Teaching Palestine Today Episode 1:
Liberal Arts Context
Featuring:
Lara Deeb
Heather Ferguson
Amanda Lagji
Leila Mansouri
Moderator:
Bassam Haddad
Wednesday, 26 March, 2025 | 2:00PM EST
Watch Here:
Youtube.com/Jadaliyya
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Join our first session of “Teaching Palestine Today” series. This session addresses the “Liberal Arts Context,” with Lara Deeb, Heather Ferguson, Amanda Lagji, and Leila Mansouri, moderated by Bassam Haddad.
Four faculty members at the Claremont Colleges, a liberal arts consortium, discuss their approaches to including material on Palestine and Palestinian perspectives into classes in anthropology, history, postcolonial and decolonial literature, and creative writing. Topics addressed include classroom approaches, syllabi scaffolding, and strategies for building support beyond the classroom.
This series is organized by the Gaza in Context Project and National Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, with more than 140 chapters nationwide.
Featuring
Lara Deeb is Professor of Anthropology and MENA Studies at Scripps College. She has published widely on Lebanon, especially in relation to gender, Shi'ism, piety, youth, and Hizbullah, as well as on the politics of knowledge production in relation to the Middle East. Her most recent book is Love Across Difference: Mixed Marriage in Lebanon. She regularly incorporates material on Palestine into classes in anthropology and has taught a class called "Palestine Through Ethnography and Film" annually for the past decade.
Heather Ferguson is Associate Professor of Ottoman and Middle East History at Claremont McKenna College. Her research focuses on Ottoman imperial categories of difference and patterns of governance in the early modern context. Heather teaches surveys and seminars that span chronologies from the 7th to the 2lst centuries, and develops methods to help students assess violence associated with shifts from empire to nation-building.
Amanda Lagji is Associate Professor of English and World Literature at Pitzer College. Amanda researches and teaches on postcolonial and global Anglophone fiction, time, and terror. Her book, Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time: Waiting for Now (2022) was published by Edinburgh University Press. Recent courses include "Decolonial Futures" and "Terror and the Text."
Leila Mansouri is Associate Professor of English and Core Faculty in the American Studies Program at Scripps College. A fiction writer, essayist, and literary critic, her creative work focuses on the Iranian-American diaspora and has appeared in Mizna, The Offing, The Believer, and elsewhere. She also holds a PhD in American literature and publishes scholarship on race and the politics of representativeness in the early United States. Her courses include a mix of creative writing workshops and American literature
Bassam Haddad (Moderator) is Founding Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Magazine and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding the Syrian Calamity: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).