WELCOME TO MESAAS
WELCOME TO MESAAS
WELCOME TO MESAAS
WELCOME TO MESAAS
News & Announcements
- Summer 2021 Allison Busch Memorial Language Study FellowshipMarch 5, 2021
- MESAAS Summer Courses 2021February 25, 2021
- Debashree Mukherjee awarded the Katherine Singer Kovács Essay AwardJanuary 22, 2021
- In Memoriam: Gregg LabitaJanuary 18, 2021
- Wael Hallaq awarded the TÜBA PrizeJanuary 10, 2021
Events
march 2021
12mar2:00 pm- 4:00 pmMESAAS Open House
Event Details
Zoom link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/97839642989 Open to all students interested in the MESAAS major or pursuing a senior thesis Hosted by MESAAS Chair Gil Hochberg and Director of Undergraduate
Event Details
Zoom link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/97839642989
Open to all students interested in the MESAAS major or pursuing a senior thesis
Hosted by MESAAS Chair Gil Hochberg and Director of Undergraduate Studies Hamid Dabashi
Time
(Friday) 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
19mar12:00 pmNeither Settler Nor Native: Book Panel with Mahmood Mamdani
Event Details
Book Panel Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Identities registration link for Zoom event Mahmood Mamdani Moderator: Gil Hochberg
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Event Details
Book Panel
Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Identities
registration link for Zoom event
Mahmood Mamdani
Moderator: Gil Hochberg
Speakers:
Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Cal State San Marcos
Sean Jacobs, New School for Social Research
Joseph Massad, Professor, MESAAS, Columbia University
Gil Hochberg, Professor and Chair, MESAAS, Columbia University
Date: Friday, March 19, 2021
Time: 12 p.m. (EST, New York City)
Time
(Friday) 12:00 pm
april 2021

Event Details
In this social and intellectual biography, Hamid Dabashi contends that Jalal Al-e Ahmad was the last Muslim intellectual to have articulated a vision of Muslim worldly cosmopolitanism, before the militant
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Event Details
In this social and intellectual biography, Hamid Dabashi contends that Jalal Al-e Ahmad was the last Muslim intellectual to have articulated a vision of Muslim worldly cosmopolitanism, before the militant Islamism of the last half a century degenerated into sectarian politics and intellectual alienation from the world at large. Dabashi places Al-e Ahmad beside other towering critical thinkers of his time, showing how he personified a state of Muslim anticolonial modernity that has now disappeared behind the smokescreen of sectarian politics. This unprecedented engagement with Al-e Ahmad’s life and legacy is a prelude to what Dabashi calls a ‘post-Islamist Liberation Theology’. The Last Muslim Intellectual expands the wide spectrum of anticolonial thinking beyond its established canonicity by adding a critical Muslim thinker to it – an urgent task, if the future of Muslim critical thinking is to be considered in liberated terms beyond the dead-end of its current sectarian predicament.
Click here to register via Zoom.
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
About the Author:
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include Authority in Islam (1989); Theology of Discontent (1993); Truth and Narrative (1999); Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future (2001); Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (2000); Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema (2007); Iran: A People Interrupted (2007); and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (2006).
About the Speakers:
Ali Mirsepassi is Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University. He is also the Director of Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and also director of Iranian Studies Initiative at NYU. He is the author of numerous books including Iran’s Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State (October 2019, Cambridge University Press); Iran’s Troubled Modernity: Debating Ahmad Fardid’s Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 2018); and Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Thought of Ahmad Fardid (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Elleni Centime Zeleke is Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Ethiopia In Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production,1964–2016, among other published works.
Atefeh Akbari is Term Assistant Professor of English at Barnard College. Her current book project is a cross-cultural comparison of Iranian and Caribbean fiction and poetry from the 1960s through the 1980s. An article from this project, titled ““Where Is the Friend’s Home?”: New World Landscapes in Sohrab Sepehri’s Poetic Geography,” has been published in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (September 2019).
Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination; and, most recently, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, among other published works.
Time
(Wednesday) 6:15 pm
may 2021
There are no Events for this month. Please check back soon
Recent Books
Harvard University Press presents Neither Settler nor Native by Mahmood Mamdani
The Resistance Network by Khatchig Mouradian, Michigan State University Press
Haymarket Books presents On Edward Said by Hamid Dabashi
Bombay Hustle by Debashree Mukherjee, Columbia University Press
University of Michigan Press presents Kafka’s Zoopoetics by Naama Harel