New Books in Middle Eastern Studies
1,075 episodes - English - Latest episode: 21 days ago - ★★★★ - 28 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of the Middle East about their New Books
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Episodes
Toufoul Abou-Hodeib, “A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut” (Stanford UP, 2017)
May 15, 2018 10:00 - 6 minutesToufoul Abou-Hodeib‘s A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the urban history of Beirut precisely because it exceeds the disciplinary boundaries of urban history: A Taste for Home tells the story of late Ottoman Beirut through the middle class and their sense of self. Abou-Hodeib uses domesticity as a category of analysis to look at how the middle class functioned and what it aspired to be in t...
Jörg Matthias Determann, “Space Science and the Arab World: Astronauts, Observatories, and Nationalism in the Middle East” (I. B. Tauris, 2018)
May 11, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourSpace Science and the Arab World, Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2018) a recently published history of Arab exploration of space, offers a fascinating insight into fundamental issues shaping the contemporary Middle East, including efforts to turn Arab societies into twenty first-century knowledge-based economies and the role of the religion and its relationship to science. Assistant Professor Jörg Matthias Determann takes the reader on a highly re...
Omina El Shakry, “The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt” (Princeton UP, 2017)
May 01, 2018 10:00 - 50 minutesOften, when writing the intellectual history of the Middle East, we make assumptions about the influence of ideas from other places on the Middle East itself. We assume what ideas are being adapted in their entirety and not necessarily as challenged and critiqued; this is often influenced by power dynamics themselves the products of historical processes like colonialism and capitalism. Omnia El Shakry challenges this approach to ideas in The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Eg...
Michael Brenner, “In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea” (Princeton UP, 2018)
April 30, 2018 10:00 - 31 minutesIn his new book, In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2018), Professor Michael Brenner, a historian of Jews and of Israel who teaches both at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and at American University in Washington, DC, offers a history of the Zionist idea, and the debates over its embodiment in 70 years of Israeli statehood. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign...
Nadia Yaqub and Rula Quawas, “Bad Girls of the Arab World” (U Texas Press, 2017)
April 16, 2018 10:00 - 47 minutesModeled on Bad Girls of Japan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press, 2017), edited by Nadia Yaqub and the late Rula Quawas stands apart from the edited volume crowd. It includes, not only academic entries, but personal essays and reflections on art by their artists, all centered on the theme of transgression, or to put it in the language of Bad Girls of the Arab World itself, bad girls. And there is no one bad girl. Some bad girls of the Arab world...
Mehammed Mack, “Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture” (Fordham UP, 2017)
March 29, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourIn the recent past, anti-Muslim hate crimes and rhetoric have surged across America and Europe. Much of this public discourse revolves around questions of assimilation and where Muslim positions on sexuality and gender fit into national unity. In Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture (Fordham University Press, 2017), Mehammed Amadeus Mack, Assistant Professor of French Studies at Smith College, explores the politicization of Muslim minority sexuality in France in...
Hoda Yousef, “Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, 1870-1930” (Stanford UP,
March 20, 2018 10:00 - 35 minutesLiteracy is often portrayed as a social good. Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, 1870-1930 (Stanford University Press, 2016), Hoda Yousef has a different take on it, portraying it as a tool. Yousef uses reading and writing to interrogate how new social practices were changing Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, demonstrating how they were used to further divide or fracture the public sphere. Literate, illiterate, and semi-literate ...
Alexander Orwin, “Redefining the Muslim Community: Ethnicity, Religion, and Politics in the Thought of Alfarabi” (U Penn Press, 2017)
March 19, 2018 10:00 - 44 minutesAbu Nasr Al-Farabi (c. 872 – c. 950) a philosopher who wrote on politics, metaphysics, and logic as well as mathematics, psychology, and music, was known by Jews, Christians, and Muslims as the “second teacher,” second only to Aristotle. Although little of his biography is known, we have many of his works that were instrumental in preserving and adapting the Greek philosophical heritage in an Islamic idiom in the Middle Ages. Until the work of Leo Strauss and his students, Alfarabi was largel...
