Islam, the Humanities and the Human

One Thousand and One Nights is a work made of and by translation. The earliest Arabic fragments are already translations of an earlier Persian work, which borrowed in turn from … Read More

In Fantasmic Objects, Kirsten L. Scheid offers a striking study of both modern art in Lebanon and modern Lebanon through art. By focusing on the careers of Moustapha Farrouk and Omar Onsi, forefathers of an iconic national repertoire, and their rebellious student Saloua Raouda Choucair, founder of an antirepresentational, participatory art, Scheid traces an emerging sense … Read More

The Dawn is Too Far shares a multi-generational perspective of those who came as students, refugees, and exiles to the U.S., particularly in the context of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This film charts the longer history of Iranian Americans in the San Francisco Bay area and the ways they have been impacted and contributed to … Read More

      In February 2022, Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs landed in the news when it announced that performing the pilgrimage to Mecca in the Metaverse does not count as a ‘real hajj’. Mixed reactions to this declaration aside, this talk argues that, in the Metaverse era, the existence of a visible but immaterial … Read More

The Race and Gender in Islamic Art Workshop brings together a group of scholars who seek to acknowledge the ways in which race and gender converge and jointly impact codes of representation in Islamic image-making practices over the centuries. Exploring the artistic traditions of the lands of Islam writ large—from the Middle East to the … Read More

In the early nineteenth century, some of the most consequential developments in Ottoman architecture unfolded not in Istanbul but on the empire’s frontier. This talk explores the ambitious building program of Ali Pasha of Ioannina (r. 1788–1822), the renegade governor of Greece and Albania whose architectural patronage ranged from mosques to dervish lodges and even Orthodox … Read More

Since the 1990s, Jafar Panahi has been a central figure in contemporary Iranian cinema and one of its most acclaimed voices on the global stage. A master of the semi-documentary form, Panahi has captured the spirit and texture of Tehran with a rare intimacy and precision. Even after receiving a draconian sentence that placed him … Read More

From the era of the Mamluk Sultanate to the age of jet travel, Cairo has long served as an important hub of West African migration. Whether as a stop on the hajj to … Read More

The Iranian diaspora, estimated at 5 to 8 million people worldwide, has become increasingly visible, especially in North America and Europe. In response to misrepresentation and marginalization, many have turned to cultural work to reshape public narratives and claim space for more accurate and diverse expressions of Iranian identity. Drawing on 16 years of ethnographic … Read More

The Nakba of 1948 is often narrativized as a massive break in Palestinian cultural production. In this presentation, Drs. Ari and Amin will bring nuance to this idea through comparative studies of … Read More