Date: Monday, October 28

Time: 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM

Location: Knox Hall, Room 509

Join us for a discussion with novelist and translator Salar Abdoh on how English-language works and translations shape our understanding of Persophone cultures, particularly in Iran and Afghanistan. Abdoh will explore the complexities of representing gendered life worlds and the politics of translation, as well as emerging literary genres from West and Central Asia.

Date: Thursday, October 24

Time: 6:10 PM - 8:00 PM

Location: Knox Hall, Room 208

Join Nathaniel Mathews, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at SUNY-Binghamton, for a discussion on his first book Zanzibar Was a Country. The book explores Zanzibar's fight for independence, the experiences of its postcolonial diasporas, and the intertwined histories of Zanzibar and Oman.

Date: Wednesday, September 18

Time: 6:00 - 7:30 PM

Location: East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

Join Susan Slyomovics to discuss her book, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria's French Colonial Heritage  

"Statuomania" overtook Algeria beginning in the nineteenth century as the French affinity for monuments placed thousands of war memorials across the French colony. But following Algeria's hard-fought independence in 1962, these monuments took on different meaning and some were "repatriated" to France, legally or clandestinely. Today, in both Algeria and France, people are moving and removing, vandalizing and preserving this contested, yet shared monumental heritage. 

In her book, Susan Slyomovics follows the afterlives of French-built war memorials in Algeria and those taken to France. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews in both countries, she analyzes the colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm of these works of art. Her book offers a fresh aesthetic take on the increasingly global move to fell monuments that celebrate settler colonial histories.