Debashree Mukherjee awarded fellowship at the Institute of Ideas & Imagination
April 2019
Professor Debashree Mukherjee has been awarded a residential fellowship at the Institute of Ideas & Imagination, Paris. In Spring 2020, Professor Mukherjee will begin research on a new book project titled “Mediated Ocean: A Techno-Aesthetic View of Migration Between Africa and Asia.”
The full announcement can be viewed here.Anthem Press publishes Contemporary Art, World Cinema, and Visual Culture essays by Hamid Dabashi
March 2019
Taoufik Ben-Amor has received a Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award
January 2019
Taoufik Ben-Amor, Gordon Gray Jr Senior Lecturer in Arabic Studies, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies has been awarded the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award: The award honors faculty for their ability to engage, challenge and inspire students in the classroom.exceptional instruction and scholarship, with a special emphasis on the mentoring of students in the arts and sciences.
The full announcement can be viewed here.New MESAAS Faculty
MESAAS welcomes Professor Elleni Centime Zeleke and Professor Elaine van Dalen to our faculty.
Professor Zeleke's work encompasses student movements in the Horn of Africa, 20th-century state formation in Africa, as well as comparative social and political theory. Her course subjects include African Political Thought, Critical Theory, and Histories of Capitalism.
Professor van Dalen is a philologist working on medical, botanical, and agricultural texts from the Classical Islamic world. Her research questions relate to the transmission and translation of knowledge, history of scholarship and writing, history of ideas, and philosophy of science.
Columbia University Press publishes The Shahnameh by Hamid Dabashi
January 2019
Muhsin al-Musawi has been awarded the 2018 Kuwait Prize for Arts and Literature
November 2018
Muhsin al-Musawi, Professor of Arabic Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, was awarded the 2018 Kuwait Prize for Arts and Literature. The Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences announced the award, citing Professor al-Musawi's "research on critical studies of the rich Arabic cultural and innovative contributions to postcolonial literature in English."
The full announcement can be viewed here.
Allison Busch has been awarded the Vishwa Hindi Samman award
September 2018
Allison Busch, Associate Professor of Hindi Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, was awarded the Vishwa Hindi Samman by the Government of India, through through the World Hindi Conference. The Vishwa Hindi Samman (the World Hindi Award) was given to Professor Busch to honor her "remarkable and outstanding contributions to the spread of Hindi language and Hindi literature." She was presented with the award by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Indian Ambassador to the US Navtej Sarna on September 27.
The full announcement can be viewed here.
Columbia University Press publishes Restating Orientalism by Wael Hallaq
July 2018
Columbia University Press publishes Shari'a Scripts by Brinkley Messick
January 2018
Debashree Mukherjee has been awarded a Global Humanities grant
April 2018
Debashree Mukherjee has been awarded a Global Humanities grant for the year 2018-2019 for a collaborative project titled “Thinking the Ecological in Media Studies,” along with Dr. Ying Qian (EALAC) and Dr. Brian Larkin (Anthropology). The project conceives of “ecology” as methodology as well as material reality, both fundamentally predicated on the specificities of time and place. With India, China, and Nigeria as their primary sites of study, the lead faculty hope to initiate a broad conversation on campus on the ways in which media condition our sensory environments, the ecologies of media labor and production, and the urgent need to think with “other” media from “other” places.
The full announcement can be viewed here.Sarah bin Tyeer has been awarded a Global Humanities grant
April 2018
Sarah bin Tyeer has been awarded a Global Humanities grant for the year 2018-2019 for a collaborative project titled "Conceptions and Configurations of the Arabic Literary Canon" along with Dr.Claire Gallien. This project endeavors to look at the conceptions and configurations of the Arabic literary canon as it was conceived by pre-modern Arab scholars, later reconfigured by early-modern orientalist scholars in Europe, and engaged with by modern and contemporary Arab writers, whether in Arabic or in English in order to understand how the Arabic literary canon was conceptualized across space and time, periods and languages.
The full announcement can be viewed here.$500,000 grant awarded to catalog and digitize Columbia's collection of manuscripts and paintings from the Golden Age of Islam
January 2018
The announcement noted: "The Manuscripts of the Muslim World project—supported by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), which is made possible by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—will provide digital access to 576 Islamic manuscripts and 827 paintings that have previously been largely invisible to scholars."
The full announcement can be viewed here.Mahmood Mamdani has been named as a Fellow of the British Academy
October 2017
Per the announcement: "Fellows of the British Academy represent the very best of humanities and social sciences research, in the UK and globally. This year’s new Fellows are experts in subjects ranging from feminist theory to the economic development of Africa; medieval history to Indian philosophy and face perception."
The full announcement can be viewed here.Roni Henig is the recipient of the 2017 A. Owen Aldridge Prize
June 2017
The announcement noted that "Ms. Henig’s essay reveals, as one Aldridge judges expressed it, 'deep insight and nuanced analysis. By analyzing differences between oral and written word, and offering an excellent analysis of the way rhetorical tropes are inflected by stuttering, it sheds new light on the work of Y.H. Brenner with nuanced reading and brilliant theoretical argumentation.'"
The announcement can be viewed here.Timothy Mitchell is the recipient of the 2017 Ester Boserup Prize
June 2017
The announcement noted that Professor Mitchell's work has "influenced fields as diverse as anthropology, history, law, philosophy, cultural studies, and art history. By exploring the origins and limits of many of the key ideas of modernity, Mitchell contributes to the decolonization of political thought."
The announcement can be viewed here.Book launch for Ghalib: Selected Poems and Letters translated by Frances Pritchett and Owen Cornwall
Book Culture on 112th Street
Friday, April 30 at 4pm
Book launch for Fueling Culture edited by Jennifer Wenzel et al.
Book Culture on 112th Street
Friday, April 7 at 7pm
Kai Kresse, Translated by Hassan Mwakimako and Kai Kresse, Guidance (Uwongozi) by Sheikh al-Amin Mazrui: Selections from the First Swahili Islamic Newspaper With a forward by Alamin Mazrui and Hammad M.K. Mazrui
2016
Kai Kresse and Rose Marie Beck, ed. ABDILATIF ABDALLA: POET IN POLITICS
2016
Columbia University Press publishes Ghalib: Selected Poems and Letters translated by Frances Pritchett and Owen Cornwall
March 2017
Fordham University Press publishes Fueling Culture edited by Jennifer Wenzel et al.
January 2017
