Drawing on extensive archival sources and hundreds of interviews, Timothy Brennan's Places of Mind is the first comprehensive biography of Said, one of the most controversial and celebrated intellectuals of the 20th century. In Brennan's masterful work, Said, the pioneer of post-colonial studies, a tireless champion for his native Palestine, and an erudite literary critic, emerges as a self-doubting, tender, and eloquent advocate of literature's dramatic effects on politics and civic life.

Professor Timothy Brennan will explore some of the paradoxes of the biography's reception, focusing on two ideas: Said as an Arab, not only American, intellectual; and how his study of literary and cultural theory made his very public and political successes possible.

Timothy Brennan teaches humanities at the University of Minnesota and is a member of both the departments of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, and English. He is a member of the graduate faculty of American Studies and is also affiliated with the Institute for Global Studies and the Institute for Advanced Studies. Timothy’s essays on literature, cultural politics, intellectuals, and imperial culture have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Times Literary Supplement, New Left Review, Critical Inquiry, and the London Review of Books. He is the author of Borrowed Light, Vol I: Vico, Hegel and the Colonies and Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said.

This event is organized by Columbia Global Center in Amman and cosponsored by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities and the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. 

Israel’s Ministry of Defense designated six prominent Palestinian human rights organizations — Al-Haq, Defense for Children International - Palestine, Addameer, Bisan Center for Research and Development, Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees — as “terrorist organizations” on Friday October 22nd, 2021. These organizations now face increased political isolation and operational challenges as they continue to work to expose and seek accountability for Israeli human rights abuses. 

Join the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Institute for Palestine Studies for a panel discussion on 18 November 2021 with Sahar Francis (Addameer), Khaled Quzmar (Defense for Children International - Palestine), Katherine Franke (Columbia Law School) Maria LaHood (Center for Constitutional Rights) and Rashid Khalidi (Columbia University). The event will begin at 1pm NY / 8pm Palestine.

The conversation will address the work of Addameer and Defense for Children International-Palestine in particular, the new challenges imposed by the Israeli government's designation, and how the organizations plan to move forward. 

Panelists
Sahar Francis is the Director of Ramallah-based Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, a Palestinian NGO providing legal and advocacy support to Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli and Palestinian prisons. An attorney by training, she joined the association in 1998, first as a human rights lawyer, then as head of the Legal Unit, and became the Director in 2006. With over sixteen years of human rights experience, including human rights counseling and representation, Ms. Francis was also on the Board of Defense for Children International – Palestine Section for 4 years, and was on the Board of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees.

Maria LaHood is Deputy Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she represents Palestinian rights advocates facing suppression in the United States in cases such as Bronner v. Duggan, defending against a challenge to the American Studies Association’s resolution endorsing a boycott of Israeli academic institutions; and Jewish National Fund v. US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, a case challenging human rights advocacy under the Anti-Terrorism Act.  Read more.

Khaled Quzmar is General Director of Defense for Children International - Palestine. Quzmar joined DCIP in 1995 as a lawyer representing Palestinian children in Israeli military courts. He rose through the ranks to become administrative and legal affairs director. He holds a master's degree in international human rights law. He specializes in issues of juvenile justice and grave violations against children during armed conflict. He earned a Master of Laws degree in international human rights law from the Irish Center for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland Galway.

Moderators
Katherine Franke is James L. Dohr Professor of Law, Columbia Law School. Read more. 

Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, Columbia University. Read more.

About the Organizations
Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association is a Palestinian non-governmental, civil institution that works to support Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli and Palestinian prisons. Established in 1991 by a group of activists interested in human rights, the center offers free legal aid to political prisoners, advocates their rights at the national and international level, and works to end torture and other violations of prisoners' rights through monitoring, legal procedures and solidarity campaigns. Read more. 

Defense for Children International - Palestine is an independent, local Palestinian child rights organization dedicated to defending and promoting the rights of children living in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Since 1991, we have investigated, documented, and exposed grave human rights violations against children; provided legal services to children in urgent need; held Israeli and Palestinian authorities accountable to universal human rights principles; and advocated at the international and national levels to advance access to justice and protection for children. Read more.

Join the Center for Palestine Studies on 28 October 2021 for the next event in our Readings in the Khalidiyya series with A. Tunç Şen (Columbia University) and Guy Burak (New York University).

