Nubar Hovsepian’s new book, “Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual,” deals with a simple question: How does Said’s Humanism inform his politics, on Palestine, the Middle East and US policies? Nubar Hovsepian will read excerpts from his book and be joined in conversation by Bruce Robbins.
VENUE
Second Floor Common Room
The Heyman Center
Columbia University
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Advanced registration is required for all attendees, including CUID holders.
Nubar Hovsepian is Associate Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Chapman University. He is the author of Edward W. Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual (2025) and Palestinian State Formation: Education and the Construction of National Identity (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) and he edited and contributed to The War on Lebanon (Interlink Publishers, 2008). He has also written and edited four books in Arabic, most notably on the Iranian revolution of 1979, and has published articles in professional journals, newspapers, and magazines in various parts of the world. Hovsepian has devoted enormous time to the Israel/Palestine conflict, and served, from 1982 to 1984, as Political Affairs Officer for the United Nations Conference on the Question of Palestine.
Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University. His most recent books are Who's Allowed to Protest? (Melville House, 2026) and Teaching Politically (Fordham, 2025), coedited with May Hawas. Atrocity: A Literary History (Stanford, 2025), won the Wellek Prize for the best monograph in Comparative Literature. He is also the author of Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford, 2022), The Beneficiary (Duke, 2017), and Cosmopolitanisms, co-edited with Paulo Horta (NYU, 2017). His essays have appeared in The Baffler, n+1, The Nation, The New Statesman, Public Books, the London Review of Books, and the LA Review of Books. His efforts on behalf of justice for Palestine began in 2002, when he collaborated (with the physicist Alan Sokal) on an "Open Letter of American Jews to Our Government" that called for cutting off American aid to Israel if Israel refused to recognize the relevant United Nations resolutions. The "Open Letter" was published in the New York Times with over 4000 signatures and translated into various languages. He is the director of two documentaries, “Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists” and “What Kind of Jew Is Shlomo Sand?” His book Why Read Said Now? is forthcoming from Polity in 2027.
Organzed by the Center for Palestine Studies
& co-sponsored by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.
“Edward Said, the well-known Palestinian American intellectual, did not set out to be a partisan provocateur; if, more than two decades after his death, his work is treated as though he had been merely an ideologue or simply a shill for the Palestine Liberation Organization, it is a testament to the deeply debased quality of today’s debate about the Middle East rather than a reflection of his scholarship and public writing. Hovsepian, a U.S.-based academic, was Said’s friend, admirer, confidant, and sometime sparring partner. Drawing on his own diaries and Said’s unpublished letters and manuscripts, Hovsepian sketches both the portrait of a friendship and an intellectual biography. From Said’s early focus on music and English literature to his political awakening in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, Hovsepian traces Said’s evolving arguments about the relationship between culture and politics, best exemplified in Orientalism, Said’s most influential work, and his shifting conceptions of humanism and nationalism. As Said turned his skills as a literary critic to political analysis, he understood it as the responsibility of an intellectual to test conventional wisdom and challenge the complacency of the powerful, including the PLO, the U.S. government, and those he considered their apologists. This book is a useful reminder of the value of such critical perspectives.”