CMES Newsletter - Spring 2016

Newsletter

SPRING 2016 VOL 37, No 1

center for middle eastern studies University of California Berkeley

Table of Contents Letter from the Chair || New Faculty: Ahmad Diab New Staff: Julia Choucair-Vizoso || CMES Graduate Intern: Stephanie Brown CMES Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP) Select Faculty News || CMES Responses to the Syrian Crisis Beyond Destruction: Report on Spring Symposium Visitors: Mohamed Abdel-Kader, Gil Anidjar MES Alumni profiles: Sam Metz and Sarah Dadouch Upcoming Events || Teacher Trainings

Letter from the Chair Prof. Emily Gottreich, CMES Chair

For those of us who work on the Middle East, Syria is a lodestar. Long before European colonial powers drew the boundaries of the modern Middle East, this area was known as bilad al-sham, epicenter of the Fertile Crescent, heartland of the Arab world. When the Umayyads built their capital in Damascus, they were signaling that Islam had spread definitively beyond the Arabian Peninsula and would continue to expand to encompass peoples well beyond the Arabs themselves. They built the Umayyad mosque, one of the largest and oldest in the world, on the site of a former Christian cathedral where John the Baptist’s head is said to be buried. The mausoleum of the great Kurdish leader Salah al-Din [Saladin], who taught medieval crusaders a thing or two about chivalry, is located nearby. Under Ottoman rule, the wilaya of Aleppo began to eclipse Damascus, though not without cause: Aleppo was then and remains one of the oldest continually occupied cities in the world, the Ottomans’ third-most important city after Istanbul and Cairo.

Today much of Syria stands in ruins. Civil war—with its attendant airstrikes, suicide bombings, and urban guerilla warfare of the ugliest sort—has displaced

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more than 7 million people and killed around half a million as of this writing. Over 11,000 children have been killed. There is no end to the mayhem in sight.

I had the opportunity to visit Syria just weeks before the outbreak of the civil war, with a delegation from UC Berkeley and other institutions. It was December of 2010 and we were in the region for a conference organized by former CMES Chair Nezar AlSayyad.

We had no idea then that we would be one of the last academic groups to see Syria intact. A small contingent from our group was summoned to the presidential palace, an invitation we were made to understand could not be refused. We arrived by bus; it was cold, and we wore our coats despite being told to leave everything behind in the bus.

(Our pockets were never checked, and I sometimes have the grandiose thought: how might we have changed history?)

We spent a good hour in the company of Bashar al-Assad, and I am deeply embarrassed to say that he had me fooled. He spoke perfect American English, despite never having been to the United States. He was open and amicable, and did not shrink away from probing questions. I remember

him insisting that the questions were more important than the answers—what historian wouldn’t fall for that? I asked him to speak about the current state of Syria’s Jews, and he answered honestly and accurately. He was young; or at least close to my own age. He talked about pop culture and shared his favorite musicians (Phil Collins has a big fan in Damascus). Overall he seemed benign, and I left the meeting cautiously hopeful for Syria’s future.

Three weeks later Assad began massacring his own people. Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil comes to mind.

That was five years ago, and Syria is still burning.

The CMES and its affiliates have struggled to get our heads (and hearts) around this tragedy. Many of our faculty here and at neighboring institutes have worked on Syria for years—Peter Bartu and Stacy Fahrenthold at UC Berkeley, Keith David Watenpaugh at UC Davis, Fred Lawson at Mills College—and are now finding new ways to apply their expertise. The coming pages will describe this semester’s efforts to engage with the crisis here at the CMES. One of the more egregious effects of Syria’s destruction has been the rise of the so-called Islamic state and its ramifications around the globe.

Here too, CMES scholars are working hard to make sense of the new Middle East order. The CMES cosponsored a panel to try to think through the Paris attacks last semester, and we are just starting to grapple with Brussels, Ankara, Istanbul, and Lahore.

