Mar 18-20: “Comparative Middle Eastern Literatures: Forging a Discipline”

Date: 

Saturday, March 19, 2016, 8:30am to 10:15am

Location: 

Barker Center Room 110

I am sincerely pleased to inform you that I will be a co-organizer of the panel, “Comparative Middle Eastern Literatures: Forging a Discipline,” at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) conference, which will take place at Harvard University on March 17-20, 2016.  The panel aims to create new transnational perspectives on the region’s literary history, bridge the gap between classical and modern traditions, and lead to promising future collaborations. For more information on the panel, please see https://www.acla.org/seminar/comparative-middle-eastern-literatures-forging-discipline. I hope you have the chance to participate in this wonderful occasion.

Please let me know if you have any questions about the panel. 

Kind regards,
Ceyhun Arslan
carslan@fas.harvard.edu

~~

The panel meets at 8:30-10:15 am in Barker Center Room 110 (Thompson Room) on March 18-20.

Below please find the schedule for the panel: 

Friday, March 18 

Chair: William Granara (Harvard University)

Selim S. Kuru (University of Washington in Seattle); “United Yet Apart: Configuring a Premodern Islamicate Literature?”

Sunil Sharma (Boston University); “Literary Culture(s) of the Gunpowder Empires”

Azadeh Safaeian (Northwestern University); “Iran-Iraq War Memoirs: Birth of a New Subjectivity?” (Persian and Arabic)

Thomas Thompson (UCLA); “At Far Off Points, People Pass By: A Transnational Approach to Iranian and Iraqi Modernist Poetry” (Persian and Arabic)

Metin Yüksel (Hacettepe University, Turkey); “Solidarity without Borders: The Poetic Tributes to Paul Robeson of Goran and Cegerxwîn" (Kurdish)

 

Saturday, March 19

Chairs: C. Ceyhun Arslan (Harvard University) and Elizabeth Nolte (University of Washington in Seattle)

C. Ceyhun Arslan (Harvard University); “Imagined Networks: Ahmad Shawqi’s ‘Sister of Andalusia’ and Reading the World in Literature” (Arabic)

Elizabeth Nolte (University of Washington in Seattle); “Imperial Traces: The Grounds for a post-Ottoman Literature” (Arabic and Albanian)

Nanor Kebranian (Columbia University); “Post-communal Literatures: An Ottoman Afterlife” (Armenian)

Mehmet Fatih Uslu (Istanbul Şehir University, Turkey); “The Last Spring: Armenian and Turkish Literatures between 1908 and 1914” (Turkish and Armenian)

 

Sunday, March 20

Chair: Kamran Rastegar (Tufts University)

Yael Kenan (University of Michigan); “Dialogue in Monologue: Addressing Mahmoud Darwish in Hebrew” (Hebrew)

Matthew Chovanec (University of Texas at Austin); "Chartering the Literature of Engagement within Comparative Middle Eastern Literature Framework" (Arabic and Turkish)

Fatih Altuğ (Istanbul Şehir University, Turkey); “Abjection, Denial, Alterity in Modern Ottoman-Turkish Literature” (Turkish)

Maya Kesrouany (New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE); “Reimagining Comparative Literature in the Arab World as a Paradigm for a Comparative Middle Eastern Studies”  (Arabic)