Didem Havlioglu, “Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History” (Syracuse UP, 2017)
March 13, 2018 10:00 - 32 minutesMihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse University Press, 2017) by Didem Havlioglu is at once an intellectual history and biography of sorts of Mihri Hatun, a fifteenth century Ottoman poet. It considers the question of what happens when a woman enters a field dominated by men; in this case, poetry. Using her own poetry and biographical dictionaries (the tezkire genre), Havlioglu contextualizes Mihri and tries to understand her as a p...
Ian Black, “Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017)
March 02, 2018 11:00 - 43 minutesIn Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017), Ian Black, the former Middle East Editor of the Guardian, offers a comprehensive view of the past and present of what would ultimately become known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Drawing on a range of sources, the book aims to offer a balanced and clear narrative of a history that has become infamously contested. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at t...
Maha Nassar, “Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World” (Stanford UP, 2017)
March 01, 2018 11:00 - 48 minutesThe study of Palestine and Israel has been largely shaped by the politics of the conflict and thus, many scholars start with political history, often using Israeli state sources. Maha Nassar, in Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2017), looks specifically at the larger context of Palestinian citizens of Israel, those Palestinians who stayed behind after the 1948 war simultaneously created the state of Israel and created refugees out o...
Sara Hirschhorn, “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement” (Harvard UP, 2017)
February 20, 2018 11:00 - 29 minutesWho are the American Jews behind many of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank? This is the question that Dr. Sara Hirschhorn, Research Lecturer at the University of Oxford, seeks to answer in her new book City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement (Harvard University Press, 2017). By analyzing archival documents along with periodicals, internet sources, and a wealth of self-conducted interviews, Hirschhorn concludes that many American-Israeli settlers are not the me...
Stephen Sheehi, “The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography 1860-1910” (Princeton UP, 2016)
February 15, 2018 11:00 - 50 minutesIn the Arab world, photography is often tied to the modernizing efforts of imperial and colonial powers. However, indigenous photography was itself a major aspect of the cultural and social lives of Middle Eastern societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stephen Sheehi’s The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography 1860-1910 (Princeton University Press, 2016) tells that story, focusing primarily on portraiture and those that took portraits. Sheehi examines...
Alexander Knysh, “Sufism: A New History” (Princeton UP, 2017)
February 01, 2018 11:00 - 56 minutesSufism, like many terms in the study of Islam, can be difficult to define and even more difficult to handle, but Alexander Knysh, in Sufism: A New History (Princeton University Press, 2017), has produced a primer that will both challenge and reinforce many of the assumptions we’ve made in the study of Islamic mysticism. Knysh walks us through how to define Sufism, the origins of Sufism (including the influence of the Hellenic world), how texts fit into our consideration of Sufism, contemporar...
Claire Eldridge, “From Empire to Exile” (Manchester UP, 2016)
January 26, 2018 13:57 - 58 minutesThe French-Algerian War that erupted in 1954 ended with the emergence of an independent Algeria in 1962, but it was not until decades later that a broader French public turned its attention with vigor to the violence and pain of that conflict. Indeed, the French state only officially recognized the war as a war in 1999. Claire Eldridge‘s From Empire to Exile: History and Memory Within the Pied-noir and Harki Communities, 1962-2012 (Manchester University Press, 2016) interrogates the war’s leg...
Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, “Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France” (Liverpool UP, 2016)
January 18, 2018 11:00 - 53 minutesConnections between France and North Africa have long been shaped by colonialism, nationalism, and economics. This intercultural relationship has also been mediated through the arts. In Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France (Liverpool University Press, 2016), Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, Assistant Professor of French at the University of Rhode Island, examines one population who has often been left out of these cultural formations. Kemp focuses on the representation o...
Ella Shohat, “On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements” (Pluto Press, 2017)
January 16, 2018 17:28 - 50 minutesSpanning several decades, the work of Ella Shohat, a Professor of Cultural Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University, has introduced conceptual frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of Israel, Palestine, Zionism and the Middle East. On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements (Pluto Press, 2017) gathers together her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies and memoirs, as well as previously unpublished material...
