Past Events
Interpersonal Communication: A Workshop for Arabic Instructors
Saturday, 1/18/2020, 10:00am - 1:30pm
DC Arabic Teachers' Council Workshop
Book Launch: Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in 21st Century Palestine
Thursday, 12/5/2019, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins will offer an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it begins with the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians forge their lives, naming that context a “waste siege.” She argues that to speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life.
Female Religious Scholars of Classical Islam: Between Creativity and Copying with Asma Sayeed
Thursday, 10/24/2019, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
Asma Sayeed will explore the history of women as religious scholars from the first decades of Islam through the early Ottoman period. Focusing on women’s engagement with hadīth, she analyzes dramatic chronological patterns in women’s hadīth participation in terms of developments in Muslim social, intellectual and legal history, challenging two opposing views.
Muslim American Youth Voices: “I Am the Night Sky” Book Workshop for Educators
Thursday, 10/24/2019, 5:00pm - 7:00pm
IMES Outreach Event
Book Launch: Globalizing Morocco: Transnational Activism and the Postcolonial State w/ David Stenner
Friday, 10/4/2019, 12:30pm - 2:00pm
The end of World War II heralded a new global order. Decolonization swept the world and the United Nations, founded in 1945, came to embody the hopes of the world's colonized people as an instrument of freedom. North Africa became a particularly contested region and events there reverberated around the world. In Morocco, the emerging nationalist movement developed social networks that spanned three continents and engaged supporters from CIA agents, British journalists, and Asian diplomats to a Coca-Cola manager and a former First Lady.
Thursday, 10/3/2019, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
Since the late nineteenth century the Persian Gulf has been transformed from a social world facilitating movement and interdependence to a fault-line needing to be secured.
Thursday, 9/12/2019, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
Since 2011 over 5.6 million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and beyond, and another 6.6 million are internally displaced. The contemporary flight of Syrian refugees comes one century after the region's formative experience with massive upheaval, displacement, and geopolitical intervention: the First World War.
DC Arabic Teachers’ Council Inaugural Meeting
Saturday, 9/7/2019, 9:00am - 12:00pm
DC Arabic Teachers' Council Workshop
Wednesday, 5/15/2019, 5:00pm - 6:00pm
Amb. Gnehm discusses the conundrum the U.S. faces in protecting its interests in the Middle East.
Book Launch: Matt Buehler, “Why Alliances Fail: Islamist and Leftist Coalitions in North Africa”
Wednesday, 4/24/2019, 12:00pm - 1:30pm
Since 2011, the Arab world has seen a number of autocrats, including leaders from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, fall from power. Yet, in the wake of these political upheavals, only one state, Tunisia, transitioned successfully from authoritarianism to democracy.
Monday, 4/22/2019, 12:30pm - 2:00pm
The creative, entertaining and sometimes zany English instruction programs, produced by the Israeli Educational Television in the 1970s, abandoned the respectability associated with “Shakespeare” in favor of the plots and images of American popular culture.
Friday, 4/19/2019, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
The ongoing war in Yemen that began in 2015 has created one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. While critical awareness of the magnitude of the crisis is growing, the political and economic roots of the crisis and the complex realities of Yemeni political life are often obscured by misunderstandings.
2019 IMES Annual Conference: Infrastructure, New Materialism & the Agency of Objects
Friday, 4/19/2019, 8:00am - 4:30pm
This conference presents historic and contemporary academic work centered around the material dimensions of politics and power struggles in the Middle East and North Africa.
Book Launch: “Winning Hearts and Votes” with by Steven T. Brooke
Thursday, 4/11/2019, 12:00pm - 1:30pm
Steven Brooke argues that authoritarians often seek to manage moments of economic crisis by offloading social welfare responsibilities to non-state providers. But providers who serve poorer citizens, motivated by either charity of clientelism, will be constrained in their ability to mobilize voters because the poor depend on the state for many different goods.
Global Fables, Folklore and Fantasy in Children’s & Youth Literature
Wednesday, 4/10/2019, 10:00am - 3:00pm
IMES Outreach Event
Monday, 4/8/2019, 12:00pm - 1:30pm
Lisel Hintz will discuss her new book Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey, with POMEPS on Monday, April 8, 2019 at the Elliot School of International Affairs, Room 505.
For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers with Hiba Bou Akar
Thursday, 4/4/2019, 5:00pm - 7:00pm
For the War Yet to Come examines urban planning in three neighborhoods of Beirut's southeastern peripheries, revealing how these areas have been developed into frontiers of a continuing sectarian order.
Navigating the New Middle East: Challenges and Obstacles to Fieldwork
Wednesday, 4/3/2019, 1:00pm - 3:00pm
Join us for a panel discussion on the difficulties facing academics conducting fieldwork in the Middle East.
Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq with Omar Dewachi
Thursday, 3/21/2019, 5:00pm - 7:00pm
Once the leading hub of scientific and medical training in the Middle East, Iraq's political and medical infrastructure has been undermined by decades of U.S.-led sanctions and invasions.