ISIS is a frequent topic at our weekly MENA Salon, where we curate articles for participants and talk about the headlines: the fallout of the Syrian Civil War for Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Greece, and indeed the globe.

Middle East: an upcoming exhibit in the Sultan room will explore comics and cartoons from the Arab world; a co-sponsored series with the Berkeley Art Museum-Pacific Film Archive highlights the austerely beautiful films of the Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

At our annual winter party, we hosted not one but two North African bands: Aza, a Berber group from Ouarzazate, as well as an Andalusian-style orchestra from Algeria.

We kicked off our spring symposium on cultural heritage destruction in the Middle East with extremely moving musical performances; one from a UC Berkeley student playing the Persian Santur, and a vocal arrangement in Neo-Aramaic with piano accompaniment. The latter was a reminder from two young Assyrians that the human impulse for creativity and perseverance can endure through millennia of destruction and heartache.

Still, we hope for a swift resolution to the most current, the most devastating example.

Professor Emily Gottreich CMES Chair

Despite the moral and humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century, the Middle East remains a site of great creativity and beauty, sometimes arising directly from conflict. For the CMES, the region is never only about war, despite its seeming omnipresence in the news in the last few years. Our programs endeavor to represent all elements of the

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New Faculty Ahmad Diab The CMES is pleased to welcome Ahmad Diab, an Acting Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. This is an anchor position for the campus, and we are thrilled at Ahmad’s arrival. Ahmad received his B.A. from Damascus University, majoring in English Literature, and completed an M.A. in English Literature at City University of New York while on a Fulbright scholarship. He received a Ph.D. from the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at New York University. On an Erasmus Mundus scholarship he spent a semester at Universitat de Barcelona. His research interests include twentieth and twenty-first century Arabic literature; translation studies; Arabic philology; Middle Eastern cinema; post-colonial politics of culture and representation. Ahmad is currently completing a book manuscript on representations of Arabs in the Palestinian literary and visual cartography. It demonstrates that Palestinian writers and artists, both before and after the Nakba of 1948, responded to the exigencies of their political conditions by articulating heterogeneous visions for identity and alterity around the concept of the Arab. Ahmad is currently teaching a graduate seminar (in Arabic) on subjectivity in modern Arabic literature in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. His work has appeared in the Arab Studies Journal, Washington Square Review, Wasafiri, Jadaliyya, and Al-Shabaka.

New STAFF Julia Choucair-Vizoso In important CMES news, we are delighted to announce the appointment of a new Vice Chair at the CMES. Julia Choucair-Vizoso is a political scientist with a Ph.D. from Yale. She recently finished a fellowship at Stanford and defended her dissertation. Julia’s research focuses on elite networks in Iraq and Syria, and she spent a number of years at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace developing programming and establishing its online English-Arabic journal, SADA. She is the co-author of Beyond the Façade: Political Reform in the Arab World. Julia will take on the management of our federal Title VI grant and, crucially, will spearhead our first concerted effort toward fundraising and strategic planning.

GRADUATE INTERN Stephanie Brown This year, the CMES added a Graduate Intern position to its staff roster. Our first intern, Stephanie Brown, has provided invaluable support in planning and executing our spring symposium and graduate student workshops. Stephanie is currently completing her dissertation in UC Berkeley’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. Her project, “Living on the Edge of Empire: Edomite Households in the First Millennium BCE,” explores the nature of asymmetrical political relationships in the Middle East, particularly those between large, territorial empires and the polities over which they claim political hegemony. Stephanie also directs the Busayra Cultural Heritage Project based in southern Jordan. This project pursues the twin goals of investigating the political and economic strategies that ancient communities employed while under the political control of empire, and works closely with local communities and archaeological stakeholders toward protecting, preserving, and developing their cultural heritage resources.

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Undergraduate Research Apprentices This year, we have welcomed undergraduate students to the CMES through the UC Berkeley URAP program.

This team of bright young Middle East scholars have done excellent work assisting with CMES projects.