Adam Mestyan, “Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt” (Princeton UP, 2017)
January 15, 2018 11:00 - 49 minutesStudies of Arab nationalism populate the field of Middle Eastern studies, perhaps even overpopulate it. However, what Adam Mestyan does in Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2017) is very different: he looks specifically at patriotic sentiment, not nationalism per se, and its specifically Ottoman roots. Using archival sources in both Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, Mestyan ties together the public sphere, the press, leadership, an...
miriam cooke, “Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience, and the Syrian Revolution” (Routledge, 2017)
January 02, 2018 05:00 - 1 hourThe Syrian Revolution, which began in March 2011, has since resulted in what can be described as a civil war, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the forced migrations of millions of Syrians. This story has been told countless times in news media. However, less known is the story of the Syrian artists who have portrayed the revolution with all of its nuances. miriam cooke’s Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience and the Syrian Revolution (Routledge, 2017) tells that story,...
Elizabeth Bucar, “Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress” (Harvard UP, 2017)
December 25, 2017 20:33 - 1 hourWe’ve featured a few books on fashion and the Muslim world recently, all part of an effort to re-orient the study of women in the Muslim and Arabic-speaking worlds. Elizabeth Bucar’s Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress (Harvard University Press, 2017) uses three different Muslim populations, Iran, Indonesia and Turkey, to look at what Muslim women wear and how it reflects individual agency. What’s so original about Bucar’s contribution is that it emphasizes how women dress, versus simply wh...
Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, “The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation” (Columbia UP, 2016)
December 20, 2017 11:00 - 1 hourOver the past century, virtually every Iranian—whether living in Iran or in the diaspora—has been exposed, to one degree or another, to certain commonly held nationalistic beliefs about what it means to be Iranian. These beliefs include the idea that Iranians are an “Aryan” race; that pre-Islamic Iran was a sort of golden age, marked by a glorious Persian Empire; and that this pure Iranian “soul” was subsequently “polluted” by the arrival of Arab culture, language and even religion in the sev...
Kevan Harris, “A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran” (U. Cal Press, 2017)
December 11, 2017 11:00 - 24 minutesKevan Harris is the author of A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran (University of California Press, 2017). Harris is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Much scholarship has focused on understanding the Iranian revolution of 1979, especially in relation to other nations in the Middle East and those further away in the West. The Islamic Republic of Iran is an interesting foreign policy study, but of less interest for studies of ...
Marie Grace Brown, “Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan” (Stanford UP, 2017)
December 04, 2017 11:00 - 51 minutesMarie Grace Brown’s Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan (Stanford University Press, 2017) is in many ways a history of fashion in Sudan, but in so many ways, its much more than that. It is the story of women in Sudan, as well as the story of their bodies and movement. Brown weaves together women’s education, women’s health, activism and more through the tobe, a popular, modest form of dress that wrapped around a woman’s head and body. She reads textiles like texts a...
Sophia Rose Arjana, “Pilgrimage in Islam: Traditional and Modern Practices” (Oneworld Publications, 2017)
November 27, 2017 11:00 - 46 minutesIn her new book Pilgrimage in Islam: Traditional and Modern Practices (Oneworld Publications, 2017), Sophia Rose Arjana explores the diverse array of pilgrimage practices in the Muslim world. Pilgrimage in Islam is often synonymous with the hajj, or the pilgrimage to Mecca, but Arjana’s study deconstructs this normatively held assumption by taking her readers on a journey across various sacred spaces throughout the contemporary global context. Her itineraries in this book beautifully illumin...
Neda Maghbouleh, “The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race” (Stanford UP, 2017)
November 20, 2017 17:39 - 56 minutesHow does a group become defined as white? And does that group define themselves that way as well? Neda Maghbouleh‘s new book, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford University Press, 2017), uses interview and ethnographic data to better understand how Iranian Americans perceive themselves and are perceived. “Caught in the chasm between formal ethno-racial invisibility and informal hypervisibility,” Iranian Americans often straddle a space in whi...
