We host numerous guest speakers from across the disciplines on campus each year, thus bringing our students and faculty into contact with the most prominent scholars and intellectuals from across the United States and the rest of the world. Check out this small selection of recent events!

2014

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (Hebrew University) “Criminality in Spaces of Death:  The Palestinian Case-Study” (January 28, 2014)

Anjali Arondekar (UC Santa Cruz) “In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts: Sexuality, Historiography, South Asia” (February 6, 2014)

Karima Benoune (UC Davis School of Law) “Sidi Bouzid Blues and the Green Wave: Journeys through the Arab Spring and Fall” (February 10, 2014)

Fatima Sadiqi (Sidi Mohamed ben Abdallah University – Fez) “Women’s Right in Morocco and the 2011 Constitution” (February 20, 2014)

Sunil Sharma (Boston University) “Imaging India in Safavid Isfahan” (March 10, 2014)

Mehran Medni (North Dakota State) “An Overview of Persian Classical Music” (April 10, 2014)

Asli Bali (UCLA) “Court and Constitutional Transition: Lessons from the Turkish Case.” (April 14, 2014)

2013

Prince Moulay Hicham (Moroccan intellectual and cousin of King Mohamed VI) addresses the Arab Spring (Feb 06, 2013)

Asef Bayat (University of Illinois) “Revolution without Movement, Movement without Revolution” (Apr 17, 2013)

Sonallah Ibrahim (Egyptian novelist) “Literature, Dissent & Revolution in Egypt” (May 07, 2013)

Priti Ramamurthy (University of Washington) “Technology, Gender, and Perplexities of Smallholder Capitalism in India” (May 16, 2013)

Ayca Alemdaroglu (Stanford) “Guardians of the Republic: Youth, Social Inequality and Politics in Turkey” (May 22, 2013)

Asad Ahmed (UC Berkeley) “Muslim Rationalist Scholarship in the Pre-Modern Period” (Jun 04, 2013)

Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi (University of Toronto) “The Cyrus Cylinder and a Trans-confessional Narrative of Iranian Civilization”(Oct 16, 2013)

Thomas Hansen (Stanford) “Melancholia of Freedom: Social Life of an Indian Township in South Africa” (Oct 21, 2013) 

Giancarlo Casale (University of Minnesota) “The Eunuch’s Galleons: Cultural Exchange and the Technology of Warfare in the Early Modern Indian Ocean” (Nov 05, 2013)

2012

Omar Al-Dewachi (American University of Beirut) “Iraq’s Emerging Therapeutic Geography: Warfare and the Crisis of (Health) Care” (Nov 13, 2012)

Abed Azzam (Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry) “A Reading of Islamic Atheism against the Background of Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is Dead'” (Oct 04, 2012)

Ali Gheissari (University of San Diego) “Constitutional Rights Reconsidered” (May 15, 2012)

Abdulkarum Soroush (Visiting Professor Stanford, Emeritus Tehran University) “Islamic Reform: Iranian Style” (May 09, 2012)

Saba Mahmood (UC Berkeley) “Secterian Conflict, Geopolitics, and the ‘Minority Problem’ in Contemporary Egypt” (Apr 11, 2012)

Farzaneh Milani (University of Virginia) “Flight and Captivity in the Writing of Iranian Women Writers” (Feb 08, 2012)

Juan Cole (University of Michigan) “The Arab Spring – One Year Later” (Jan 18, 2012)

2011

Gilbert Achcar (SOAS) “The Arabs and the Holocaust” (Oct 21, 2011)

Beth Baron (CUNY) “The Port Said Orphan Scandal and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt” (Nov 14, 2011)

James Danowski (University of Illinois) “Some Ideological Effects of the Islamist Arab Spring” (Nov 04, 2011)