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Filling the Head: Listening to Rap in Arabic

In this ethnography, El Zein listens to the experiences of rappers and their audiences in Amman, Beirut, and Ramallah as they search for ways to engage the political beyond the framework of resistance. Her recently published book, Filling the Head: Listening to Rap in Arabic, theorizes an interdisciplinary approach to political agency rooted the feeling of yearning for a new model of recognition. Dr. Rayya El Zein is an independent researcher. Her writings explore return, yearning, and other frameworks of belonging and becoming. She holds a PhD in theatre and performance studies from the Graduate Center, CUNY.

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An Epic of Martyrs: Revolutionary Images and Muslim Mythologies in 1960s Iraq

In the immediate aftermath of the 1963 Iraqi Ba'ath Party-led coup d’état of the Republic of Iraq and assassination of its democratically elected Prime Minister, Abd al-Karim Qasim, several prominent artists began producing new artworks and public art exhibitions. Iraqi artists drew upon transnational anticolonial symbols and common motifs of the heroic worker, farmer, and revolutionary to visualize collective solidarity and resistance against the new regime. Yet these new artistic activities also began incorporating representations and materials drawn specifically from Islamic religious traditions. The activation of historically religious content into contemporary artworks reveals how anti-authoritarian political resistance increasingly comingled with new heroic mythologies in the 1960s Islamic World. With Elizabeth Rauh, American University of Cairo

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Friendship and Control: Impersonal Feminism in the Mirrors of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

In the late 1950s, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian returned to Iran after more than a decade in the United States, where she studied at Parsons School of Design and worked as an artist and layout designer at a now-defunct luxury department store, Bonwit Teller. Soon after her return, she joined the Point Four Program, launched by the US president Harry S. Truman to provide technical and economic assistance to developing countries. There, she helped traditional craftspeople in rapidly depopulating rural and tribal regions find new markets in Tehran and abroad—effectively acting as an agent of capitalism. Her engagement with Islamic craft also reshaped her artistic practice. Beginning in the early 1970s, she incorporated mirror mosaic—a decorative element of Iranian palatial and religious architecture since the seventeenth century—into modern sculptures, executed with the assistance of artisans. Her collaborations with artisans can be read as a form of wage labor that reduces the artisan to a manual extension of the artist’s vision. Yet how did these male artisans understand the gendered and classed dynamics of their work with her? And what do the mirror works themselves reveal about the tension between freedom and subjugation in her practice? This talk argues that Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s mirror works operate with a notion of power in which love and authority collapse into a single relational act. Hamed Yousefi is an art historian focusing on the intersection of Islam and modern art. His work draws on Islamic theories of the image to rethink modernism beyond Eurocentric assumptions that conflate the modern with the secular. He is currently a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University, and the incoming Assistant Professor of Islamic Art History at Oberlin College. Yousefi received his PhD from Northwestern University in 2025.  

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