi has been active in the public and political life in Israel . His book, Druze and Jews in Israel : A Shared Destiny? , explores the history and important relations between Israeli Jews and Israeli Druze. His work seeks to unravel the complex religious, economic and cultural relations between majority and minority groups in the Middle East and especially in Israel .

Arang Keshavarzian Public Talk
A Genealogy of Free Trade Zones in the Persian Gulf:
Geopolitics of Global Integration

Arang Keshavarzian is an associate professor of Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, at New York University and a Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, Princeton University

Free trade zones have been championed by policymakers as important mechanisms for the “economic liberalization” and “globalization” of the Middle East. While a growing number of political economists have begun to investigate the performance of these projects, few have considered why states voluntarily limit their sovereign powers by establishing these liberalized territories. To address this question, this paper studies the Jebel Ali free trade zone in Dubai (UAE) and the Kish free trade zone in Iran, two of the earliest such projects in the region. Building on recent scholarship that views “globalization” as locally differentiated, territorially specified, and politically generated, the essay argues that paradoxically these zones were developed by the Iranian state and Dubai emirate to project territorial sovereignty in turbulent geostrategic settings and times as well as nodes in circuits of rent for domestic coalitions and international interests. The geostrategic and state-building logics informed when, where, and how these projects were developed. More generally, this analysis illustrates that the Middle East is neither absent from the process of globalization, nor does it simply respond passively and reactively to this complex process. Free trade zones are an example of local strategies working in consort with international processes to fashion new forms of economic and political interconnectedness.

Arang Keshavarzian Graduate Student Lunch

Open to Graduate Students only. RSVP required. Call us at 621-5450 or stop by the CMES Front Desk to sign up.

Tuba Demirci Public Talk
Visiting candidate: Turkish Studies

co-sponsored by Near Eastern Studies

Sabbagh Lecture *
Rise of the Arab and Muslim Community in Detroit

Andrew Shryock, who has studied the cultural, political and economic influences of Arabs and Muslims in the United States and abroad, will speak about Arab communities in Detroit during an annual event at the UA. The Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Shryock will speak Feb. 26 as part of the Sabbagh Lecture, which is sponsored by the UA anthropology department.

Akbar Aghajanian Public Talk
The Change in Family and Household Formation in Iran: 1976-2006

Dr. Aghajanian is Professor of Sociology at Fayetteville State University in Fayetteville, NC and holds a Ph. D. from Duke University. Dr. Aghajanian has expertise in women's roles, marriage trends, and infertility in Iran.   He teaches classes on research methods and statistics, social demography, social change, the family, and stratification and inequality.    Dr. Aghajanian has conducted research in urban and rural Iran, as well as Morocco and Tunisia.  His research has received support from the Rockefeller Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and National Science Foundation, among other granting organizations.

Richard Eaton, professor in History (UA)
Architecture and Power in the 16th c. Deccan: an Historical Typology
NES Spring Colloquium Series

Brian Silverstein , assistant professor in Anthropology (UA)
The Abolition of the Caliphate and Debates about Islamic Governance in the Early Turkish Republic
NES Spring Colloquium Series

Alexandra Avakian , Public Talk
Windows of the Soul: My Journeys in the Muslim World
a slide show and book signing by National Geographic photographer Alexandra Avakian. 

Alexandria Avakian has been a photojournalist since 1984 and a photographer for National Geographic since 1995. Her assignments have included a cover story on Iran; photographic essays on Gaza, Romania, and Armenia; and intensive photographic projects on Lebanon 's Hezbollah and American Muslims.

Co-sponsored by the UA School of Journalism

Tucson Festival of Books
CMES will have a booth on the UA Mall. Join us for an exciting weekend of booksignings with authors from the Middle East and authors writing about the Middle East.

Special guest: Alexandra Avarkian, photojournalist and author of "Windows of the Soul: My Journeys in the Muslim World."

The Tucson Festival of Books is sponsored by the Arizona Daily Star and hosted and organized by the University of Arizona. Net proceeds will promote literacy in Southern Arizona through the Tucson Festival of Books Foundation, a 501c (3) nonprofit organization.

Eisenhower Series College Program Outreach Talks
U.S. Army War College

A panel of senior officers from the Army War College will be at the University of Arizona as part of the Eisenhower Series College Program. They will discuss their perspectives on world issues, including the Middle East .

The program encourages dialogue on national security and other public policy issues between students of the Army's senior educational institution and the public at colleges and universities throughout the United States .

