UC Berkeley CMES

🎼 Don’t miss "No Lines in the Sea," a special concert with internationally acclaimed vocalist, composer, and bandleader Elana Sasson. Joined by Queralt Giralt on cello and Bahar Badiei on oud, this powerhouse trio explores themes from the current exhibition, "Flowing through Time and Tradition," through an immersive musical lens. From the mountains of Kurdistan to the shores of the Mediterranean, the ensemble performs ten songs in seven languages, including four original compositions. Together, they trace routes of exile, memory, and belonging, casting water as a universal symbol of hope, survival, and celebration. 🗓 Thursday, April 16, 2026 | 5:30–7:00 pm 📍 Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Downtown Berkeley 🎟 Tickets: General: $30 (Use code EarlyB5 for $5 off!) Students & Museums For All: $5 🔗 Use the QR code or find the link for more info and to buy your tickets in @themagnes profile linktree Presented in partnership with UC Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies and Center for Middle Eastern Studies. #NoLinesInTheSea #ElanaSasson #WorldMusic #BerkeleyEvents #LiveMusic #TheMagnes #UCBerkeley #PersianMusic #KurdishMusic #Cello #Oud #DowntownBerkeley #VisitBerkeley @elanasasson @queraltgiralt @baharbadiei @ucb_cjs @ucberkeley_cmes_ @ucberkeleymusic @ucberkeleyofficial @berkeleyartshumanities @berkeleyhillel @dwntwnberkeley

🚨EMERGENCY WEBINAR | The War on Iran After the Gaza Genocide: A Regional Analysis🚨 Join us on March 09 for an emergency webinar titled “The War on Iran after the Gaza Genocide: A Regional Analysis.” This webinar brings together leading scholars from the region to discuss the rapidly escalating war in the Middle East, examine the historical antecedents to the ongoing crisis, and discuss the humanitarian and geopolitical ramifications of this war. 🗓️ Monday, 03/09/2026 ⏰ 9AM Pacific / 12PM Eastern / 5PM GMT / 7PM Ramallah 🔗 bit.ly/BerkeleyWebinar or link in bio 📣 Open to the public The online session features contributions from: Minoo Moallem (Director of the Iranian Studies Program, UC Berkeley), Karim Makdisi (Founding Director of the Program in Public Policy and International Affairs, American University of Beirut), Maryam Al-Kuwari (Director of the Gulf Studies Center, Qatar University), Abdel Razzaq Takriti (Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair in Arab Studies, Rice University), and is moderated by Ussama Makdisi (Palestinian & Arab Studies Program Director, UC Berkeley) This public webinar is cosponsored by UC Berkeley’s Iranian Studies Program and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. For more information, please contact [email protected]

Join us for a timely lecture on Palestinian woman incarcerated in Israeli prisons titled “Sumud Behind Bars: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Everyday Resistance” by Dr. Samah Saleh. 🗓️ Thursday, March 05, 206 ⏰ 2:30-4:00 PM 📍CMES Sultan Room, 340 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley 🔗 Register via QR code or link in bio! Dr. Samah Saleh a Visiting Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and an Assistant Professor at An-Najah National University in Palestine. Her research examines Palestinian women’s experiences of imprisonment within Israeli colonial carceral systems, engaging feminist theory, carceral geography, and decolonial scholarship. Cosponsors: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies Department, Gender Equity Resource Center (GenEq)

Lecture | “My Work Is My Autobiography”: Shamlou at 100. Poetry, witness, and the work of translation 🗓️ Wednesday, February 25 ⏰ 4:00 P.M. 📍 340 Stephens Hall * Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000), often called Iran’s “Master Poet of Liberty,” was a foundational modernist who helped usher free verse into Persian poetry while bearing witness to Iran’s turbulent twentieth century. This talk introduces Shamlou’s life and work through Elegies of the Earth: Selected Poems by Ahmad Shamlou (World Poetry Books, 2025), a landmark bilingual centennial volume edited and translated by Niloufar Talebi. Framing Shamlou as a poet-witness, Talebi explores how his body of work operates as a lived historical conscience, unfolding in dialogue with Iran’s political history and cultural shifts. She also reflects on her translation as a public-facing practice that extends beyond the page through contextual framing, performance, and cross-media work, including her Shamlou-inspired opera Abraham in Flames. The presentation will include bilingual readings and archival material, and will consider translation as a form of cultural mediation and historical recovery.

