CMES will be holding its diploma ceremony followed by a reception for MES graduating seniors, and their families and friends. 

Class of 2025
Jad Hamze
Baylie A. Hartford
Anais S. Leichtling
Mica Maltzman
Bianca Rosen
Ian Stettner

2:30 p.m. or soon thereafter
Welcome Remarks
Elias Muhanna, Director, Center for Middle East Studies

Introduction to Students
Alexander Winder, Associate Director, Center for Middle East Studies

Presentation of Undergraduate Diplomas
Elias Muhanna Director, Center for Middle East Studies

Closing Remarks

3:15 p.m.
Reception
Graduates and their guests are invited to participate in the reception set up in the Kim Koo Library, 3rd floor, Watson Institute, following the awarding of the diplomas

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

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 panelist 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.

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