Events

To request special services, accommodations, or assistance for any events, please contact the Watson Institute at WatsonEvents@brown.edu or (401) 863-2809.

  • In December 2024, the reign of the Assad regime came to an end in Syria. This discussion with Joshua Landis will address the challenges facing Syrians in the coming years, as they seek to rebuild their country after 13 years of civil war and 53 years of authoritarian rule. Topics to include: the fears of communal violence; the spectres of Al Qaeda and ISIS; Syria’s relationships with Russia, Iran, and the Arab states; and the role of the international community.

    About the panel:

    Joshua Landis is Sandra Mackey Chair and Director of the Center for Middle East Studies and the Farzaneh Family Center for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies at the University of Oklahoma in the Boren College of International Studies. He writes and manages SyriaComment.com, a daily newsletter on Syrian politics and publishes frequently in policy journals such as Foreign Affairs, Middle East Policy and Foreign Policy. His book,Syria at Independence: Nationalism, Leadership, and Failure of Republicanism”, will be published by the Arab Center for Research and Policy studies this coming year. He is a frequent analyst on TV, radio, and in print and is a regular on NPR and the BBC.


    Elias Muhanna is associate professor of comparative literature and history, and director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University. He is a scholar of medieval and early modern Islamic history, and also publishes commentary on modern Middle Eastern politics and culture in the mainstream press. He has written for The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Nation, and other periodicals.

    Nina Tannenwald is senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Political Science. Her research focuses on the role of international institutions, norms and ideas in global security issues, efforts to control weapons of mass destruction, and human rights and the laws of war. Her book, “The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Nonuse of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945” (Cambridge University Press, 2007), won the 2009 Lepgold Prize for best book in international relations.

    Cosponsor:

    The Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies

  • Made Possible by the Peter Green Lectureship Fund on the Modern Middle East
    Cosponsors:
     Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
    Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women

    About the Event:
    A panel conversation on the release of “Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe” (University of Edinburgh Press, 2024) with editors Tunay Altay, Nadje Al-Ali, and Katharina Galor, and featuring panelists Sa’ed Atshan and Elizabeth Berman.

    About the Book:
    “Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe” provides an empirically grounded exploration of different case studies on anti-LGBTQ and anti-gender mobilizations of the far-right in Europe and the Middle East. The contributions engage with multilayered histories of gender and sexuality politics that connect the Middle East and Europe, informed by histories of colonialism, racism, and border controls. A second, underlying objective of this volume is to contribute to decolonized knowledge productions by de-centering Europe and simultaneously de-exceptionalizing the Middle East. The contributors commit to respecting the heterogeneity and complexity of these regions by focusing on grounded and life experiences. Ultimately, this volume illustrates a conceptualization of the broad spectrum of far-right politics and queer feminist critiques as manifested in a wide array of contexts, including academia, politics and everyday lives.

    About the Speakers:
    Nadje Al-Ali is Robert Family Professor of International Studies and professor of anthropology and Middle East studies. Her main research interests revolve around feminist activism and gendered mobilization, mainly with reference to Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and the Kurdish political movement. Her publications include What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (2009, University of California Press, co-authored with Nicola Pratt); Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (2007, Zed Books), and Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East(Cambridge University Press 2000.

    Tunay Altay is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology and gender studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. His research focuses on queer migration and sexual politics in Germany, Turkey, and the broader contexts of Europe and the Middle East. He has published in top-ranked journals, including Sexualities and Ethnic and Racial Studies. He co-chairs the Gender and Sexuality Research Network at the Council for European Studies.

    Sa’ed Atshan is associate professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and anthropology and Chair of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College. Atshan is the author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique(Stanford University Press, 2020), coauthor (with Katharina Galor) of The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press, 2020), and co-editor (with Galor) of Reel Gender: Palestinian and Israeli Cinema(Bloomsbury, 2022).

    Elizabeth Berman is a Ph.D. student in the department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She was a Fulbright scholar and lecturer at Humboldt, where she taught on topics ranging from queer theoretical philosophies of death and reproduction to Germany’s imperial history and the afterlives of the Shoah. In her research and teaching, she interrogates theories of trauma, repair, and disability through engagement with postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories; psychoanalysis; and philosophies of technology.

