Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Life, Sovereignty, and the Political: Towards a Middle Eastern Global History
2014-02-19 00:00 (America/Denver) | CA
AbstractWith one of the latest turns in historiography, it seems that documents as quintessentially national as the American Declaration of Independence can have a global history. This is indeed an exciting prospect, and the distinguished historian David Armitage encourages us all to become global historians if we are to remain relevant. In my first book, Working Out Egypt, I tried to do something to that effect before having
read Armitage, situating what I called effendi masculinity within a set of emerging global practices and discourses around gender, sexuality, the body, desire, and national identity. It seems to me that scholars of gender and sexuality were at the forefront of claiming a global canvas for their work. Of course one could also make a good case for scholars of Islam such as Marshall Hodgson and Richard Eaton. What animates my current project, of which I give an overview in this talk, is a certain anxiety about the kinds of themes deemed globally significant in the recent scholarship. Thus, I consider how some of the basic building blocks of our modern world—life, sovereignty, and the political—appeared through the lens of a nineteenth-century Sufi, Sayyid Fadl b. Alawi, as a step towards imagining a Middle Eastern global history.

“The Recovery of Nazi-Looted Art: The Bloch-Bauer Klimt Paintings”
2014-02-20 00:00
Los Angeles attorney specializing in recovery of property stolen by the Nazis responsible for the landmark Supreme Court case returning Gustav Klimt paintings–valued at $325 million–to their rightful heir.
The Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies at UC Santa Barbara, a program
of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, is cosponsored by UCSB Arts and Lectures, Department of Religious Studies,
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Jewish Federation of Greater Santa Barbara, and Santa Barbara Hillel.
hm 1/6/14
