UPCOMING EVENTS 2025-2026
To stay abreast of news and developments at UC Santa Cruz related to CMENA, please subscribe to our CMENA 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.
October 6th | Falafel Welcome Lunch
November 13th | Decolonizing Surfing: A View From Morocco
Selected Events, 2024-2025
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.