THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Past Friday Lectures
September 22, 2023 - Alireza Doostdar (University of Chicago)
“God and Revolution in Iran”
October 20, 2023 - Ahmet Karamustafa (University of Maryland)
“A Path to Early Alevi History from within the Study of Islam”
November 17, 2023 - Rodrigo Adem (Georgetown University)
“Distinct Origins: Early Islamic Theology on its own Terms”
December 1, 2023 - Tahera Qutbuddin (Oxford University)
“‘The Living Imam is the Speaking Qur’an’: Fatimid-Tayyibi Shia Doctrines of Walāyah and Taʾwīl”
January 26, 2024 - Jonathan Brack (Northwestern University)
“The Polemical Worlds of a Persian Vizier: Buddhism, Judaism, and Mongol Sacred Kingship”
March 1, 2024 - Nada Moumtaz (University of Toronto)
“Waqf and Sect in Beirut: The Indeterminate Character of Property”
March 29, 2024 - Omnia El Shakry (Yale University)
“Psychoanalysis and the Calligraphy of Invention”
April 5, 2024 - Paul Walker (University of Chicago)
“Two Giants of Sunni Islam Confront the Ismailis of the Mountaintop Fortresses"
April 12, 2024 - Margaret Litvin (Boston University) - Farouk Mustafa Memorial Lecture on Modern Arabic Literature
“The Damascus Giraffe: What Place for Beauty in Arabic Fiction Today?”
April 26, 2024 - Susan Gunasti (Ohio Wesleyan University)
“Hadith in the Late Ottoman Empire”
September 23, 2022 - Orit Bashkin (University of Chicago)
"Ottoman Purim: Jewish Memories of an Ottoman Past"
October 14, 2022 - Abdel Razzaq Takriti (University of Houston)
"Reframing Palestine: Towards an Anti-Colonial History "
October 21, 2022 - Heba Gowayed (Boston University)
"Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential"
November 4, 2022 - Mohamad Ballan (Stony Brook University)
"Borderland Hybridities: Genealogical Politics and the Racialization of Religion in Nasrid Granada"
November 11, 2022 - Fahad Bishara (University of Virginia)
"Monsoon Voyagers: The Indian Ocean and Other Arab Worlds"
January 6, 2023 - Hassan (Husni) Haddad Memorial Lecture - Hanan Hammad (Texas Christian University)
“Layla Murad: The Jewish-Muslim Star of Egypt”
January 27, 2023 - Dana Sajdi (Boston College)
"A Flower from Every Meadow: The History Collection from the Library of Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar of Acre"
March 31, 2023 - Amidu Sanni (Fountain University)
"The Arabic-Islamic Heritage of Sudanic Africa: Old Sources and New Challenges of a Documentary Tradition"
April 7, 2023 - Farouk Mustafa Memorial Lecture on Modern Arabic Literature - Samah Selim (Rutgers University)
"A Tale of Two Cities: the Scales of Literary History and the Ends of Comparison"
April 14, 2023 - Charles Hirschkind (University of California, Berkeley)
"Divine Presences and Absences in the Anthropology of Islam"
April 28, 2023 - Ziad Fahmy (Cornell University)
"Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in Modern Egypt"
September 24, 2021 - Ghassan Moussawi (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
"Beirut, Disrupted: On Fractal Orientalism, Queer Strategies, and Recursive Time"
October 15, 2021 - Mona El-Ghobashy (New York University)
"The Anthropologist as Reader"
November 12, 2021 - Ziad Elmarsafy (King's College London)
"’Whose Son Are You?’ Saud al-Sanousi’s Treatise on Fathers"
November 19, 2021 - Febe Armanios (Middlebury College)
"Challenging Archives, Paradigms, and Perceptions: Coptic Egyptian History in the Ottoman Period"
January 21, 2022 - Corisande Fenwick (University College London)
"How to found an Islamic State: the Idrīsids and the transformation of medieval Morocco in the early middle ages"
February 4, 2022 - Devin Stewart (Emory University)
"Uses of the Qur'an for Practical Purposes"
April 8, 2022 - Monica Ringer (Amherst College)
"God's Intent: Islamic Modernism Between Historicism and Re-Enchantment"
April 29, 2022 - Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (Bard College)
"Livability under Siege: Infrastructure's Everyday Worlds"
May 20, 2022 - Hassan (Husni) Haddad Memorial Lecture - Carmen Gitre (Virginia Tech)
“Playing a Part: Twentieth-Century Egyptian Theater and the Politics of Performance”
September 25 - Naghmeh Sohrabi (Brandeis University)
"Does the 1979 Revolution in Iran Still Matter?A Conversation with Naghmeh Sohrabi, Moderated by Alireza Doostdar"
October 23 - Alyssa Gabbay (UNC Greensboro)
"The Anthropologist as Reader"
November 6 - Giancarlo Casale (European University Institute)
"Flat-earthers in the Observatory: Mathematical Cartography and the Destruction of Takiyuddin's Rasathane (1573-1583)"
November 20 - Zeynep Tufekci (University of North Carolina)
January 22 - Nina Safran (Penn State University)
"The Authority of a Fatwa: Ibn al-Hajj's Opinion on the Construction of New Houses of Worship"
February 19 - Scott Lucas (University of Arizona)
"A Guide that is Clear to Zaydi Tafsir: An Introduction to Qur'an Commentaries from northern Yemen"
April 9 - Farouk Mustafa Memorial Lecture on Modern Arabic Literature - Barbara Romaine (Villanova University)
"On Not Getting it Right: Literary Translation as a Deliberately Imperfect Art"
April 23 - Malika Dekkiche (University of Antwerp)
“A World of Kings and Realms”
May 21 - Hilary Kilpatrick
"Christian Doctors and Secretaries as Poets in Ottoman Syria (17th and 18th centuries)"
November 22 - Asli Bali (UCLA)
“From Revolution to Devolution? Reforming the State in the Modern Middle East”
January 24 - Husni Haddad Lecture - Samer El Saber (Stanford University)
"Palestinian Performance on the Theatrical Front"
February 7 - Dimitri Gutas (Yale University)
"Graeco-Arabic Studies beyond Greek and Arabic: Integrating the Western Humanities Canon"
February 21 - Asli Igsiz (New York University)
"Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange"
September 27 - Khaled Furani (Tel Aviv University)
"Recovering Khalifa for an Ethics of Fragility: Fragments of a Palestinian Challenge from Within the Leviathan"
November 1 - Brinkley Messick (Columbia University)
"The Anthropologist as Reader"
March 6 - Rochelle Terman (University of Chicago)
"Islamophobia and Media Portrayals of Women’s Rights: A Computational Text Analysis of U.S. News Coverage
April 3 - Shi’a Studies Symposium - POSTPONED
April 10 - Farouk Mustafa Memorial Lecture on Modern Arabic Literature - Samah Selim (Rutgers University) - POSTPONED
April 17 - Satyel Larson (Princeton University)- POSTPONED
April 24 - James Montgomery (University of Cambridge)
"The Classical Arabic Hunting Poem: A Library of Arabic Literature Project"- POSTPONED
May 8 - Aynur de Rouen (Binghamton University - SUNY)
"The Story of the Vera Beaudin Saeedpour Kurdish Library & Museum Collection" (Co-sponsored by Kurdish Circle)
May 15 - Güneş Murat Tezcür (University of Central Florida)
"Kurdish Studies in North America"" (Co-sponsored by Kurdish Circle)
May 29 - Orit Bashkin (University of Chicago)
"An Old New World: Modernity, Science, and New Islamic Cosmology"