Yasmine El-Hage Yasmine is a first-year student and an intended Public Health major. Two summers ago, she had the opportunity to work on a public health initiative at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, which inspired her passion for global public health and the Middle East. She is currently focused on finding ways to assist with the Syrian refugee crisis.

Hannah Ellis Hannah is a second-year undergraduate majoring in Political Science and minoring in Arabic. She is very interested in cultural heritage and human rights, particularly with regard to women, and hopes to work in a related field when she graduates. In the meantime her coursework includes International Human Rights and Gender and International Ethics and Justice. She has lived in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Jay Jung Jay Jung is a second-year undergraduate. He is a Political Science and Economics double major with a minor in Global Poverty and Practice. He plans to work in international development, specifically in democracy building, and hopes to one day to live in the Middle East and Arabian Peninsula.

Julia Malakiman Julia is a third-year undergraduate majoring in Peace and Conflict Studies with a concentration in Human Rights/Security. Her research interests include Palestinian resistance movements, gendered violence affecting refugees, and human rights.

She grew up in a Persian-German household and has aspirations to become fluent in multiple languages, including Arabic.

Josie Ygnatowitz Josie is currently studying the Middle East and Political Economy with a focus on Turkish culture, politics, and strategy post-WWI. She spent her 2015 summer in Turkey as a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow and has been awarded the Turkish Critical Language Scholarship for summer 2016. She is passionate about the diverse cultures and rich history of the Middle East, and works with organizations like the Euphrates Institute and the Interfaith Action Initiative to promote cultural awareness, philosophical discussions, and critical thinking. In her free time, catch her at Berkeley’s radio station, KALX 90.7 FM, playing traditional Kurdish music on her late-night DJ sets. center for middle eastern studies 5

Select Faculty News Asad Ahmed, Near Eastern Studies Asad Ahmed published two co-edited volumes, Islamic Cultures Islamic Contexts and Rationalist Disciplines in Islam, and several articles: “Motion in 12th-century Falsafa” in Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 26.2; “The Problem of Conversion to Islam in Post-Classical Legal Theory” in Empires of the East; “The Sullam of Bihari” in Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy. He additionally wrote three entries for the Encyclopedia of Islam 3. Asad was the recipient of the Mellon Project grant for Sunni Sectarianism in South Asia, delivered the Pakistan Distinguished Lecture at the Institute of Business Administration in Pakistan, and was elected the Chaire Secable at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He gave a number of lectures and papers at various institutions.

Mia Fuller, Italian Studies Mia Fuller was elected to the board of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, a three-year term. She chairs the faculty advisory of CMES.

Emily Gottreich, History and International and Area Studies Emily Gottreich began her official tenure as CMES Chair on July first after spending the previous academic year as Acting Chair. While directing the Center has kept her busy, she was able to participate in a conference at UCLA, “On the Margins of the Holocaust: Jews, Muslims, and Colonialism in North Africa during the Second World War” and give a pop-up lecture at the Magnes museum on “Moroccan Jews and the Ornaments of Acculturation.” This spring, she is teaching her History/MES lecture course, “Jews and Muslims,” and she continues to be an active member of MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom, North America. This group wrote several letters in defense of academic freedom recently, including to the president and regents of our own university protesting the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism in the report of the Regents Working Group on Principles Against Intolerance. See the full text of the letter here.

Rita Lucarelli, Near Eastern Studies Rita Lucarelli was nominated Faculty Assistant Curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe E. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, where she is working on a project involving 3D models of ancient Egyptian coffins. The project is funded by a Collaborative Research Grant from Digital Humanities at UC Berkeley and the Mellon Foundation.

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Maria Mavroudi, History and Classics In October 2016 Maria Mavroudi participated at the conference “The Languages of the Past and the Future of Ancient Studies” held at the University of Pennsylvania, where she presented a paper, “Working with Byzantine Greek and Arabic, 1990–2040: An Interim Report on a Half-Century of Cultural Politics”.

