Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference on the Middle East, South Asia and Africa

Thursday, April 15 to Saturday, April 17, 2010

Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference on the Middle East, South Asia and Africa - Columbia University, April 15-17, 2010(conference logo)

Conference Description

The discipline that was once called “Oriental Studies” has been divided up in various ways in today’s university. Post-colonial literature has a foothold in the English department, history departments have by and large stopped confusing “European history” with “world history,” and of course the area studies departments with venerable names like Near Eastern Studies or South Asian Languages and Civilizations have taken up an array of new methodologies from other departments. Several universities have begun expanding their African and South Asian studies offerings under the umbrella of “Global Studies.” This conference is concerned not with “the death of the discipline” as so many others have been, but rather with the diversity of the disciplines when it comes to studying the non-Western World.

Join us for student papers, two faculty discussion panels, and a keynote address by Professor Aamir Mufti of UCLA. Coffee, tea and light refreshments will be served at each event.

Welcome to the website for the 2010 graduate conference hosted by the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. We hope that this conference will become an annual event that brings young scholars from many disciplines and institutions together.

The conference took place on April 15-17, 2010, and the 2011 conference is scheduled for February 17-18. The 2010 conference proceedings are now available in Columbia's online repository, Academic Commons. Presenters who still wish to have their papers published in the Academic Commons should contact the conference organizers.

To register for the conference, please fill out the registration form (you'll need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader software). Registration is required for non-Columbia affiliates, but we hope that Columbia students intending to join us will register as well so that we can estimate the number of attendees in advance.

The conference poster, which we hope you'll distribute widely, is available here.

If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at CUgradconf (at) gmail (dot) com.

Please note that our department is presently changing its official name from MEALAC to MESAAS so this conference was previously advertised as hosted by MEALAC.


The conference is supported by the Graduate Student Advisory Council, the Institute of African Studies, the Middle East Institute, the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the South Asia Institute.


This site was lasted updated on 19 September 2010 by Arthur Dudney.