Karen Ross, “Youth Encounter Programs in Israel: Pedagogy, Identity and Social Change” (Syracuse UP, 2017)
November 18, 2017 11:00 - 1 hourIn her new book, Youth Encounter Programs in Israel: Pedagogy, Identity and Social Change (Syracuse University Press, 2017), Karen Ross conducts an in-depth analysis of Jewish-Palestinian youth encounter peace-building programs in Israel. She adopts a narrative approach and carefully considers how these youth programs impacted their young participants in long-term, positive and profound ways. Of particular interest is her insights about how to research and evaluate the “impact” of education p...
Reina Lewis, “Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures” (Duke UP, 2015)
November 15, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourFashion is often dismissed as trivial, but Reina Lewis‘s Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Duke University Press, 2015) takes both it and what Muslims specifically wear and devotes and 300+ eye-opening pages to it. Defining it as, not a history, but “a history of several lived presents.” Largely focusing on Turkey, Western Europe, and North America, Lewis walks us through the landscape of Muslim fashion, incorporating marketing, global trends, social media, and the perspectives of ...
George Kiraz on Gorgias Press (NBn, 2017)
November 02, 2017 19:03 - 20 minutesNormally, we feature books, but this time we’re highlighting an independent press making waves in academic works on the ancient Near East, Syriac, Islam, Jewish studies, and more: Gorgias Press. Based in New Jersey, the press has grown since its inception in 2001 to include the publication of journals, open-source projects, and countless monograph and handbook series. We talk to the founder, George Kiraz, also director of the Beth Mardutho (The Syriac Institute) about how the press came about...
Mya Guranieri Jaradat, “The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others” (U. Chicago/Pluto Press, 2017)
October 19, 2017 17:57 - 25 minutesIn The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others (University of Chicago/Pluto Press, 2017), Mya Guarnieri-Jaradat offers her readers an intimate, often devastatingly gloomy portrait of the lives of Southeast Asian migrant workers and African asylum seekers in Israel. She depicts an image of a reality of poverty, harassment, and abuse that often goes largely unseen. Based on a decade’s worth of experience in the field, The Unchosen sheds light on Israel’s often brutal treatment of these margi...
Adam Gaiser, “Shurat Legends, Ibadi Identities: Martyrdom, Asceticism and the Making of an Early Islamic Community” (U. South Carolina Press, 2016)
October 18, 2017 15:07 - 40 minutesAdam Gaiser‘s majestic new book Shurat Legends, Ibadi Identities: Martyrdom, Asceticism and the Making of an Early Islamic Community (University of South Carolina Press, 2016), treats readers to a dazzling analysis of a wide range of Shurat/Kharijite texts centered on the themes of martyrdom, asceticism, and the body. Providing a rare and sympathetic window into this often misunderstood tradition, Gaiser presents a compelling and nuanced account of ways in which discursive concepts, construct...
Bruce B. Lawrence, “The Koran in English: A Biography” (Princeton UP, 2017)
October 16, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourAs the basis for a major world religion, the Qur’an is one of the most influential books of all time. But when it first appeared, the Qur’an was in Arabic. Most Muslims today are not native-Arabic speakers. Bruce B. Lawrence deals with this issue of translation and more by specifically focusing on the Qur’an (or the Koran) in English in the aptly titled The Koran in English: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2017). He goes back to the earliest English translations, which he terms the “...
Yakov M. Rabkin, “What Is Modern Israel?” (U. Chicago/Pluto Press, 2016)
October 04, 2017 19:11 - 43 minutesIn What is Modern Israel? (University of Chicago/Pluto Press, 2016), Yakov Rabkin, a professor of history at the University of Montreal, discusses some of the most fundamental issues pertaining to the history and socio-politics of Israel. He does not shy away from dealing with some of the most sensitive and controversial issues, such as the Christian roots of Zionist ideology, the commemoration and political uses of the Holocaust in Israel, and the problematic stance of Zionist ideology towar...
Cyrus Schayegh, “The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World” (Harvard UP, 2017)
October 02, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourThe question of how to write the history of the modern Middle East is a much contested one. Do we write national histories, focused on modern-nation states? Do we treat the Middle East as an integrated unit? What even constitutes the Middle East? At that, how do we deal with the great changes that swept the region during the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Cyrus Schayegh in The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 2017) introduces the concept of transp...
