UPCOMING EVENTS 2025-2026
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January 16th | Hicham Alaoui: Pacted Democracy in the Middle East
The talk will be from 3-5pm in Humanities 1, room 210. A reception will follow. This talk is co-sponsored by the Politics Department.
Join us for a book talk by Dr. Hicham Alaoui in which he will deliver insights about the battle for democracy in the Middle East, drawing upon his recent book, Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave, 2022), also available in French (Le Cherche Midi, 2024) and Arabic (Dar Saqi, 2025). Reflecting an ongoing research agenda, the book provides a novel framework for imagining how democratic politics can emerge from social conflicts waged over religion and Islamism in the public sphere. Contrasting cases like Tunisia, Egypt, and other regional countries, it further illuminates the novel and oft-ignored connections between secular opposition, theological identity, and authoritarian rule in the Arab world.
January 26th | Lisa Wedeen: Whose Dialectic? Thinking with Fanon, Žižek, and Al-Attar
This talk begins with a question inspired by the work of the anthropologist David Scott, as to whether radical social transformation can remain a credible historical possibility if it is not undergirded by a belief in teleology. Does collectively willed transformation—the kind to which leftist and anticolonial movements have traditionally aspired—become unthinkable absent some degree of confidence in the arc of History bending toward social amelioration on its own? And if not, how do we begin adjudicating what counts as an emancipatory politics today? Put another way, this talk searches for forms that political hope might take in the disappointing and exhausted ruins of our postcolonial and post-socialist present. It approaches answers to these questions by examining a core concept in key narratives of leftist collective transformation, that is, by exploring anew the promise and limitations of “the dialectic.” It puts Frantz Fanon and Slavoj Žižek into conversation with the playwright Mohammad Al Attar, whose play While I Was Waiting not only shows us the dialectic in action, but in so doing offers a compelling approach to political transformation in the present. This talk will be hybrid and you can register here.
January 29th | Fanon in Documentary Film: Algerian Legacies
Marking the centenary of Frantz Fanon’s birth, the Center for Middle East and North Africa is hosting a film screening of True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, the recent film by Algerian director Abdenour Zahzah that focuses on his time in the psychiatric hospital in Blida, Algeria. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Meryem Belkaïd (Bowdoin College), Isaac Julien (UCSC), and Mark Nash (UCSC) on the representation of Fanon’s work and life in film, from Julien and Nash’s classic 1998 documentary, Black Skin White Masks, to more recent films that focus on how Fanon’s time in Algeria shaped his intellectual and political commitments.
January 30th | Maghreb Workshop Featuring Susan Slyomovics
This workshop will bring together over a dozen scholars from the UC-system who research the Maghreb to share their work and exchange ideas. It is designed as a way of maintaining the rich network of expertise on this region found on the west coast.
In addition to thematic panels, Susan Slyomovics (UCLA) will be presenting on her recently published work, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria’s French Colonial Heritage (Stanford University Press, 2024).
Selected Past Events, 2024-2026
May 23rd | Raï Concert at Woodhouse Brewery featuring Fella Oudane
CMENA Mailing List
To stay abreast of news and developments at UC Santa Cruz related to CMENA, please subscribe to our mailing list.
If you are interested in events related to the Humanities more broadly, please visit the homepage of The Humanities Institute and scroll down to sign up for their mailing list.
Past Events
Dr. Persis Karim, SCREENING OF “The Dawn Is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life”
February 3rd, 2025.
Leila Shereen Sakr, “Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives”
April 11th, 2024.
Vladimir Hamed-Tryansky, “Refugee Migration in the Ottoman Middle East?
March 7th, 2024.
Reza Aslan, “An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville”
January 25th, 2024. Co-sponsored with The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
Roxanne Euben, “The Power of Humiliation: Rhetoric, Retaliation, Resistance”
May 31st, 2023. Co-sponsored with the Department of Politics.
Alev Çinar, “The Predicament of Islamic Decoloniality in Turkey”
May 2nd, 2023. Sponsored by the Department of the History of Consciousness.
Max Weiss, “Revolutions Aesthetic”
April 17th, 2023. Co-sponsored by the Research Cluster “Vernaculars of Travel in South Asia and the Middle East.”
Eliane Raheb, “Miguel’s War” (film showing)
March 8th, 2023. Co-sponsored by the Department of Film and Digital Media.
Liora Halpern, “The Oldest Guard: Landowners, Local Memory, and the Making of Zionist Settler Past”
January 20, 2023. Sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies.
Workshop, “Post-Colonial Arab Thought”
April 19th and 20th, 2024.
Lisa Hajjar, “Gaza Is a Crime Scene”
February 29th, 2024. Co-sponsored with the Departments of Politics and Sociology.
Mohamed Abdelaziz, “Photogrammetry and Computer Graphics in Archaeology”
February 28th, 2024.
Benoît Challand, “Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprising”
May 25th, 2023. Co-sponsored with the Department of Sociology.
Christopher Silver, “Recording History”
April 26th, 2023. Sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies and the Center for Cultural Studies.
Mohamed Hamed, “Arabic Language Resources in the UC System and Beyond”
March 16th, 2023. Sponsored by the Arabic Colloquium and funded by the UC Humanities Network.
Tarek El-Ariss, “The Fallen Note: A Journey to the Birthplace of the Image”
March 1st, 2023. Co-sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies.
On February 4th, 2020, the Center for the Middle East and North Africa welcomed veteran journalists Hannah Allam and Leila Fadel to the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in downtown Santa Cruz. CMENA Founding Director Jennifer Derr engaged them in a wide-ranging conversation about their experiences reporting the war in Iraq, the Arab Spring, on issues related to American Muslim communities, and the future of investigative journalism at home and abroad. This event celebrated the launch of CMENA and was part of The Humanities Institute‘s “Questions that Matter” series.