    Katharina Galor is the Hirschfeld Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies at Brown, and an affiliate member of the Center of Middle East Studies and Urban Studies. She has published widely on Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian visual and material culture, from antiquity through present times. Among her books are Finding Jerusalem: Archaeology between Science and Ideology (University of California Press, 2017), The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press, 2000; co-authored with Sa’ed Atshan) ), and Jewish Women: Between Conformity and Agency(Routledge, 2024).

    University of Edinburgh press discount code NEW30

  • Film Screening: Prisoner No. 626710 is Present
    Thursday, February 6, 2025
    4:00 PM – 6:00 PM EST
    Joukowsky Forum, 111 Thayer St

    Join us for a screening of Prisoner No. 626710 is Present (Kaidi No. 626710 Haazir Hai), a compelling documentary by Lalit Vachani that examines the arrest and ongoing imprisonment of Umar Khalid under India’s Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. Through archival footage and a forensic analysis of media framing, the film sheds light on the events leading to Khalid’s incarceration and the larger implications for dissent and democracy in India.

    [60 min; India/Germany; 2024. In Hindi and English, with English subtitles.]

    Lalit Vachani, acclaimed documentary filmmaker and research scholar at the University of Göttingen, will be present to discuss his work.

    Learn More
  • About the Event
    Who, and perhaps more importantly what, is a worker? Starting in the 1870s government officials, company managers, political organizers, and laboring people in Greater Syria (today’s Lebanon and Syria) began to ask this question. Faced with labor struggles from Beirut to Aleppo and beyond, a diverse set of historical actors realized something in common: the category of the “worker” was becoming central to how people organized and oriented themselves in a world increasingly ruled by capitalist social formations. They also recognized that the answer to this question was not immediately available. It would be worked out through social, legal and intellectual struggles over the next half century. This talk explores the history of “the worker question” in Greater Syria between 1870-1939 by examining the work stoppages, newspaper debates, and legislative initiatives which attempted to define or manage workers. Brown Postdoctoral fellow in Labor History Ellis Garey argues that over the course of the late Ottoman and early post-Ottoman period, it became impossible for a wide range of historical actors to make sense of their social reality without reference to the status of people who labored.

    About the Speaker
    Ellis Garey holds a Ph.D. in history and Middle Eastern studies from New York University. She recently joined Brown as the 2024-2026 Postdoctoral Fellow in Labor History. Her manuscript in progress, Figuring Labor: The Emergence of the Worker in Greater Syria, 1870-1939,attends to the emergence of “the worker” as both a social concept and as a historical actor in late-Ottoman and French Mandate Greater Syria. Her research has been published in The Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association and is forthcoming in the Radical History Review.

  • Join the artist Leslie Starobin for a talk on the art exhibit “Looming in the Shadows of Lodz”

    This new photography exhibition is sponsored by Art at Watson and features the photography of Leslie Starobin taken during a “roots journey” to Poland, coupled with memories from family members who survived the Holocaust.

    Artist statement:

    “Looming in the Shadows of Lodz” was inspired by a roots journey I made to Poland in 2019 with my husband and children. We traveled on the 75th anniversary of our relatives’ deportation to Auschwitz from the Lodz Ghetto, the last one to be liquidated by the Nazis. In Lodz, I photographed the Altman family residences, the cemetery where they hid from the Nazis, and the Radegast train station where they boarded cattle cars to the death camp.

    After visiting Auschwitz, we flew to Israel, where my husband’s aunt lives. At 95, Dorka

    Berger (née Altman) is the only relative alive to contribute to this multi-generational project. She poured over our photos and film footage, revealing new memories of the past.

    In July 1945, when 15-year-old Dorka penned her “Diary of Dwojra Altman,” she was haunted by the atrocities she witnessed, and she was mourning the loss of her parents. Now, she aspires to fulfill Jewish tradition — “l’haggid” — “And you should tell your children.”