Film Screening & Discussion | 3 x 13 🗓️ Monday, February 23 ⏰ 4:00 P.M. 📍 340 Stephens Hall * Produced by Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre and co-created by award-winning director Eimi Imanishi and choreographer Samar Haddad King, 3 x 13 explores the singularity of the individual and the universality of the human experience. In 12 short films with original music by Lou Tides, 12 artists from around the globe share a journey of transformation that deeply marked their lives. The work culminates in an interactive 13th film that unites all 12 journeys in a virtual ensemble that invites audiences to chart their own course across 5 languages and 8 countries: Cuba, Egypt, France, Mali, Mexico, Palestine, South Korea, and the US.

Please join the Palestinian & Arab Studies Program on Tuesday, February 10, for a public lecture titled “Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class” featuring Dr. Stacy Fahrenthold! 🗓️ Tuesday, February 10, 2026 ⏰ 5:00 - 6:30 PM 📍 370 Dwinelle Hall (Level F/G), University of California Berkeley 🔗 Register via QR code or link in bio! Histories of Arab America often begin with the Syrian merchant peddler, a historical ‘main character’ whose commercial prowess seems to explain the immigrant community’s upward economic mobility through the twentieth century. In this talk, Stacy Fahrenthold explores the consequences of assuming the Syrian mahjar (diaspora) lacks an industrial past. Pursuing the stories of textile workers as they organized across the Arab Atlantic, Fahrenthold introduces us to alternative narrators: union activists who led street demonstrations, women who shut down kimono factories, child laborers who threw snowballs at police, and the merchant capitalists who contended with all of them. Stacy D. Fahrenthold is Professor of History and Middle East/South Asia Studies at the University of California Davis. Her research focuses on Middle Eastern migration, transnational social movements, and the endurance of ties between Arab American diasporas and modern Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. At UC Davis, she offers courses in global migration, diasporas, and refugee histories. In addition to Unmentionables, she is the author of Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2019). She is Associate Editor of Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration. Cosponsored by @ucberkeley_cmes_ @ucberkeleyhistory This in person event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact [email protected]

Ekin Öyken | Latin in an Uncharted Territory: A Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Dragoman and the Latin Self-translation of His Islamic World 🗓️ Tuesday, February 10 ⏰ 4:00 P.M. 📍 340 Stephens Hall * Sixteenth-century Ottoman translator Murad bin Abdullah (1509 – c. 1585) may, at first glance, appear to be one of those who converted to Islam in order to escape the treatment they endured as slaves after being brought to Ottoman lands as captives. However, his lengthy treatise Tesviyetü’t-teveccüh ilel-Hakk[Turning/Directing One’s Face Toward God], which will be presented in this talk from the viewpoint of translation history, suggests that Murad Bey’s attitude toward Islam may have been genuine. Tesviye is an unpublished and therefore relatively unknown bilingual text in Ottoman Turkish and Latin. As its title suggests, it is a theological work akin to religious manuals, on the one hand, and to the confessional literature on the other. It differs, however, with its elaborate comparison of Christianity and Islam, and its Sufism elements. The author, whose real name was Balázs Somlyai, was a prisoner of war of Hungarian or Transylvanian origin who was brought to the Ottoman capital in his youth, later converted to Islam there and, as the autobiographical section at the end of the work informs us, became a chief Latin translator of the palace. Written to invite Christians to conversion, the work was completed in 1557 and translated into Latin ten years later by the author, who expected it to be widely read in Europe. However, the paucity of its extant manuscripts and references to it suggests that this was never fulfilled. * Visit our events page here: https://events.berkeley.edu/cmes