In November 2016 she traveled to London for the conference “Ptolemy’s Science of the Stars in the Middle Ages”, held at the Warburg Institute. This was the first international conference of the project “Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus,” and explored the Arabic and Latin traditions of Ptolemy’s astronomical and astrological works from late Antiquity to the seventeenth century. Mavroudi’s paper discussed the Byzantine career of Ptolemy’s Karpos (known in Latin as Liber Fructus or Centiloquium, in Arabic as Kitab al-thamara), one of the most important texts on the practice of astrology and divination during the Middle Ages and the early modern period in the East or West. Mavroudi focused the Arabic-to-Greek translation of a tenth-century Arabic commentary on the Karpos, written by the Egyptian scholar Ahmad Ibn Yusuf Ibn al-Daya. Later in November she traveled to Istanbul, Turkey, where she helped inaugurate Turkey’s first center for Byzantine studies attached to a state university. The center was founded at Turkey’s premier academic institution, Bosphorus or Boğaziçi University, originally set up by American missionaries in the nineteenth century and continuously tied with the US academy ever since. The inauguration of the Center for Byzantine Studies was an event of great cultural and social significance for the city of Istanbul and was attended by Patriarch Bartholomew I, U.S. Consul General Charles F. Hunter, and a number of Turkey’s leading historians and intellectuals.

Mavroudi gave a paper titled “Byzantine Philosophy and Science at the Court of Mehmed the Conqueror.”

Minoo Moallem, Gender and Women’s Studies Minoo Moallem published a new essay, “The Unintended Consequences of Equality within Difference” in the Brown Journal of Public Affairs in the fall of 2015.

She presented several papers: one on sexualities and queer imaginaries at a conference at Brown, and another, “Vision, Value and the Burden of Humanism,” at Princeton. She presented “War Movies and Fractured Notions of Masculinity,” at Duke in October 2015, and “The Empire of Merchandise,” at the Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR) conference in Beirut in January 2016.

She was the keynote speaker at the conference, “Interdisciplinary Innovations in the Study of Religion and Gender” at Utrecht University, the Netherlands in February 2015, and moderated a panel at the UC Berkeley International House in March 2015.

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Saba Mahmood, Anthropology Saba Mahmood published a book, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton University Press, 2015). The book focuses on the plight of religious minorities in Egypt in the context of conditions of modern secular governance. Since its publication, Religious Difference in a Secular Age has been discussed in a variety of places, including the Social Science Research Council’s blog “The Immanent Frame.” She will present the book at the CMES on May 5.

Cihan Tuğal, Sociology

Cihan Tuğal’s book The Fall of the Turkish Model: How the Arab Uprisings Brought down Islamic Liberalism (Verso) came out in February, and he gave book talks at NYU and Yale (he spoke at the CMES last semester). Cihan was interviewed by KALW on the current crisis in Turkey. He is currently teaching graduate classes on political sociology and contemporary theory.

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CMES Responses to the Syrian Crisis

“A Requiem for Syrian Refugees” In light of the successful fall Summit on Public Health and Innovation in the Middle East, the CMES again joined with the UC Berkeley Center for Global Public Health to screen “A Requiem for Syrian Refugees,” a documentary offering an unprecedented in-depth perspective on the daily lives of refugees. The screening was accompanied by a panel of experts, including the film’s director Richard Wolf, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer Emilia Bardini, and political refugee Meron Semedar. The event was standing-room only and the CMES plans to offer a second screening on April 25.

