Faculty, Staff, Students, and the Charlottesville community are invited to attend a teach-in regarding the recent incidents in Mumbai India.  Panel participants bring a rich background in South Asian history, economics, literature, and anthropology.  Religious representatives and expatriates living in Charlottesville will bring their own perspectives to this discussion.  All are welcome to come, listen, and participate in this forum.

From South Asia, Europe and North America the University of Virginia has brought together three generations of scholars of Urdu and its literature for enlightening and inspiring discussions on Urdu and Urdu literature's past, present and future. All presentations will be aimed not only at fellow scholars but at students of comparative literature and of South Asia generally. The keynote speech is by the renowned critic, poet and novelist Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. In addition to a full day of academic panels the University also hosts an informal evening of poetry and a reading by S R Faruqi from his recent novel Kai chand the sar-e asman, in both Urdu and English.

"Queering the Arabic Novel"

Friday, 17 October 2008
3:00 - 5:00 pm
Shea House 211

Abstract

Hanadi al-Samman's curriculum vitae

DAVID GROSSMAN
An Evening with the Author and his Works

Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Harrison Institute / Small Library
6:00 - 8:00 pm

More information about David Grossman's talk

Born in Jerusalem in 1954, David Grossman is the author of six internationally acclaimed novels, including Someone to Run With, Be My Knife, The Book of Intimate Grammar, and See Under: Love. He is also the author of several powerful and important works of nonfiction, including Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel and The Yellow Wind. For his work, which has been translated into 25 languages, Grossman has been presented with numerous awards, including Chevalier de l'Ordre des Artes et des Lettres (France), Valumbrosa Prize (Italy), Prix Eliette Von Karajan (Austria), Premio Grinzane (Italy), Vittorio de Sica Prize (Italy), the Buxtehuder Bulle (Germany), and the Sapir Prize (Israel). In 2007, he was awarded both the EMET Prize and the Rome Peace Prize. Grossman lives near Jerusalem with his family.

"The Role of Place in Halide Edib's Inside India"

Friday, 30 January 2009
3:00 - 5:00 pm
Shea House 211

More information about Roberta Micallef

Roberta Micallef received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from The University of Texas in Austin in 1997. She has since taught Turkish Language and Culture courses as well as Women’s studies courses at Uppsala University (1997-2000), at the University of Utah (2000-2005) and Boston University since accepting a position as Assistant Professor of Turkish in the summer of 2005. She has published several articles in Turkish studies and gender studies. She is currently working on an article about Turkish women political prisoners and she is working on an collection of articles about 19th and 20th century Middle Eastern travel narratives. She is also an active member of the Turkish language teaching community. She is among the first group to receive ACTFL training toward Turkish oral proficiency testing and she received a summer grant to work on a Turkish language teaching aide.

Etgar Keret:
An Evening with the Author and his Works

Thursday, 19 March 2009
6:00 pm
South Meeting Room, Newcomb Hall

Etgar Keret will be reading from his collection of short stories, The Girl on the Fridge.

More information about Etgar Keret's talk

Etgar Keret was born in Ramat Gan, Israel. He lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, Shira Geffen, and their son, Lev. He is a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva and Tel Aviv University.

Keret's first published work was Tzinorot (Pipelines, 1992), a collection of short stories which was generally ignored. In 1993 he won the first prize in the Alternative Theater Festival in Akko for Entebbe: A Musical which he wrote with Jonathan Bar Giora. His second book, Ga'aguai Le'Kissinger (Missing Kissinger, 1994), a collection of fifty very short stories, caught the attention of the general public. His short story "Siren", which deals with the paradoxes of modern Israeli society, is included in the curriculum for the Israeli bagrut examination in literature.

Keret has co-authored several comic books, among them Lo Banu Lehenot (Nobody Said It Was Going to Be Fun, 1996) with Rutu Modan and Simtaot Hazaam (Streets of Fury, 1997) with Asaf Hanuka. In 1999 five of his stories were translated into English, and adapted into "graphic novellas" under the joint title Jetlag. The illustrators were the five members of the Actus Tragicus collective.

In 1998 Keret published Ha'Keytana Shel Kneller (Kneller's Happy Campers), a collection of short stories. The title story, the longest in the collection, follows a young man who commits suicide and goes on a quest for love in the afterlife. It appears in the English language collection of Keret's stories The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories (2004) and was also adapted into the graphic novel Pizzeria Kamikaze (2006), with illustrations by Asaf Hanuka. The story was also adapted by director Goran Dukic into a feature-length film called Wristcutters: A Love Story starring Patrick Fugit, Shannyn Sossamon, Tom Waits and Will Arnett. The film premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Keret's latest short story collection in Hebrew is Anihu (I-am-him, 2002). Keret also wrote a children's book Dad Runs Away with the Circus (2004), illustrated by Rutu Modan. Keret publishes some of his works on the Hebrew-language web site "Bimah Hadashah" (New Stage). (from Wikipedia entry)

Yaron Shemer (University of North Carolina)

Yaron Shemer was born in Jerusalem, Israel.  He entered the Film-Television program at Tel Aviv University, Israel, in 1980 and earned the degree of Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1983.  Upon the completion of his degree, he was employed as an assistant director at the Israeli Educational Television in Tel Aviv.  In 1986 he entered the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin and earned his degree of Masters of Arts in August 1991.  He began his doctoral program in Radio-Television-Film with a doctoral portfolio in Cultural Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in 2001 and received his Ph.D. in 2005.

Yaron Shemer is an Assistant professor of Israeli culture and modern Hebrew at The University of North Carolina, which he joined last fall.   From 1991 to 2008 Yaron Shemer taught at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  He has recently published several articles on contemporary Mizrahi cinema and is completing his book manuscript on that topic. Yaron Shemer has produced and directed films in Israel, Poland, and the United States.  Among the documentary films he directed are Dancing Braille (1983), Pilgrimage of Remembrance: The Jews of Poland (1991), The Road to Peace: Israelis and Palestinians (1995), and Agua for Life (2008).  He has curated film festivals in Texas and Wisconsin and has given public talks on Israeli cinema and society at universities and organizations in the United States and Mexico.

More information about Yaron Shemer

"Reading and Misreading Iranian Women in the US"

Friday, 3 April 2009
3:00 - 5:00 pm
Shea House 211

More information about Farzaneh Milani

In "'Reading and Misreading Iranian Women in the U.S.," I consider the birth in the U.S. of a new literary subgenre - Hostage
Narrative - and the portrayal of Iranian women as the ultimate prisoners in a giant gulag the size of Iran. Hostage narratives, I argue, generalize and simplify, flatten and fix, rather than specify and expand.  They present women in the role of victims and effectively dismiss their contributions to Iranian culture in favor of a master narrative of oppression and irrelevance, of entrapment and imprisonment.  Intentionally or not, they perpetuate a legacy of silence and insignificance where there is a resolute struggle for freedom and expression.  I examine the allure of captivity as a literary theme and the explosion of life narratives written in English and addressed to a Western audience in which the figure of the Iranian Woman is represented as the victim of an immobilizing faith, the captive of a multi-generational army of male prison guards.

"The Place of Media in the Arabic Curriculum ."

Friday, 17 April 2009
3:00 - 5:00 pm
Shea House 211

More information about Mahmoud Abdalla