Lecture

Lecture on Jewish Approaches to Islam 4/19, 4:30 p.m.

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A Lecture by Elisha Russ-Fishbane, Princeton University

 Judaism and Islam: Between History and Polemics

 The talk will address Jewish approaches to Islam from a historical and modern perspective.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in 2009.  His dissertation, Between Politics and Piety: Abraham Maimonides and His Times, is a historical investigation into Egyptian Jewish society in the thirteenth century.   Elisha Russ-Fishbane is now a Tikvah Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Thought at Princeton University and will be joining Wesleyan’s Religion Department and Jewish and Israel Studies in July.

Thursday, April 19, PAC 004, 4:30 pm

Prof. Elvin Lim: Tea Party Talk – 4/10, 5 p.m.

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The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences (CAAS) is presenting a talk today at 5:00 pm in Usdan University Center, Room 108:

Why the Tea Party of 1773 Achieved More Than the Tea Party of 2012, by Elvin Lim, Associate Professor of Government
  
The talk is free to all.

The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1799 and is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States.  The Academy sponsors several lectures a year, including an annual lecture at Wesleyan.

Lecture: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt — Prof. S. Hamdy, 4/10, 4:30 p.m.

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On Tuesday April 10 at 4:30pm in PAC 002, Prof. Sherine Hamdy, a current member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology of Brown University, will be giving a talk entitled: “Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt”.  Prof Hamdy’s talk is being funded by the Middle East Studies Program and the Feminism, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. 

Brief description of the talk:
This talk will analyze the national debate over organ transplantation in Egypt as it has unfolded during a time of major social and political transformation—including mounting dissent against a brutal regime, the privatization of health care, advances in science, the growing gap between rich and poor, and the Islamization of public space.

Brief bio:
Sherine Hamdy is an assistant professor of anthropology and social sciences at Brown University who focuses on cross-cultural approaches to medicine, health, and authoritative knowledge about the body. She is currently a member at the School of Social sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, where she is working on a new project about reproductive health and gender in Egypt.

Lecture by Prof. Joseph Siry on Frank Lloyd Wright

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Prof. Joseph Siry:   Frank Lloyd Wright’s Steel Cathedral Project and Beth Sholom Synagogue

 In a suburb just north of Philadelphia stands Beth Sholom Synagogue, Frank Lloyd Wright’s only synagogue and among his finest religious buildings. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 2007, Beth Sholom was one of Wright’s last completed projects, and for years it has been considered one of his greatest masterpieces.

The talk is based on Professor Siry’s recently published book The Beth Sholom Synagogue: Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious Architecture.”  The book has been praised as “a work of art in its own right” (The Forward)

Thursday, April 5, SQUASH 112, 8:00 pm

“The European Edge: A Conversation About Doing American Studies and American Literary Studies in Europe” –4/3, 4:15 p.m.

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There is a very special and unusual AMST/ENGLISH event that will take place in Downey Lounge, 4:15-5:30, on Tuesday, April 3 and it will feature an extremely talented guest: 

Professor Ulla Haselstein, Director of the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free University (Freie Universitat), Berlin.   She is one of the most wide-ranging, dynamic, and respected American literary studies scholar-teachers in Europe and is also Chair of the Literature Department at the JFK (all classes are conducted in English).  

THE EUROPEAN EDGE:  A CONVERSATION ABOUT DOING AMERICAN STUDIES AND AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES IN EUROPE

 The John F. Kennedy Institute is world-renowned as one of the greatest centers for the study of American culture (American Studies and Canadian Studies).  She is eager to meet Wesleyan students and faculty. We’ll be talking about some intriguing and under-researched aspects of Cold War history and the Cold War production of knowledge.

Lecture Commemorating One Year Anniversary of Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami — 3/8, 5 p.m.

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Lecture: Tohoku One Year Later

Thursday, March 8, 5:00 pm at Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies

This event commemorates the anniversary of the March 11, 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. We are very excited to have two eminent speakers, Michael Yamashita of the National Geographic magazine, and Ted Bestor, Chair of Anthropology at Harvard and author of Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World. Both have visited northern Japan repeatedly since the disaster.

Instead of just seeing “the one photo” in Michael Yamshita’s slide lecture, you’ll see other, unpublished images of the same scene, giving a sense of the scale of the disaster. Michael Yamashita talked about taking off in a helicopter from near the Fukishima Nuclear Plant a few weeks after the disaster, flying north for 2 1/2 hours and seeing nothing but destruction. He had been to Kobe right after the earthquake there and said that in that disaster, some buildings failed but others withstood the shaking: he said after Tohoku everything was simply swept away.  

Ted Bestor’s work on the Tsujiki Fish market (Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World (University of California Press, 2004) is generally credited with saving that institution. His research on the state of northern Japan after the disaster highlights the devastation of the fishing economy which experienced a double hit: its physical plant wiped out by the earthquake and tsunami, and then its market devastated by fear of nuclear poisoning from water released during the meltdown of the Fukushima Plant.

 For info contact Ann Gertz at X2300

 Caption for image: March 11 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. Measuring 9, biggest ever to hit Japan destroying the NE coast line cities and villages for 200 plus miles.  Toshiya Kanaka, 79, doing the clothes he found in his house that was in the background.  He now lives in a refugee center during the day but stays with his wife in a small workshop where he has gathered together all he needs to survive happily making knots with ropes he has recovered from wreckage.  It’s a hobby of which he has many.  A very resourceful man who challenges this to undo him. © Michael Yamashita

 

A Biblical Sex Scandal? Noah, Ham, and the Curse of Canaan” — 3/1, 7 p.m.

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Thursday, March 1, 7 p.m.     Center for African American Studies

Jennifer Knust, “A Biblical Sex Scandal? Noah, Ham, and the Curse of Canaan” 

The story of Ham’s encounter with Noah’s nakedness, and the curse that followed, offers a particularly notorious example of what today we might call a “sex scandal.” Though the specifics of Ham’s infraction are far from clear, the shame that was then affixed to whomever was designated as one of his descendants is not. Adapting the insights of affect theory and addressing larger biblical notions of sexual morality and kinship, Jennifer Knust will consider the way that the Canaanites became disgusting objects, and the effect this interpretation has had on understandings of sex, race, and gender.