The Seminar Series is a weekly lecture and discussion organized by the Near Eastern Studies Department and Program. Prominent scholars, journalists, diplomats and others are invited to to speak on a range of topics relating to the Middle East, North Africa, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and South Asia. Previously called the “Brown Bag Lunch Talks,” the series has been running since the 1970’s. It meets on Mondays at noon while the university is in session. The events are open to the public and usually take place in Jones Hall 202. Our events will take place virtually in 2021–22. Registration links can be found in the announcement for each event on this page.
Conveners 2022-2023: Michael Reynolds and Jonathan Gribetz
To view NESS Webinar Recordings, click here.
Upcoming Events
Bernard Haykel is a scholar of the Arabian Peninsula, focusing on the politics, economics and history of the Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) and Yemen. He is professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University where he is also director of the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East. Haykel is author of …
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Matthew Delvaux is a Lecturer in History and a Cotsen Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. He brings interdisciplinary approaches to the study of marginalized peoples and interregional connections, challenging received narratives of the post-Roman world. He is particularly interested in problems of materiality,…
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Susanna Ferguson is Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at Smith College, where she writes and teaches on the history of gender, sexuality, and political thought in the modern Arab world. She's currently finishing up a book manuscript called "Formative Years: Gender, Childrearing, and Democracy in the Arab East," and…
Speaker
Shay Hazkani is an Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War (Stanford University Press, 2021), recipient of the Korenblat Book Award. He is also the co-creator of The Soldier’s Opinion,…
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Rachel Schine is an assistant professor of Arabic and religious studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work focuses on histories of representation in premodern Arabic literatures, with attention to dynamics of race and racialization, gender, class, and kinship. Her current book project analyzes the roles of Black Muslim…
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Robyn Creswell is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut. He is the translator of Iman's Mersal's The Threshold (FSG, 2022) and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.
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Aaron Rock-Singer is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a research focus on 20th century Islamic movements and states. He received his BA at the University of Pennsylvania, his M.Phil at Oxford and his Ph.D in Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. In his first book, Practicing Islam in Egypt: Print Media…
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Matthew L. Keegan is the Moinian Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University. His research focuses on the intersections of Arabic literature and Islamic thought in the pre-modern world, with a particular interest in the receptions of and commentary tradition on the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī…
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Deborah Schlein is the Near Eastern Studies Librarian at Princeton University Library. She received her PhD in 2019 from Princeton's Near Eastern Studies department, where she wrote her dissertation on the history of Yunani medicine in Mughal and colonial India. As Near Eastern Studies librarian at Princeton, Deborah works closely with …
Speakers
- Deborah SchleinAffiliationPrinceton University
- Joyce BellAffiliationPrinceton University
Marion Holmes Katz is a Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Her research revolves around issues of Islamic law, gender, and ritual. Her publications include Body of Text: The Emergence of the Sunni Law of Ritual Purity (2002), The Birth of the…
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Sarah Eltantawi is a scholar of contemporary Islam. She is Associate Professor of Theology at Fordham University (Modern Islam) and the author if Shar'ah on Trial, Northern Nigeria's Islamic Revolution, a study of the career of the stoning punishment in Islam centered on the infamous case of Amina Lawal in Northern…