Speaker: Marcelo Siqueira Ridenti, Cardoso Visiting Professor; Columbia University

a discussion with Roger Owen
AJ Meyer Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus, Department of History

Professor Owen will lead a discussion on the chaos in the MENA region with a focus on the process of events since the Arab Uprisings of 2011.

This event is open to the public, no registration is required.

Sponsors: Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History; Harvard Philosophy Department
Contacts: Richard Moran; Peter Gordon, pgordon@fas.harvard.edu

Abstract:  "How did the newly established Republic of Turkey legislate its minorities in its formative years? How did minorities (defined legally as non-Muslim citizens of the Republic) respond to the new regime? Looking at state-minority relationships in the context of interwar Europe’s League of Nations-initiated “minority protection regime” and taking a longue durée approach to the question by incorporating a discussion of the legacy of the Ottoman millet system as well as the 19th century Great Power “interventions” into what Ottomans viewed as their “...

Speaker(s): Michael Miller , Professor of History, University of Miami

Sponsor(s):  New Directions in European History

How does one write the history of a river? In recent decades the prevailing tone...

"The Medieval Reception of Firdausi's Shahnama: The Ardashir Cycle as a Mirror for Princes"

Askari is currently at the Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia.

"Of Translation and Toleration: Āẕar Kayvān (d. 1618 CE) and the 'Persian Age' (dawr-i ʻajam) in Safavid Iran and Mughal India"

...

"A Poem for All Seasons: The Language of Occasion in Early Persian Poetry"

Landau is currently at the Institute of Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences.

"Reclaiming Persian: The Safavid Literary Response to Victory at Qandahar (1649)"

...

"Conventions of Truth in Pre-modern Persian Poetry: Sincerity & Hypocrisy, Fantasy vs. Historicity, and Other Continua"

Lewis is currently at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

...

"The Dark Cradle of Modernity:
Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and the Idea of the Renaissance."

Martin Ruehl (Trinity Hall, Cambridge University)

Speaker(s): Benjamin Braude, Professor of History, Boston College

Sponsor(s):  Jews in Modern Europe; Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History; Contemporary Europe

Paradoxically Simone Weil was both one of the most polarizing thinkers in the twentieth century and an important unifying figure for both left and right in post-war France. Some called her a pacifist saint and others as bad as Hitler. This talk will argue that Weil's...

The film is set against the backdrop of unrest in East Pakistan in the late 1960s leading up to the Bangladesh War of Liberation. In this setting, a small family must come to grips with its culture, its faith, and the...