Ziad Fahmy Public Lecture
Media Capitalism: Colloquial Mass Culture and Nationalism in Egypt, 1904-1919

The existing historiography places early Egyptian nationalism within the realm of elite politics. The principal reason why historians have missed the significance of the masses is their almost complete neglect of the role of colloquial Egyptian, either in its written or non-textual forms.  Accordingly, the primary objective of my paper is to examine the popularization of Egyptian nationalist discourse, primarily through the investigation of early twentieth century music recordings.  By the 1920s, the laws of supply and demand fostered an elaborate music industry composed of writers, musicians and singers who catered to a growing demand for new colloquial Egyptian hits.  This new mass entertainment industry increased the popularity of Egyptian music by exposing more and more Egyptians to the same music culture, creating in the process a national community of listeners.  With the transformation of songs into a mass medium, discourse and practice often converged, in the sense that unlike novels, newspapers and other forms of written discourse, listeners often participated in the experience of discourse dissemination by the simple act of singing along. My paper will also engage with theories of nationalism and tests their applicability to Egypt and the Arab world. It introduces the concept of media capitalism, expanding the historical analysis of nationalism beyond print.

As part of the 9th Annual Southwest Graduate Conference in Middle Eastern Studies, Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives in Middle Eastern Studies

Hosted by the Middle East and North Africa Graduate Students Association of the University of Arizona, in cooperation with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Near Eastern Studies Department, and the Religious Studies Program

Ziad Fahmy (Ph.D., History, University of Arizona, 2007) is an Assistant
Professor of Modern Middle East History at Cornell University. His interests include nationalism and identity in the modern Middle East, colloquial Arabic mass-culture, and issues of diglossia in the Arab World. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation, tentatively titled: “Making Egyptians: Colloquial Culture, Media Capitalism, and the Growth of National Identity, 1870-1919.”

5.15pm, Chemistry 134

Scott Lucas , assistant professor in Near Eastern Studies (UA)
Al-Hakim al-Naysaburi and the Companions of the Prophet: An Original Sunni Voice in the Shi'i Century
NES Spring Colloquium Series

Charles Smith , professor in Near Eastern Studies (UA)
World War I and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 'Scholarly Research' and Its Pitfalls
NES Spring Colloquium Series

Hamdy Singary
Nation Building and Oil Rights in Iraqi Kurdistan:  Navigating the Iraqi Constitution and the United Nations

Singary recently received his SJD in the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona. In his dissertation he posed the question "Is it possible under the present system (in Iraq) for Kurdistan to access its rights?"

Carine Bourget, assistant professor in Dept of French and Italian (UA)
Islam and the French Republic: The Affair of the Muslim Headscarf in Francophone Literature

NES Spring Colloquium Series

Sama Alshaibi , assistant professor in School of Art (UA)
War, Women and Imaging: Iraqi Women's Struggles Shared Through Art

NES Spring Colloquium Series

Nick Campion , Public Lecture
Astronomy and Islamic/Persian Theories of History

Nick Campion is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Director of the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture, at the University of Wales , Lampeter.

Dr. Campion will be discussing the use of astronomy to analyze history and manage the present in the Islamic world of the eighth to tenth centuries. Zoroastrian historiography was based on the division of history into thousand year periods and, sometime probably between the first and fifth centuries, it was noticed that the Zoroastrian millennium was just forty years longer than the complete cycle of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions. This coincidence was the origin of a theory of historical change in which these two planets were thought to regulate or indicate changes in the state, society and religion. It provided a temporal framework for understanding major religious events, such as the coming of great prophets, and for political management, for example, the foundation of Baghdad as a model of the cosmos.

Aomar Boum , assistant professor in Near Eastern Studies (UA)
Virtual Jews: Reviving Community Memories among Moroccan Jews in Cyberspace
NES Spring Colloquium Series

Symposium on War and Social Sciences

Saturday, 24 January 2009

War has given rise to both employment opportunities and ethical debates within the social sciences for at least a century.  US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan currently rely upon diverse social science human resources and techniques, ranging from embedded ethnography, historical and psychological analyses, mapping, linguistics and demographical statistics. Presently, the US Defense Department not only integrates these methodologies into counter-insurgent field strategies abroad, but also influences the funding, and in turn the research priorities, of an increasing number of social science units in America 's universities.  As students preparing for careers in these disciplines, it is important to explore the challenges, opportunities, and ethics of scholarly engagement with the military and national security agencies.  This symposium is meant to provide information on the history, contemporary context, and implications of being social scientists during wartime in the United States .  It is intended to provide a platform for various arguments to be made on this topic, and to encourage students and faculty to consider their own position drawing from the breadth of expert commentary that will be presented by this multidisciplinary panel.

Opening Address
David Price, PhD, Professor of Anthropology, St. Martin's University

Closing Address (approx 2:45pm)
Kelly Moore, PhD, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Cincinnati; Alumni, UA

Panelists
Jesse Ballenger, PhD Candidate, Deparment of Anthropology, UA
Laura Briggs, PhD, Department of Women's Studies, UA
Leila Hudson, PhD, Department of Near Eastern Studies, UA
Maggy Zanger, LLM/MA, School of Journalism, UA

Post-symposium reception to follow panel

For more information contact: Jacob Campbell at jacob@email.arizona.edu