Teacher Training Workshop: War and Displacement Through the Title VI program of the Department of Education, the CMES and other National Resource Centers at UC Berkeley have partnered with the UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project to develop a multi-year workshop helping educators prepare students to understand cross-regional and thematic elements in global history. Each workshop features

a scholar talk on a contemporary global issue, the presentation of a teacher–designed model lesson, and collaborative planning time. In January, the CMES invited Professor Keith David Watenpaugh, Director of the Program in Human Rights Studies at UC Davis, to speak with teachers about children and their role in the Syrian refugee crisis. center for middle eastern studies 9

A Day with US Citizenship and Immigration Services Contributed by Stacy Fahrenthold, CMES Visiting Scholar President Obama’s announcement of plans to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees in the United States came at a moment when debates about refugees and international humanitarian obligations had reached a tumultuous pitch. Thousands of refugees fleeing Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq had begun washing up on Europe’s Mediterranean shores, prompting European leaders to welcome Syrian refugees or, alternatively, to sharply reject them. The November 14 attacks on Paris and the discovery of a Syrian passport (later found to be bogus) among the slain assailants threw into dramatic relief the global predicament that international inaction on Syria has caused: the EU’s failure to reform its asylum process had created a market for smugglers, and across the Aegean they came — an unregulated wave of people who simply cannot return home.

The United States’ perspective on the refugee crisis is fundamentally different than that of European countries, because the effects of the crisis differ not only in terms of magnitude but also in structure.

The 10,000 Syrians arriving in the U.S. in 2016 come from UNHCR refugee camps in countries neighboring Syria (particularly from Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq). Most of them have entered the queue for resettlement already, a process which takes between 18 and 24 months, all told. Refugees seeking resettlement undergo a strict process of investigation involving nearly a dozen agencies, including the United Nations, the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. intelligence, and security channels. All of this occurs before an applicant is granted entry into the United States.

The final group responsible for handling the resettlement process in the United States is Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). On November 19, the CMES arranged for Visiting Scholar and historian Stacy Fahrenthold to present to immigration officers in USCIS’s San Francisco on the Syrian war, the Assad regime’s ongoing displacement of Syrians, and the documentary challenges which confront refugees as they await legal resettlement. USCIS San Francisco holds regular meetings like this to keep its officers trained in global conflicts that cause refugee flows. This was the first meeting on Syria, just days after the President’s announcement and amid sudden public scrutiny over the resettlement process.

Fahrenthold gave a brief history of Syria’s 2011 uprising and civil war. The discussion then moved into the complications that displaced Syrians face after leaving Syria, including de facto denationalization by the Assad regime (which since 2013 has denied passports to Syrians in refugee camps or otherwise unable to return to Syria), transnational harassment by Syrian police and intelligence agents, or imprisonment and torture of family members still inside Syria. Each of these challenges further complicate the already-fraught task facing USCIS: how does one prioritize refugee claims, particularly when the documents they carry might be out-of-date, expired, or missing altogether? Though the discussion raised more questions than answers, one conclusion became evident: that for as long as the U.S. resettlement process takes, it is in some small way a means of undercutting the dangerous human trafficking that has become a defining feature of Europe’s refugee crisis.

The need for refugee relocation is vast: 4.7 million UN-registered Syrian refugees are currently displaced outside of Syria. As Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Ecuador also pledge to resettle Syrians in their countries in 2016, let us hope that the United States will consider expanding its quota further.

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“The Challenge of Immigrant and Refugee Resettlement in an Era of Major Social Conflict” On March 14, the CMES collaborated with the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare on a colloquium bringing together representatives from the International Rescue Committee, USCIS, and Refugee and Immigrant Services (RISE) to speak about the challenges facing immigration and refugee populations. One out of eight residents in the United States is a foreign-born immigrant or refugee, altogether making up about thirteen percent of the population. Social Service providers often find themselves ill-prepared to meet the ever changing needs of these populations. Immigrants and refugees are perhaps one of the most challenging groups to serve because they are not homogeneous: each group/sub-group brings its own unique cultural, language, belief and religious traditions. Moreover, despite experiencing numerous difficulties during the migration and resettlement process, immigrants and refugees tend not to seek services out of trauma related to previous victimization by their natal government prior to, during or after their displacement. Facing these challenges, this colloquium sought to identify strategies that can be used to improve service delivery and support to immigrant and refugee communities, and overcome the barriers preventing them from participating fully in U.S. society.

