Working Groups
MENA Interdisciplinary Working Groups are designed to encourage active and emergent research agendas shared by faculty and graduate students, and to facilitate collaboration in MENA studies across home departments, colleges, and campuses. These agendas may encompass geographically-situated topics within or across national or regional boundaries, or may focus on theoretical or methodological approaches. Creative programming and event-formatting is encouraged, and some emphasis should be placed on pathways to productive research outcomes for graduate students and faculty.
Workshops might follow a range of formats including discussions of works-in-progress or shared readings, lectures by local or visiting scholars, pro-seminars on research methods, “laboratory” inquiries into shared questions, project-specific research, conferences and symposia, or preparation of collaborative digital or print publications. All workshops should engage members of the MENA community in multiple home departments, programs (including the MENA Languages Program), colleges, or campuses. Participation of advanced undergraduates is also welcome. Calls for Working Group proposals are circulated in the Spring and an elected faculty committee selects three Working Groups to run in the following year.
For the academic year, MENA will host the following Working Groups:
- Story-telling and Violence: Narratives of Insecurity in the Middle East and North Africa. Conveners: Foroogh Farhang, Sami Hermez, Rana Kazkaz, Wendy Pearlman
- Arabic Literature Reading Group. Conveners: Allison Gibeily, Jesús C. Muñoz, Ragy Mikhaeel
- Institutional Histories of Aesthetic Forms. Conveners: Hannah Feldman, Rebecca C. Johnson, Matthew, Randle-Bent, Hamed Yousefi