    My “photo narratives” are framed by quotes I collected over three decades from Dorka and her older sister, Tola (my mother-in-law). By layering memories of the past onto visual depictions of the present, I am asking viewers to shift between text and image and between memory and place as they view these topographies of trauma across time and space.

    When speaking in Hebrew throughout our conversations, Dorka and Tola referred to Nazis as “Germans.” I chose to adhere to their language in the photo narratives as they were speaking about their past experiences.

    Made with generous support from the Combined Jewish Philanthropies Arts & Culture Community Impact Grant Fund, “Marching All Night: The Testimony of Dorka Berger née Altman” will screen on opening night. It can also be seen by scanning the QR code. Ori Segev, who is the third generation to inherit and tell this family story, filmed and edited the video.

    Exhibit open February 13 - May 30

    Stephen Robert ’62 Hall, 280 Brook Street, The Agora

  • The Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy is pleased to present the John Hazen White, Sr. Lecture featuring New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens. With deep insight into the intersection of domestic policy and global events, Stephens will explore how decisions made at home ripple across the international stage.

    In this thought-provoking lecture, Stephens will discuss key political dynamics shaping the United States, while connecting these trends to global affairs—from shifting alliances to rising geopolitical tensions. Drawing on his recent columns, he will examine the challenges of leadership, governance, and ethics in a rapidly evolving political landscape.

    Join us for an engaging conversation that bridges the local and the global, offering perspectives on what lies ahead for both American politics and the international community.

  • About the Event:
    The arts of literature and architecture are symbiotic. In dedicatory inscriptions, travelogues, and ekphrastic praise poems, literature serves to describe, explicate, and celebrate architectural structures and their significance. But equally often architecture is at the service of literature, playing a crucial role in the construction of fictional worlds and providing the scene in which characters act and the narrative unfolds. Building projects frame the career of Alexander the Great as told by the Persian poet Nezāmi Ganjavi (d. 1209) in his Eskandarnāmeh. After Alexander first demonstrates his military prowess in battling the Ethiopians, his first order of business is to build the city of Alexandria; just before his death he erects a wall to prevent the demonic forces of Gog and Magog from invading the civilized world. Although Alexander is famous as a builder of cities, he destroys as often as he builds and is most often associated with the militaristic architecture of tents and fortresses. His encounters with palaces, religious sites, and domestic dwellings, however, shape his character significantly, leading to an ascetic critique of architecture as a whole, a critique symbolized by the natural shelter of the cave. Conversation with Paul Losensky (Indiana University) is hosted by Margaret Graves. 

    About the Speaker:
    Paul Losensky is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he taught Persian language and literature, translation theory and practice, and comparative studies of Western and Middle Eastern literatures. His research focuses on Persian poetry of the early modern period, biographical writing, and comparative studies in literature and architecture. His publications include Welcoming Fighāni: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in theSafavid-Mughal Ghazal (1998), Farid ad-Din ‘Attār’s Memorial of God’s Friends: Lives and Sayings of Sufis (2009), and In the Bazaar of Love: Selected Poems of AmirKhusrau (2013, with Sunil Sharma). He has authored numerous articles on Persian literature for journals such as Iranian Studies and is a contributor to Encyclopedia ofIslam and Encyclopaedia Iranica. Professor Losensky is currently working on a book the work of the master-poet of the seventeenth century, Sā’eb Tabrizi, and a new edition and translation of Nal o Daman by the poet-laureate of the Mughal court, Abu’l-Feyz Feyzi. He has served as chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and is a former fellow at the National Humanities Institute and the Bodleian Library.

    Host
    Margaret Graves
    , Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in honor of Marilyn Jenkins-Madina

    Cosponsors
    Islam & the Humanities Initiative
    Department of the History of Art and Architecture
    Department of Comparative Literature
    Department of History
    Center for the Study of the Early Modern World

     

  • This event will discuss the work of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, more commonly known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. The conversation will touch on the actions of the Khmer Rouge that ultimately led to charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity; the genesis and outcomes of the joint United Nations-Cambodian court established to prosecute some of the perpetrators of those crimes; and how the Khmer Rouge Tribunal compares to other international criminal courts and fits into a broader transitional justice landscape. 