FILM SCREENING This upcoming Wednesday, February 4th, The Center for Middle Eastern Studies will be screening The Voice of Hind Rajab from 5-7PM at Eugene Jarvis Auditorium # 103, located in the Grimes Engineering Center at UC Berkeley. On January 29, 2024, Red Crescent volunteers received an emergency call. A 5-year-old girl trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue. While trying to keep her on the line, they did everything they could to get an ambulance to her. Her name was Hind Rajab. Blending real emergency call recordings with narrative story structure, the film follows the Red Crescent dispatchers who fight against time and impossible barriers to reach her. Registration for the screening is required, you can register through the QR code or at bit.ly/4qTVpiQ. You can also visit the CMES event page here: https://events.berkeley.edu/cmes

Join the Palestinian and Arab Studies Program and the ASUC MEMSSA office on Feb. 6th for a pressing Know Your Rights Training with Palestine Legal. RSVP with the link below, refreshments will be provided. See you there! /palestinelegalkyr

Contesting Pluralism(s): How to learn from Turkey and “Non-Western” Cases 🗓️ 12 February 🕛 Noon 📍201 Philosophy Hall As the liberal international order weakens, anti-pluralist leaders and movements seek to capture states & societies. At the same time, more (and less) vigorous coalitions for open societies are challenging the global, anti-pluralist turn. This pattern involves multiple actors, norms, pressures and processes which can and should be compared to better understand this acute global challenge. Nora Fisher-Onar’s new book Contesting Pluralism(s): Islamism, Liberalism and Nationalism in Turkey and Beyond does so via original framework that puts comparative politics / area studies into conversation with complexity thinking The product is a dramatic re-reading of a pivotal country’s political history and present which demystifies Orientalism or the view that what happens “over there” can’t happen here. It thus offers a timely toolkit to probe the intersection everywhere of political religion, populism and democratic decline. 🔗Register for this event on our website https://events.berkeley.edu/ies/event/315104-nora-fisher-onar-contesting-pluralisms-how-to

Join us for an exclusive screening of Ojalá Supieras (I Wish You Knew) followed by a discussion and Q&A with the film’s director and producer, Dr. Mariam Saada! Ojalá Supieras is an immersive documentary that recovers the marginalized history of Islam in colonial Mexico. Using unpublished manuscripts, inquisitorial trials, and carefully reconstructed visual representations, the film reveals the silenced voices of people accused of crypto-Islam and persecuted for their faith. This work challenges the traditional historical narrative and shows how diverse communities—Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Indigenous—formed part of the cultural foundation of Viceregal Mexico. Ojalá Supieras invites the public to rethink historical memory and to recognize the traces that still remain in our contemporary identity. Dinner will be served! RSVP here: /1naf0a2j

Please join the Palestinian & Arab Studies Program on Monday, 02/02 for a book talk of "Race and the Question of Palestine" featuring co-editor Lana Tatour in conversation with Rhetoric professor Samera Esmeir 🗓️ Monday, February 02, 2026 ⏰ 5:00 - 6:30 PM 📍 370 Dwinelle Hall (Level F/G), University of California Berkeley 🔗 Register via QR code or link in bio! 📚 Book copies will be available for purchase Race and the Question of Palestine explores how race operates as a technology of power and colonial rule, a political and economic structure, a set of legal and discursive practices, and a classificatory system. Offering a wide-ranging set of essays by historians, legal scholars, political scientists, sociologists, literary scholars, and race critical theorists, this collection illuminates how race should be understood in terms of its political work, and not as an identity category interchangeable with ethnicity, culture, or nationalism. Lana Tatour is a Senior Lecturer in Global Development at the University of New South Wales. She is a scholar of settler colonialism, indigeneity, race, and citizenship, with a focus on Palestine. Her coedited book, Race and the Question of Palestine was published in 2025 with Stanford University Press. She is currently completing her monograph, Colonized Citizens: Liberalism, Settler Colonialism, and Palestinian resistance. Lana is also a public commentator. She has appeared on ABC News, the BBC, and TRT World, and her publications have appeared in The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, The Age, Overland, and more. Cosponsored by @ucberkeley_cmes_ @ucberkeleyhistory & @crgberkeley This in person event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact [email protected]