Berkeley Student’s Syrian Analysis Ph.D. Student and CMES fellowship awardee Ghaleb Attrache published a cogent examination of the political narratives around Syria in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology.

Coming up: Book Talk on Burning Country Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War explores the complicated reality of life in present-day Syria with unprecedented detail and sophistication, drawing on new first-hand testimonies from opposition fighters, exiles lost in an archipelago of refugee camps, and courageous human rights activists. Join authors Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami at the CMES on Friday, April 29 at 5:00 for a discussion of this vivid look at a modern-day political and humanitarian nightmare. This talk will be moderated by Ghaleb Attrache

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Beyond Destruction: Report on Spring Symposium Contributed by Amber Zambelli, CMES Administrative Coordinator Before 2015, you might not have recognized the Temple of Bel (Bel Shaamin) at Palmyra, much less known its long history— starting with its construction in 32 BCE and lasting through its tenure as a temple of Ba’al, early Christian church, mosque, and local municipal government headquarters. The temple received heightened global attention after it was targeted by the Islamic State, in an act harking back to the damage of the Great Sphinx of Giza in the fourteenth century.

The Islamic State quickly swept cultural heritage into both its ideological and physical warfare. Unfolding before a global audience via streaming video and glossy press releases, museums were sacked, monumental statues smashed, and antiquities secreted away to ultimately appear on the black market. The worldwide archaeological community was rocked in August 2015 by the murder of Dr. Khaled al-Asaad, a titan of Syrian archaeology and native of Palmyra. After a forty-year career as the head of antiquities for the ancient city, the octogenarian’s beheading brought into stark relief the human cost of the war against history, heritage, and identity

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for the public. The last satellite image of the temple was taken on August 27, 2015. Within days the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) confirmed the fears of those who had been monitoring the situation closely: the Temple of Bel was gone.

Tactics like these are by no means new, and the scars of cultural violence are visible across landscapes, cultural identities, and history. Though the media and motivations differ significantly through time and across geography, if we limit our gaze only to Western Asia and North Africa, instances of cultural heritage destruction are numerous, and their impact staggering. Before Syria and Iraq, there was the Cairo Museum. The Baghdad Museum. The Bamiyan Buddhas. The intangible heritage and physical spaces of Ottoman Armenians. The Maarib Dam. Jerusalem. Babylon. These are poignant reminders that although archaeologists often study the past, the research that they perform is innately contemporary. For few fields is this more true than in cultural heritage protection, destruction, and preservation.

In community archaeology, a methodology employed by scholars like UC Berkeley faculty Lisa Maher and Benjamin Porter, archaeologists actively solicit and incorporate the experiences, expertise, and identities of local and/or descendant communities in which research is performed. For Beyond Destruction, the CMES collaborated with colleagues in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Anthropology, as well as the Hearst and Bade museums, to expand traditional definitions of archeology to encompass other disciplines, as

CMES Chair Emily Gottreich introducing keynote speaker Prof. Patty Gerstenblith of Northwestern University

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Pedram Ghoreishi ‘16 on traditional Persian santur

well as the wider public and consumers of news, visual media, contemporary politics, and popular culture. To that end, we designed a multifaceted program as diverse as the audience it commands and moving beyond the ranks of our affiliated faculty to incorporate the views of colleagues in other departments and institutions.

Over the course of the academic year and in conjunction with faculty consultants, CMES composed a program distinct from any that has preceded it at Berkeley. During the weekend, audience members in Berkeley joined panelists and speakers on an exploration of the interplay of politics and practice, and how they mutually inform our relationship with cultural heritage. The proceedings began with a keynote by noted scholar of international law, Professor Patty Gerstenblith of Northwestern University, followed by musical performances and a reflection on those who have lost their lives in the Middle East. The subsequent reception was made possible by the generous contribution of the Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion, which provided an ideal backdrop to contextualize the evening’s program.