Andrea L. Stanton, “This is Jerusalem Calling: State Radio in Mandate Palestine” (U of Texas Press, 2013)
September 14, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourDespite the recent booms in the study of the Middle East and North Africa, technology studies still remain scarce: one of the recent attempts to fill the void is Andrea L. Stanton‘s ‘This is Jerusalem Calling’: State Radio in Mandate Palestine (University of Texas Press, 2013). She weaves together different narratives to tell the story of the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS), launched in 1936 as an attempt by the mandate government to cater to different audiences, shaping middle class cul...
Asher Orkaby, “Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68” (Oxford UP, 2017)
September 05, 2017 22:34 - 59 minutesThe civil war in Yemen today harkens back to a similar conflict half a century ago, when the overthrow of the ruling imam, Muhammad al-Badr, in 1962 sparked a conflict that dragged on for the rest of the decade. While primarily driven by domestic politics, as Asher Orkaby explains in his book Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68 (Oxford University Press, 2017), the fighting drew in a variety of foreign powers and multinational organizations, each...
Faegheh Shirazi, “Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety” (U. Texas Press, 2016)
September 05, 2017 21:31 - 30 minutesReligion is big business nowadays. Within the global context of Muslim consumers Islamic commodities have become increasingly popular over the past few decades. Faegheh Shirazi, Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, explores the industrial and discursive production of halal products in Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety (University of Texas Press, 2016). In the wake of increased insecurity due to the rise of anti-Musli...
Wendy Pearlman, “We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria” (Custom House, 2017)
August 30, 2017 10:00 - 56 minutesIn the wake of the Arab Spring and the ensuing Syrian Civil War, the stories of the millions displaced by the conflict as well as the millions Syria has lost since 2011 remain largely untold. Wendy Pearlman‘s We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled (Custom House, 2017) attempts to fill that void. Almost entirely comprised of interviews with Syrian refugees, conducted in Arabic then painstakingly translated and organized to tell the story of the Syrian Civil War. Pearlman covers the period before ...
Betty S. Anderson, “A History of the Middle East: Rulers, Rebels, and Rogues (Stanford UP, 2016)
August 16, 2017 20:16 - 27 minutesAs the Middle East continues to become more topical to American and European audiences, a need for textbooks to teach the history of the region has become urgent. Some such textbooks take a topical approach, others use a chronological narrative. Betty Anderson‘s A History of the Middle East: Rulers, Rebels, and Rogues (Stanford University Press, 2016) combines both. Taking us through the whirlwind of the last few centuries, she focuses on three types of actors: the titular rulers, rebels and ...
Michael Allan, “In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt” (Princeton UP, 2016)
August 14, 2017 10:00 - 31 minutesMichael Allan‘s In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2016) challenges traditional perceptions of world literature: he argues that the disciplinary framework of world literature levels the differences between different types of literature. He uses colonial Egypt as a geographic focus of inquiry and demonstrates how literary traditions changed the act of reading: his examples include the Rosetta Stone and translations of the Qur’an. ...
Zachary Lockman, “Field Notes: The Making of Middle Eastern Studies in the United States” (Stanford UP, 2016)
July 24, 2017 12:54 - 33 minutesThe dominant narrative in the history of the study of the Middle East has claimed that the Cold War was what pushed Middle East studies to develop, as part of a greater trend in area studies. Drawing on his previous work in 2004’s Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, Zachary Lockman‘s Field Notes: The Making of Middle Eastern Studies in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2016) looks at the power of institutions, corporations, and foundatio...
Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, “The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR’s Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict” (Oxford UP, 2017)
July 19, 2017 22:34 - 59 minutesThe title of Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez‘s The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR’s Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford University Press/Hurst, 2017), tells you that this is a revisionist history, which argues that the Six Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973) were not merely brief explosions of Arab-Israeli violence but part of longer sustained conflict between Israel and the Soviet Union. The role of Soviet “advisors” in Egypt in the period is well known. U...