Ottoman Librarians and their Metadata
1pm New York / 8pm Jerusalem
28 October 2021

The panel will discuss the inventory of the palace library of Bayezid II, located in Istanbul (early 16th century), the inventories of the library of the complex of Mehmet II, also located in Istanbul (15-16th centuries) and the inventory of the library of Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, located in 'Akka, Palestine (late 18th century).

A. Tunç Şen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. He is a historian of Ottoman and modern Turkey whose published work focuses on sciences and divinatory practices, manuscript studies, history of emotions, and social history of scholarship in the early modern Ottoman and Islamicate context. He is currently finishing his first book, Masters of Time: Astrologers and Scientific Expertise at the Early Modern Ottoman Court, where he examines the layers and limits of the scientific authority of stargazers in measuring and interpreting time from chronological dating to calendars and auspicious moments.

Guy Burak is the Librarian for Middle Eastern, Islamic and Jewish Studies at NYU's Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. He is the author of The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2015). His research focuses on the legal, intellectual and visual histories of the Islamic East in the post-Mongol period.

This event is co-presented with the Khalidi Library, the Center for the Study of Muslim Societies and New York University Libraries.

Located in Jerusalem, the Khalidiyya Library is arguably the most important manuscript collection in Palestine and one of the most significant family-owned Islamic manuscripts collections in the world. The library’s collection was recently digitized and made available to scholars by the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML). The accessibility of the collection to users around the world will surely open up new avenues for the study of the history and intellectual life of Palestine and the wider region.

Readings in the Khalidiyya celebrates the new accessibility of the Khalidiyya Library collection through conversations with scholars involved in manuscript studies. Recordings of previous sessions are available here.

Join the Barnard Center for Research on Women and the Center for Palestine Studies for a talk with Adania Shibli.

Adania Shibli will be joined by Layli Long Soldier and Madeleine Thien to discuss Shibli's haunting novel, Minor Detail.

Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba—the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people—and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand.

Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.

Minor Detail was published in Arabic in 2017 and translated into English by Elisabeth Jacquette and published by New Directions in 2020. The novel was nominated for a National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020 and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. 

For the Helen Pond McIntyre '48 Salon, Shibli will be joined in conversation by novelist Madeleine Thien and poet Layli Long Soldier. 

Accessibility

Live transcription and ASL interpretation will be provided. Please email any additional access needs to skreitzb@barnard.edu.

This event is free and open to all. 

Streaming information will be provided closer to the date of the event.

About the Speakers 

Adania Shibli was born in Palestine in 1974, holds a PhD from the University of East London, and has published three novels in Arabic. She splits her time between Berlin and Jerusalem.

Layli Long Soldier is the author of WHEREAS. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Madeleine Thien is the author of four books, most recently the novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which won the Giller Prize and the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her books have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Women’s Prize for Fiction and The Folio Prize, and translated into more than 25 languages. She teaches literature and writing at the City University of New York.

Advanced registration is required
Registered attendees will receive the time-limited link to the movie
72-hours in advance of the live conversation.

Join the Center for Palestine Studies for a conversation with Farah Nabulsi, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Lila Abu-Lughod about Nabulsi’s Academy Award nominated and BAFTA Award winning short film The Present. Taking the film as a departure, the conversation will center childhood and the experience of children living under occupation.

Registered attendees will receive access to the film 72 hours prior to the online conversation.

The online conversation will take place at 1pm New York / 8pm Jerusalem on 7 October 2021.

Film Synopsis
On his wedding anniversary, Yusef and his young daughter set out in the West Bank to buy his wife a gift. Between soldiers, segregated roads and checkpoints, how easy would it be to go shopping?

Speakers
Farah Nabulsi is an Oscar-nominated and BAFTA Award-Winning Palestinian British filmmaker, born, raised, and educated in the UK. She left the corporate world in 2016 to start working in the film industry as a writer and producer of short fiction films, exploring topics that matter to her. This includes Today They Took My Son, endorsed by renowned British Director Ken Loach, screened at the United Nations, and officially selected to top tier international film festivals. In 2019, she directed her first film, The Present, which she also co-wrote. The film stars renowned actor, Saleh Bakri. It premiered at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2020 and won the coveted Audience Award for Best Film. It had its North American premiere at the Cleveland International Film Festival, where it won the Jury Award for Best Live Action Short, qualifying it for the 2021 Oscars. More info.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on trauma, state crimes and criminology, surveillance, gender violence, law and society. She studies the crime of femicide and other forms of gender based violence, violence against children in conflict ridden areas, crimes of abuse of power in settler colonial contexts, surveillance, securitization and social control. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the author of numerous publications, including a recent book examining Palestinian childhood, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (Cambridge University Press, 2019). More info.

