AIS participation at Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, 2015

Several AIS graduate students and faculty participated in the Middle East Studies Association’s annual meeting, which took place from November 21-24, 2015, in Denver, Colorado.

Marya Hannun organized and presented a paper on the panel Sharia in Flux: Islamic Divorce and the Modern State. Her paper, “Islamic Law in US Courts: Sites of Collision or Conformity?” examined a number of instances in which Islamic law is brought to bear in US court cases. Anny Gaul chaired the panel, and Georgetown professor Judith Tucker was the discussant.

Anny Gaul presented a paper on the panel The View from the Edge: Decentered Histories of Modern Egypt, exploring several canonical Egyptian cookbooks from the 1930s and 40s and tracing key recipes – macarona bechamel and ful mudammas – as they were incorporated into Egyptian national cuisine via print culture.

Pamela Klasova presented a paper titled “Poets on the periphery: tajmīr and taʿarrub in Umayyad poetry” for the panel Reading Islamic Texts: Law, Biography, and Social History. Her paper focused on the poetry of two groups of poets on the margins of society in the Umayyad age. Both groups – one geographically marginal, one socially – shared a yearning to return to Bedouin life, but responded to their estrangement in different ways.

AIS professor Elliott Colla served as the discussant for the panel The Politics of Parody: Satire, Comedy, and Contestation in Arabic Literature and Culture.