This lecture revisits a few themes in Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine (Cambridge 2022) given the contemporary historical moment. It considers legal dimensions of abortion in Islamic jurisprudence and in laws operable in Palestine from the British colonial period to the present; the continuing hyperbolization and targeting of Palestinian sexual and reproductive life; and contemporary sexual and reproductive healthcare for Palestinians, including abortion access, under colonization and genocide. Palestinians continue to recognize that their futurity depends less on the biological reproduction of specific families than reproduction of generations of collective memory and resistance, a reality that has intensified since 2023.

Please join Prof. Houri Berberian and Prof. Talinn Grigor, where they offer the first history of Armenian women in modern Iran.

In Remnants, tattooed and scar-bearing bodies reveal a larger history, as the lived trauma of genocide is understood through bodies, skin, and—in what remains of those lives a century afterward—bones. Gathering individual memories and archival fragments of women survivors, Elyse Semerdjian offers a feminist interpretation of the Armenian Genocide, and issues a call to break open the archival record in order to embrace affect and memory.

This talk will be about how South Asian Muslim women used food in their travel writings to distinguish between self and other, shedding light on the role of alimentary identities in shaping colonialism, postcoloniality, nationalism, and globalization.

This talk, as part of the McMillan Stewart Lecture Series, will survey the broad ways that gender plays a role in food traditions within the Coptic Orthodox Christian community, both in Egypt and in diasporic contexts. Please join us on April 27 at 5pm in 14E-304.