Moderator
Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University where she teaches in the Department of Anthropology and at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her courses focus on gender politics in the Muslim world, the cultures of nationalism, and the politics of liberalism and women's and human rights. A leading voice in debates about gender, Islam, and global power, her publications have been translated into more than 13 languages. Her current research focuses on museum politics in Palestine and other settler colonies, security discourses and Islamophobia, and religion in the global governance of gender violence. Abu-Lughod recently won the 2021 GAD Prize for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship for her article, “Imagining Palestine’s Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics” (2020) in Critical Inquiry 47 (Autumn): 1-27. More info.

The Center’s Palestine Cuts film series is generously supported by Jeanne & Ken Levy-Church.

Join us for the next installment of Readings in the Khalidiyya with Ahmed El Shamsy and Torsten Wollina on 28 September 2021 at 1pm New York / 8pm Jerusalem.

The Damascene manuscript aficionado Tahir al-Jaza'iri (1852-1920) not only catalogued the Khalidiyya library; he also used the manuscript fragments he found in the library's scrap paper cache to reconstruct its oldest texts. His activities illustrate the change in attitudes toward manuscripts and their value during his lifetime.

Ahmed El Shamsy is Associate Professor at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law.

El Shamsy’s first book, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History, traces the transformation of Islamic law from a primarily oral tradition to a systematic written discipline in the eighth and ninth centuries. In his second book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition, he shows how Arab editors and intellectuals  in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the newly adopted medium of printing to rescue classical Arabic texts from oblivion and to popularize them as the classics of Islamic thought. Other recent research projects investigate the interplay of Islam with other religious and philosophical traditions, for example by exploring the influence of the Greek sage Galen on Islamic thought and the construction of a distinct self-identity among early Muslims. More Info

Torsten Wollina is Research Associate at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz. He received his Ph.D. from Freie University in Berlin and his MA degree from the University of Jena. He has worked at the Orient-Institut Beirut, Hamburg University and has received a Marie Curie Cofund fellowship from Trinity College, University of Dublin (cohort 2019-20). He is currently working in the DFG funded project "Orient-Digital" at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Torsten’s research focuses on questions of provenance, especially the translocations of Damascene manuscripts in the 19th and 20th centuries. Another research interest is in how intellectual and social history affect each other in textual production, e.g. in the writing of contemporary history. Some of his research can be followed at his blog Damascus Anecdotes.

Located in Jerusalem, the Khalidiyya Library is arguably the most important manuscript collection in Palestine and one of the most significant family-owned Islamic manuscripts collections in the world. The library’s collection was recently digitized and made available to scholars by the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML). The accessibility of the collection to users around the world will surely open up new avenues for the study of the history and intellectual life of Palestine and the wider region.

Readings in the Khalidiyya celebrates the new accessibility of the Khalidiyya Library collection through conversations with scholars involved in manuscript studies. Recordings of previous sessions are available here.

There is a perceptible shift in how international media has been covering news about Palestine-Israel. While mainstream mass media continues to largely follow the framing and terminology that have been firmly established for decades, a new tone that is sympathetic toward the plight of Palestinians has been emerging. This is even more noticeable in online media, where there has been an unprecedented outpouring of sentiment expressed across social media platforms.

This virtual webinar invites experts to explore the shifts and future trends in the media landscape, with special reference to reporting on Palestine and Israel. Panelists will discuss the intersection of the local and international political landscape with mainstream media, alternative media, and citizen journalism. The way news is framed and consumed has evolved significantly, due in part to the availability of digital technologies and enhanced global digital literacy that can amplify protest movements and communities of solidarity.

This panel is organized by the Columbia Global Centers (Amman), and co-presented by Centre for Palestine Studies (SOAS), Middle East Institute (Columbia University) and the Center for Palestine Studies (Columbia University).

Speakers:

Marwa Fatafta
Policy Analyst
Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network

Omar Al-Ghazzi
Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communications
The London School of Economics and Political Science

Abeer AlNajjar
Associate Professor of Media and Journalism Studies
American University of Sharjah

Greg Philo
Professor Emeritus, Glasgow University
Research Director, Glasgow Media Group

Moderated by
Dina Matar
Chair of the Centre for Global Media and Communication
SOAS University of London

Chaired by
Safwan M. Masri
Executive Vice President for Global Centers and Global Development 
Columbia University

This event is organized and will be hosted by Columbia Global Centers (Amman).