WELCOME TO MESAAS
WELCOME TO MESAAS
WELCOME TO MESAAS
WELCOME TO MESAAS
News & Announcements
- Professor Gil Hochberg receives Lenfest Distinguished Faculty AwardMarch 26, 2024
- MESAAS Newsletter Spring 2024February 14, 2024
- Call For Papers: MESAAS Graduate Student Conference 2024February 8, 2024
- Professor Wael Hallaq Announced 2024 Laureate of The King Faisal International Prize in Islamic Studies.January 26, 2024
- Allison Busch Memorial Language Study FellowshipJanuary 23, 2024
Events
march 2024
There are no Events for this month. Please check back soon
april 2024
1apr6:15 pmStatelet of Survivors
Event Details
For more information, click here: https://events.columbia.edu/go/holmes Syrian Kurds and their Arab and Christian allies have embarked on one of the most radical experiments in self-governance of our time. In
more
Event Details
For more information, click here: https://events.columbia.edu/go/holmes
Syrian Kurds and their Arab and Christian allies have embarked on one of the most radical experiments in self-governance of our time. In defiance of the Assad regime, the Islamic State, and regional autocrats, this unlikely coalition created a statelet to govern their semi-autonomous region. In Statelet of Survivors, Amy Austin Holmes charts the movement from its origins to what it has become today. Drawing from seven years of research trips to northern and eastern Syria, Holmes traces the genealogy of this social experiment to the Republic of Mount Ararat in Turkey, where a self-governing entity was proclaimed in 1927 based on solidarity between Kurds and Armenian genocide survivors. Founded by survivors of modern-day atrocities, the Autonomous Administration does more to empower women and minorities than any other region of Syria. Holmes analyzes its military and police forces, schools, the judicial system, the economic model it has implemented, and strategy of empowering women who were once enslaved by ISIS.
Amy Austin Holmes is Research Professor of International Affairs and Acting Director of the Foreign Area Officers Program at George Washington University. Dr. Holmes has published widely on the global American military posture, the NATO alliance, non-state actors, revolutions, and military coups. She has a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and previously served as a tenured Associate Professor at the American University in Cairo, and as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. Dr. Holmes is the author of Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945 (Cambridge UP) and Coups and Revolutions: Mass Mobilization, the Egyptian Military and the United States from Mubarak to Sisi (Oxford UP). Her third book, Statelet of Survivors: The Making of a Semi-Autonomous Region in Northeast Syria (Oxford UP) is based on a pioneering field survey of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). In addition to her academic career, Dr Holmes served as an advisor at the U.S. Department of State through a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she also taught as a volunteer lecturer at the Kyiv School of Economics.
The event is co-sponsored by the Columbia University Armenian Center, the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), and the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research NAASR).
Time
(Monday) 6:15 pm
Location
208 Knox Hall
3aprAll DayTrans Disruptions: The Future of Change, April 3-5
Event Details
This three-day conference will bring together activists, theorists, artists, and writers to explore the pasts, futures, and in-between times of transgender lives, narratives, and
more
Event Details
This three-day conference will bring together activists, theorists, artists, and writers to explore the pasts, futures, and in-between times of transgender lives, narratives, and theories. The conference will allow an opportunity to meet, talk, learn, and disrupt the conventional narratives that circulate about bodies, economies, histories, pleasure, revolt, and science.
Time
All Day (Wednesday)
Location
Buell Hall
8apr6:15 pmStateless in Post-WWII Beirut
Event Details
For more information, click here: https://events.columbia.edu/go/chahinian Stateless focuses on two key moments and places of Western Armenian literary history, post-WWI Paris and post-WW II Beirut, to examine how a stateless
more
Event Details
For more information, click here: https://events.columbia.edu/go/chahinian
Stateless focuses on two key moments and places of Western Armenian literary history, post-WWI Paris and post-WW II Beirut, to examine how a stateless language sustained itself in a diasporic setting. In it, by analyzing the public debates, critical writings, and the creative works of writers gathered around the journal Menk and writers gathered around the Writers’ Association of Syria and Lebanon (WASL), I comparatively interrogate competing models of literary production and their intersection with Western Armenian’s prolonged linguistic vitality.
Talar Chahinian holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA and lectures in the Program for Armenian Studies at UC Irvine, where she is also Visiting Faculty in the Department of Comparative Literature. She is the author of Stateless: The Politics of the Armenian Language in Exile (Syracuse University Press, 2023) and co-editor, along with Tsolin Nalbantian and Sossie Kasbarian, of The Armenian Diaspora and Stateless Power: Collective Identity in the Transnational 20th Century (Bloomsbury Press, 2023). She co-edits Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies and contributes regularly to the literary magazine Pakin.
The event is co-sponsored by the Columbia University Armenian Center, the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), and the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research NAASR).
Time
(Monday) 6:15 pm
Location
208 Knox Hall
18apr - 19All DayMESAAS Graduate Student Conference 2024Extra/ordinary
Event Details
The Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University is pleased to announce its annual Graduate Student Conference to be held on April 18-19 2024. This
more
Event Details
The Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University is pleased to announce its annual Graduate Student Conference to be held on April 18-19 2024. This conference is a space for graduate students to present their original work in a welcoming and stimulating environment.
Our conference this year aims to investigate the Extra/ordinary as a category and rhetoric of socio political, historical and cultural thought. What makes a particular event, invention, time, war, crisis, or phenomenon extraordinary? On the contrary, what is relegated to the realm of the ordinary? During a time of multiple compounding crises, where must we look, focus and thoughtfully respond? Is it helpful to highlight the multiplicity of crises or is our crisis-ridden world best understood through an overarching analytical framework?
We welcome a wide range of submissions that speak to our general theme and encourage (but do not seek to limit) interpretations of the Extra/Ordinary as mentioned in our Call for Papers. You can keep updated about the conference on our website: https://
Time
april 18 (Thursday) - 19 (Friday)
Location
208 Knox Hall
may 2024
There are no Events for this month. Please check back soon
Recent Books
- After The Ottomans edited by Khatchig Mouradian published by I.B. Tauris
- Digital Orality edited by May Ahmar published by Springer/Palgrave Macmillan
- The Persian Prince by Hamid Dabashi, Stanford University Press
- Anis: 111 marsiye, edited by Timsal Masud
- Beginning Armenian: A Communicative Textbook By Charry Karamanoukian