Nader Hashimi and Danny Postel, eds. “Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East” (Oxford UP, 2017)
July 16, 2017 10:00 - 27 minutesThe term ‘sectarianism’ has dominated much of the discourse on the Middle East and dictates that much of the unrest in the region is due to religious and cultural differences stemming back centuries. However, with Sectarianization:Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2017), Nader Hashimi and Danny Postel have sought to redefine the term, locating the manifestation of sectarian differences in sectarianization, a process utilized by a variety of regional actors ...
Blake Atwood, “Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic” (Columbia UP, 2016)
June 26, 2017 10:00 - 27 minutesIranian cinema has close connections to the 1979 Islamic revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini , explicitly pointed to the uses of cinema for religious and revolutionary political purposes. But Iranian films and the means of film production gradually changed in the post-Khomeini period. In Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic (Columbia University Press, 2016), Blake Atwood, Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas ...
Erik Love, “Islamophobia and Racism in America” (NYU Press, 2017)
June 26, 2017 10:00 - 32 minutesIn his new book, Islamophobia and Racism in America (New York University Press, 2017), Sociologist Erik Love provides a historical and current snapshot of civil rights issues surrounding people from the “middle east” in America. Much like other racial and ethnic categorizations, Middle Eastern is a term that does not fit quite right and is also so broad it is vague, but the concept is used widely in the mainstream media and literature and so Love uses it here to help the reader connect to cur...
Brad Gooch, “Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love” (Harper, 2017)
June 08, 2017 21:08 - 48 minutesEver since their composition in the 13th century the poems of the Persian writer Rumi have enthralled millions of readers around the world. In Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love (Harper, 2017), Brad Gooch describes the life of their author and the path that took him from scholarship to poetry. The son of a scholar and cleric, Rumi traveled extensively as a child and enjoyed a wide-ranging education that prepared him for a life as a teacher and jurist. His meeting with the trav...
Rajan Gurukkal, “Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade: Political Economy of Eastern Mediterranean Exchange Relations” (Oxford UP, 2016)
June 08, 2017 20:19 - 37 minutesRajan Gurukkal‘s Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade: Political Economy of Eastern Mediterranean Exchange Relations (Oxford University Press, 2016) casts a critical eye over the exchanges, usually and problematically termed trade, between the eastern Mediterranean and coastal India in the classical period. Using insights from economic anthropology to recast the standard narrative of the time, the study explores ports and polity in south India as well as the different types of exchange relat...
Nir Baram, “A Land Without Borders: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank” (Text Publishing Company, 2017)
May 30, 2017 10:00 - 25 minutesIn A Land Without Borders: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank (Text Publishing Company, 2017), Nir Baram, award winning author and journalist, gives a fascinating account of his travels around the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Baram talks to a wide range of Palestinians living under occupation and Jewish settlers. It’s a unique book which gives attention to voices that upset dominant understandings of the conflict. It’s highly readable yet informative and involving and deserve...
Lewis Glinert, “The Story of Hebrew” (Princeton UP, 2017)
April 11, 2017 14:40 - 34 minutesFor this episode, New Books in Jewish Studies interviews Lewis Glinert, Professor of Hebrew Studies at Dartmouth College, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Linguistics. His book, The Story of Hebrew (Princeton University Press, 2017), can be defined as a biography of Hebrew language that spans Millenia. The book includes a chronological description of the use and perception of Hebrew in different communities across the world, addressing questions related to the ways in which He...
Joseph Lumbard, “The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary” (HarperOne, 2015)
March 24, 2017 11:45 - 56 minutesThe Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (HarperOne, 2015) represents years of effort from a team of dedicated translators and editors (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Joseph Lumbard, Maria Dakake, Caner Dagli, and Mohammad Rustom). The book is a remarkable achievement. The text features a complete new translation of the Quran as well as multiple complementary essays written by leading scholars of Quranic studies. The tome also includes over a million words of running commentary from Muslim exe...
Brian T. Edwards, “After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East” (Columbia UP, 2016)
March 06, 2017 11:00 - 58 minutesAmerican culture is ubiquitous across the globe. It travels to different social contexts and is consumed by international populations. But the relationship between American culture and the meanings attached to the United States change over time. During the 20th century, the American Century, American culture generally aided in the positive global perception of U.S. policies and governance. In After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East (Columbia University Press, ...