DIGITAL FORAYS: Archives & Activation // Platforms and Publics

Digital Forays in Middle Eastern Studies // A year-long series 2020-2021: This year-long series starts from a simple premise: What does it look like to think, engage, and do research in this digital age?  This is not a call for researchers to simply produce digital outputs - but we live in an ever-increasingly digital world. In order to better activate our scholarship, and to grasp…

Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930

Judith Surkis, in conversation with Stephanie McCurry, Karuna Mantena, and Emmanuelle Saada, moderated by Camille Robcis To RSVP, please click here. During more than a century of colonial rule over Algeria, the French state shaped and reshaped the meaning and practice of Muslim law by regulating it and circumscribing it to the domain of family law, while applying the French…

90 degrees of Deguy

Registration information to come. At 90, with nearly 90 books, poet-philosopher and intellectual impresario extraordinaire Michel Deguy will be celebrated live for all he’s brought to thought for three-quarters of a century. Three roundtables will round out the three hours. In Deguy’s presence and with his comments, an international array of speakers will congregate around three prompts:   Introduction by…

The Price of Democracy: How Money Shapes Politics and What to Do about It

moderated by Anya Schiffrin To sign up for this virtual conversation, RSVP here. One person, one vote. In theory, everyone in a democracy has equal power to decide elections. But it’s hardly news that, in reality, political outcomes are heavily determined by the logic of one dollar, one vote. We take the political power of money for granted. But does…

Book Club on Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education

Join us for a lively Zoom conversation on Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert, translated from the French by Robert Baldick (Penguin). Based on Flaubert’s own youthful passion for an older woman, Sentimental Education was described by its author as “the moral history of the men of my generation.” It follows the amorous adventures of Frederic Moreau, a law student who, returning…

Interrogating the Declining Significance of Pushkin’s Blackness: Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Literary Nationalism

Though most scholarship on Pushkin’s reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, the origins of this encounter remain poorly understood. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic were obsessed with Pushkin’s racial heritage—as both a Russian, and as a canonical European writer of African descent. This collaborative talk (prepared by a transatlantic historian…

Roy Foster “On Seamus Heaney”

Oct, 14th, 12.30pm EST/5.30pm GMT Presented in collaboration with The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities. Join us for an online conversion with Professor Roy Foster about his new book, On Seamus Heaney (Princeton University Press, 2020). Published this fall, On Seamus Heaney is a vivid and original account of one of Ireland’s greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographer. Professor Foster will…

Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader

Derek Penslar will discuss his book Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader with Jonathan Gribetz. About the Book The life of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) was as puzzling as it was brief. How did this cosmopolitan and assimilated European Jew become the leader of the Zionist movement? How could he be both an artist and a statesman, a rationalist and an aesthete,…

“The Shadow King” Book Presentation

Online

Casa Italiana hosts a discussion with Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, which was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, NPR, Elle, and Time. Set during Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, The Shadow King takes us back to the first real conflict of World War II, casting light on the women soldiers who were left out of…