Dartmouth Events

Speakers
Tarek El Ariss, Dartmouth College
Hoda Barakat, Dartmouth College
Lital Levy, Princeton University
Yoav DiCapua, University of Texas, Austin

Tarek El Ariss is a Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth. Working across disciplines and languages, his research interests include contemporary Arabic culture, literature, and art; new media and cyber culture; digital humanities; Nahda literature, language, press, and literary theory; travel writing and the war novel; film and television studies; science fiction and utopia studies; 18th and 19th century French philosophy and literature; gender and sexuality studies; and psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and affect theory. He is author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age, and editor of the MLA anthology, The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda. He is the editor of a series on literature in translation entitled, Emerging Voices from the Middle East.

Hoda Barakat is a Visiting Professor in Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Award in 2016, Lebanese author Hoda Barakat is one of the most important Arab authors writing today. She is the author of almost dozen novels, plays, and essay collections including Stone of Laughter, Disciples of Passion and most recently, The Night Mail which is shortlisted for the International Prize of Arabic Fiction in 2019. Barakat’s writing has been praised for its bold exploration of ethical, social, and psychological collapse exposed in times of war.

Lital Levy, Princeton University is an interdisciplinary scholar of Comparative Literature, Jewish Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. While my interests are broad, my research is concentrated in three areas: the culture of Israel and Palestine; the historical and contemporary experiences of Middle Eastern Jewish, the Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Arab Jewish communities; and theoretical issues of comparison, representation, and language, such as translation, literary multilingualism, literary vernaculars, world literature, and cross cultural comparison.

Yoav DiCapua, University of Texas, Austin
My field of inquiry is Modern Arab intellectual history. It is a relatively small academic province whose parishioners map the Arab experience of Enlightenment. Intellectual historians of the Middle East study and document abstractions and given their engagement with a huge topic such as Enlightenment, they have a very broad scholarly mandate.

Free and open to the public
Sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program, the Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dean of Faculty Office and Middle Eastern Studies Program