On Saturday morning a panel addressed the contemporary legal and educational frameworks for discussions of cultural heritage in politics—from the role heritage plays in the transition of political power and turmoil, to the way that archaeological research can assist in the pursuit of justice and prosecution of war crimes, to scholars’ interactions with the government agencies with whom they collaborate. The panel was chaired by lecturer at Berkeley Law Carla Shapreau, whose courses on cultural heritage protection and property law are a mainstay of the campus.

Following an opportunity to view the Pop-Up Palmyra Expo in Stanley Hall, the audience reconvened for an in-depth look at the situation in Egypt from the perspective of Egyptian archaeologist Dr. Monica Hanna,

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Dr. Susan Wolfinbarger, American Association for the Advancement of Sciences

a dogged defender of cultural heritage in her home country in the face of looting, political unrest, and competing interests within the government and the academy.

Chaired by Professor Lisa Maher from the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, the afternoon panel revealed that the practice of archaeology is much more than stratigraphy and neatly squared-off trenches, and explored the various sociopolitical contexts in which research and reception occur. A panel that included local artists and theoreticians demonstrated the ways in which archaeology is enriched by collaboration and inclusion of additional voices and images, and the role of technology and how it relates to intangible heritage and its loss, preservation, and capture for archaeological study.

The symposium was ultimately forward-thinking with a focus on the possibilities inherent in technological innovation, interdisciplinary approaches, and the recognition and inclusion of previously unheard stakeholders’ voices.

A full program is available here. Videos and podcasts of the panels are available here.

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Hadrian Gate, Palmyra

Pop-Up Palmyra The CMES invited community members to take part in an unusual and timely exhibition on our campus: “Pop-up Palmyra: Responses to the Destruction of the Past.” Pop-Up Palmyra grew out of our own response to the devastation of historical sites in the Middle East. What can be done to protect, preserve, and even recreate the cultural legacy of these regions? Why is it important? In the hope of providing answers to these questions and educating the public about what is happening to some our most precious world heritage sites, we invited community members to submit original works of art. Submission included sculpture, painting, music, video, poetry, among other media.

The first iteration took place during the Beyond Destruction symposium; the second will take place on CalDay, Saturday, April 16 at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Come see this lively crowdsourced memorial to the cultural heritage—past, present, and future—of the Middle East.

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VISITORS

Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Bob Price and Abdel-Kader

Mohamed Abdel-Kader Deputy Assistant Secretary for International and Foreign Language Education, U.S. Department of Education In February, UC Berkeley’s eight world area centers, six of which are federally designated Title VI National Resource Centers, welcomed Mohamed Abdel-Kader from the Department of Education. Mohamed spent the day in a series of meetings with representatives of the centers and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) awardees, emphasizing the importance of foreign language and area studies on the national and international stage, and brainstorming with center representatives about ways to address education among refugee populations.

Gil Anidjar Professor of Religion and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University In February, the CMES also welcome its first “Distinguished Visitor,” Gil Anidjar from Columbia University. Gil spent time with CMES faculty and graduate students, offered a master class on the topic of surveillance, participated in the Townsend working group on secularism, and gave a public lecture on “Sparta and Gaza.” He also lectured at UC Santa Cruz.

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Alumni Profiles The CMES is always pleased to hear about the paths taken by the undergraduate and graduate alumni of Middle East-related programs. Two recent alumni filled us in about their professional trajectories since leaving Berkeley.

Sam Metz Intern at The Nation Sam Metz works in the editorial department at The Nation magazine on Middle East and North Africa-related topics. He has recently assisted on articles by Juan Cole and Ali Gharib as well as articles about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions and Breaking the Silence projects. Sam says, “The Middle Eastern Studies major is a gem within Berkeley. The support and guidance students receive is unrivaled, and I still keep in touch with professors and students from my thesis seminar to get smart perspectives on the Middle East.” Sam presented his thesis research on the Black Panther Party’s Algiers Exile at the MESA conference in November and has recently had his work published in Muftah. He is currently a semi-finalist for the Fulbright Grant.

