The Middle East Studies Colloquium hosts lunchtime talks by Brown faculty and visiting scholars about ongoing research projects. If you are interested in presenting your work in this series, please contact cmes@brown.edu. Please note that registration is required to attend all talks in this series.
Spring 2025
Ellis Garey, “The Worker Question: Labor and Social Struggle in Greater Syria”
Who, and perhaps more importantly what, is a worker? Starting in the 1870s government officials, company managers, political organizers, and laboring people in Greater Syria (today’s Lebanon and Syria) began to ask this question. Faced with labor struggles from Beirut to Aleppo and beyond, a diverse set of historical actors realized something in common: the category of the “worker” was becoming central to how people organized and oriented themselves in a world increasingly ruled by capitalist social formations. They also recognized that the answer to this question was not immediately available. It would be worked out through social, legal and intellectual struggles over the next half century. This talk explores the history of “the worker question” in Greater Syria between 1870-1939 by examining the work stoppages, newspaper debates, and legislative initiatives which attempted to define or manage workers. Registration required.
February 13, 2025, 12:00-1:00pm | McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute (room 353)
Gwendolyn Collaço, “Refracted Histories through Islamic Stained Glass: Crafting an Exhibit on 19th c. Ottoman Windows and their Histories of Collecting”
Hidden within MIT’s Distinctive Collections, many architectural elements from the earliest days of the Institute still survive as part of the Rotch Art Collection. Among the artworks that were salvaged by conservators was a set of striking windows of gypsum and stained-glass, dating to the late 18th- to 19th c. Ottoman Empire. Similar stained-glass windows once graced the reception halls of elite homes, like al-ʿAzam Palace in Damascus and Bayt al-Razzaz in Cairo. Such halls have quickly disappeared due to the ravages of time, war, and recent earthquakes. Yet even prior to these events, many Ottoman-era windows came to Europe and the United States decontextualized as architectural elements or as part of full Islamic rooms, which visitors still admire today at institutions like the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Registration required.
March 6, 2025, 12:00-1:00pm | McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute (room 353)
Maru Pabón, “Transitional Transcriptions: Jean Sénac and Būqāla Poetry”
This talk examines the relationship between the concepts of “transcription” and “transition” in the development of Jean Sénac’s poetics, paying close attention to his engagements with Algerian būqāla poetry, a genre of oral texts recited by women in Algerian Arabic. As a Francophone pied-noir intellectual committed to Algerian independence, Sénac understood French as a “transitional language” to be employed only while a new Arabophone literary class could emerge. Driven by his exploration of būqāla poetry, Sénac thus abstracted transcription, an ethnographic practice with considerable colonial roots in Algeria, into a translational paradigm that allowed him to maintain his authority as a Francophone Algerian poet––an authority whose ultimate purpose was to negate itself. An analysis of key poems written and translated between the early 50s and late 60s allows us to observe how transcription became a conceptual paradigm through which Sénac reconfigured his relationship to the “voice of the people,” and his status as an anticolonial and Third-Worldist poet. Registration required.
April 17, 2025, 12:00-1:00pm | McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute (room 353)