Keynote Roundtable: Contours of Thought

If you are a Columbia/Barnard affiliate with campus access, please use your Columbia/Barnard email when registering.

Each attendee must have their OWN registration and email address.

Registration for external guests closes at 4PM on April 15. Registration will automatically close at that time. Columbia/Barnard affiliates may register at the door.

The symposium will bring together scholars working across and beyond Middle East and North Africa studies to explore how discursive fields are constituted, and to ask what becomes possible when we read across and against established disciplinary and regional boundaries. Rather than simply juxtaposing area studies frameworks (e.g., Syria or Palestine), we aim to theorize “the regional” anew. This conversation began as an exchange around Syro-Palestine, reflecting on how regional fields—particularly those of Lebanon, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria—have been positioned in relation to the Question of Palestine. This positioning has tended to circumscribe the terrain of inquiry, foreclosing other narratives, epistemologies, and questions. Our symposium aims to explore a conceptual vocabulary that resists colonial inheritances and disciplinary segmentation, and that reimagines scholarly methods through forms of relation not yet captured by dominant frameworks.

The two-day program will include a Thursday evening keynote panel featuring four speakers, open to the public and the Columbia community, followed by three closed-door sessions on Friday with a cohort of invited scholars.

THURSDAY KEYNOTE ROUNDTABLE SPEAKERS

Nadia Abu El-Haj

Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University & Barnard College

Khaled Furani

Professor of Anthropology, Tel Aviv University

Ussama Makdisi

Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley

Helga Tawil-Souri

Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University

SYMPOSIUM CO-ORGANIZERS:

Aamer Ibraheem

Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University

Adrien Zakar

Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and the History of Science and Technology, University of Toronto

Esmat Elhalaby

Assistant Professor in History, University of Toronto

Iheb Guermazi

The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University

Please email [email protected]u to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.

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