Sarah Dadouch Freelance Fixer Sarah Dadouch graduated in 2015 with a bachelor’s in Political Science, after which she moved to Istanbul, Turkey, on a FLAS scholarship to take a Turkish summer course at Boğaziçi University. Through on-the-ground networking, she has since started working as a fixer for BuzzFeed News and Le Figaro, pitching story ideas, finding contacts, conducting interviews, translating and transcribing, editing, and writing pieces of her own. Because of her fluent Arabic, she is also frequently employed as a freelance fixer by other media organizations, such as Vice, New York Magazine, and various TV networks. Her intermediate Turkish allowed her to work on the coverage of the recent Turkish bombing in Istanbul.

She is waiting to hear back from graduate schools, where she hopes to continue learning Turkish and studying journalism and Middle Eastern studies.

Are you an alumnus with news to share?

Please write to Outreach Director Lydia Kiesling at lydiak@berkeley.edu.

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UPCOMING EVENTS LECTURES

All events take place at 5:00 in the Sultan Conference Room, 340 Stephens Hall, unless otherwise indicated.

APRIL 7 - CANCELLED Shiraz, History, Poetry

April 21 After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East

Setrag Manoukian, McGill University

Brian Edwards, Northwestern University

BOOK TALKS April 29, 5:00 PM

May 5, 2016

Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami

Religious Difference in a Secular Age: a Minority Report Saba Mahmood, UC Berkeley

EXHIBIT March 28 - April 29 Arab Comics: 90 Years of Popular Visual Culture

April 18, 6:00 PM A talk by exhibit curator Nadim Damluji

A traveling exhibition of original and translated comics from the Arab world, from the 1920s to the present day.

FILMS March 24 - April 17 The Cinematic Landscapes of Nuri Bilge Ceylan: A Retrospective Pacific Film Archive One of the most renowned names in world cinema, Ceylan makes films that focus on family connections and the schisms between city and rural life, the worker and intellectual, and the collective and individual in Turkey.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

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Teacher Trainings Pearls on a String: Artists, Patrons, and Poets at the Great Islamic Courts A Teacher Workshop at the Asian Art Museum April 9, 2016, 9:30 AM–2:00 PM $10, Pre-registration required Trace the relationship among the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires during the 18th century through a talk by Prof. Christine Philliou, UC Berkeley Department of History, a model curriculum, and an exploration of the exhibition, “Pearls on a String.”

Presented in partnership with the Office of Resources for International and Area Studies (ORIAS) and the Asian Art Museum.

Women in World History ORIAS Community College Institute June 3-4 Register here.

Did the growth of territorial states affect men and women differently? In what ways did women participate in the transregional spice trade? Did the expansion of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism alter gender roles? World History survey and AP courses often focus on a common set of global developments, then encourage students to make comparisons and see connections across regions. The 2016 Community College Summer Institute aims to use this set of commonly-taught topics as a framework for exploring the roles of women and gender in World History. Attendees will be presented with a combination of case studies, historical context, and conceptual frameworks for discussing gender in world history. They will leave with new content (and new questions) to make their own courses more complex, engaging, and inclusive.

This program is open to community college instructors and AP-level high school teachers.

There is no cost to attend.

Pop Culture in World History ORIAS K-12 Institute July 18-20 Register here.

Modern technologies enable young students to observe and - in some ways - participate in pop culture from around the world. What is pop culture and where does it come from? How have technological changes altered the production and spread of popular culture? Is modern pop culture actually more global than the popular culture of earlier periods? Attendees at this k-12 Summer Institute will learn about expressions of pop culture from the pre-modern era into the internet age. Teachers will leave with new ideas about how to discuss and analyze pop culture with their students.

This program is open to k-12 teachers from any discipline. Professional development credit is available for teachers. There is no cost to attend.

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center for middle eastern studies

center for middle eastern studies University of California Berkeley

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