  • Middle East Colloquium series

    About the Event
     Hidden within MIT’s Distinctive Collections, many architectural elements from the earliest days of the Institute still survive as part of the Rotch Art Collection. Among the artworks that were salvaged by conservators was a set of striking windows of gypsum and stained-glass, dating to the late 18th- to 19th c. Ottoman Empire. Similar stained-glass windows once graced the reception halls of elite homes, like al-ʿAzam Palace in Damascus and Bayt al-Razzaz in Cairo. Such halls have quickly disappeared due to the ravages of time, war, and recent earthquakes. Yet even prior to these events, many Ottoman-era windows came to Europe and the United States decontextualized as architectural elements or as part of full Islamic rooms, which visitors still admire today at institutions like the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

    This exhibition illuminates the life of these historic windows, tracing their refracted histories from Egypt to MIT, their ongoing conservation, and the cutting-edge research they still prompt. Through facets of their narrative, these windows allow us to gaze into the history of architecture as a modern university discipline in the US and Europe. Their forms reflect key facets of architectural design in the Middle East and diverse approaches to the craft of window-making, which inspired collectors and designers across the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. This legacy of Islamic design continues to spark the imaginations of architects and artists in the region today (and abroad).

    Curators from the Aga Khan Documentation Center (AKDC) uncovered these narratives through historical and archival research, alongside a new collaboration with the Wunsch Conservation Lab. Together, they commissioned a project conservator and documented the process of carefully cleaning and stabilizing these windows for exhibition and long-term preservation. They teamed up with MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Vitrocentre in Switzerland to run experiments to more precisely locate the origins of the materials used in these windows and their journey. Their research led to the commission of works from contemporary artist Dima Srouji (Palestine) and artisan Mohammd al-Dib (Egypt). 

    About the Speaker
    Gwendolyn Collaço is currently the Anne S.K. Brown Curator for Military & Society at Brown University’s John Hay Library. Prior to that, she held the position of Collection Curator of the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT, an archive relating to built environments of the Islamic world. There, she built a new collection of rare books, manuscripts, and art objects, which includes commissions from contemporary artists. Previously, she served as the Assistant Curator for Art of the Middle East at LACMA, where she contributed to the new permanent collection galleries and traveling exhibitions. Gwendolyn received her PhD from the joint program for History of Art + Arch. and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, specializing in Islamic art. Her research interests span artistic exchanges between early-modern Islamic empires, Ottoman painting, print technologies of the Islamic world, and histories of collecting. Her current book project offers the first extended history of the commercial art market for manuscript paintings in Ottoman Istanbul. Her writing appears in journals, such as Ars Orientalis, Muqarnas, and several edited volumes.

  • The Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy is honored to host the Noah Krieger Memorial Lecture featuring Jake Tapper, anchor and Chief Washington Correspondent for CNN. A leading voice in American journalism, Tapper has built a reputation for sharp reporting, tough interviews, and a commitment to truth in an era of polarization and misinformation.

    In this engaging lecture, Tapper will explore the challenges and responsibilities facing journalists today, from navigating the spread of disinformation to rebuilding public trust in the media. Drawing on his extensive career covering politics, policy, and international affairs, Tapper will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the role of journalism in shaping our democracy and holding leaders accountable.

    Join us for an illuminating conversation on the power of the press, the fight for facts, and the future of truth in American public life.

  • The Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy is pleased to present the Alexander Meiklejohn Lecture featuring Tom Perez, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Chair of the Democratic National Committee, and renowned advocate for civil rights and constitutional freedoms.

    In this timely lecture, Perez will explore the enduring principles of freedom enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and their relevance in today’s political and social landscape. Drawing on his decades of experience in public service, Perez will examine the challenges to constitutional rights, the importance of civic participation, and the role of leadership in safeguarding democracy.

    At a moment when questions of justice, equality, and democratic values are at the forefront of national discourse, Perez will offer a powerful reflection on how we can honor the Constitution’s promise of freedom while building a more inclusive and equitable future.