Book talk and conversation with award-winning Syrian novelist Shahla Ujayli, author of "A Sky So Close to Us" and "Summer with the Enemy," both shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Joining the discussion to talk about her work and challenges of translating Arabic literature will be translator Michelle Hartman, Professor of Arabic Literature at McGill University.

In the words of Shahla Ujayli: “Writing about war means writing about oneself—the harsh fate of the family, the home, the special places, and memories. But writing about your place at war is a great challenge, since you find the whole world talking about your house, slums, and city, yet no one who debated its fate had ever visited it or known it before the war. They talk about strange, complicated, fantastic things, and you find yourself writing novels to tell them that only you know the truth.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
SHAHLA UJAYLI is a Syrian writer, born in 1976. She holds a doctorate in Modern Arabic Literature and Cultural Studies from Aleppo University in Syria and is currently a professor of Modern Arabic Literature at the University of Aleppo and the American University in Madaba, Jordan. She is the author of two short-story collections The Mashrabiyya (2005) and The Bed of the King’s Daughter (2017), winner of Al Multaqa Prize, and four novels: The Cat’s Eye (2006), winner of the Jordan State Award for Literature; Persian Carpet (2013); A Sky So Close to Us, shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (Interlink, 2016); and Summer with the Enemy, shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (Interlink, 2018). She has also published a number of critical studies, including The Syrian Novel: Experimentalism and Theoretical Categories (2009), Cultural Particularity in the Arabic Novel (2011) and Mirror of Strangeness: Articles on Cultural Criticism (2006).

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR:
MICHELLE HARTMAN is a professor of Arabic Literature at McGill University and literary translator of fiction, based in Montreal. She has written extensively on women’s writing and the politics of language use and translation and literary solidarities. She is the translator of several works from Arabic, including Asmaa Alatawna’s A Long Walk from Gaza, Radwa Ashour’s memoir The Journey, Iman Humaydan’s novels Wild Mulberries and Other Lives, Jana Elhassan’s IPAF shortlisted novels The Ninety-Ninth Floor and All the Women inside Me, Alexandra Chreiteh’s novels Always Coca Cola and Ali and His Russian Mother as well as Shahla Ujayli’s IPAF shortlisted novels A Sky So Close to Us and Summer with the Enemy.

Lecture Sponsored by:

Department of Near Eastern Studies

Cosponsors:

Department of Literatures in English

Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) initiative and Migrations Program

Society for the Humanities

Institute for Comparative Modernities

The Cornell China Center, through Global Cornell and its Global Hubs initiative, is offering faculty research grants for collaboration with Zhejiang University (ZJU).

Global Hubs collaborative research seed grants bring together Cornell and partner institution faculty to develop joint projects with the potential to create new or expanded research partnerships and cutting-edge scholarship with academic and societal impact. These international seed grants provide initial financial support for early-stage research projects or capacity-building efforts to create and sustain long-term collaborations and secure external funding.

Please join us on September 18, 11:00-11:45 a.m. EDT for a joint info session to learn more about the ZJU-Cornell grant opportunity. A short presentation will be followed by time for Q&A.

Up to four (4) research proposals will be funded. Each successful proposal may receive up to $20,000 from Cornell (for Cornell expenses) and up to CNY 150,000 from ZJU (for ZJU expenses), with each university funding its own side of the project budget it its own currency.Application deadline: October 14, 11:59 p.m. EDT Project duration: January 1–December 31, 2025Register for the Cornell faculty info session on Zoom.View the grant RFP and application form here.The grant RFA and application links will be provided here shortly when available.

Learn about additional seed grants available with other Global Hubs partners.

In a seminal conference, Southeast Asian language instructors from across the country will gather to celebrate the successes of the Southeast Asian Language Council (SEALC), and to plan for the future of Southeast Asian language instruction.

For further details and a full program of the weekend's events, visit the SEALC website.

Organized by the Southeast Asian Language Council (SEALC), hosted by the Cornell University

Southeast Asia Program (SEAP), and co-sponsored by Cornell Language Resource Center (LRC) and the Cornell Department of Linguistics.

A Conversation with Nathan Thrall Abed Salama's world is turned upside down when he hears that his five-year-old son's school bus has collided with a semitrailer. Frantically, he tries to reach the site. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy explores one man's journey in navigating the bureaucratic, governmental and military obstacles for Palestinians in Jerusalem as he searches for his young son. Along the way, Salama encounters a wide cast of characters whose personal and political histories become interwoven with his own. Jerusalem based author Nathan Thrall will read from his book and be in conversation with Professor Mostafa Minawi. Nathan Thrall received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. He is also the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Guardian, London Review of Books, and New York Review of Books and been translated into more than two dozen languages. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College. Part of the Palestinian Studies Speaker Series *** Sponsors: Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) initiative, with support from Near Eastern Studies, Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Government, History, Jewish Studies, Institute for Comparative Modernities, and Society for the Humanities.

Institute for African Development weekly seminar series examines a broad range of critical concerns in contemporary Africa including food production, human resource development, migration, urbanization, environmental resource management, economic growth, and policy guidance. The weekly presentations are made by invited specialists.

Examines a broad range of critical concerns in contemporary Africa including food production, human resource development, migration, urbanization, environmental resource management, economic growth, and policy guidance. The weekly presentations are made by invited specialists. Students write weekly memos about the talks. Graduate students (CRP 6770/GDEV 6770) facilitate one seminar question period.

The IAD seminar series examines a broad range of critical concerns in contemporary Africa including food production, human resource development, migration, urbanization, environmental resource management, economic growth, and policy guidance. The weekly presentations are made by invited specialists.

Rebecca Upton, Professor of Global Public and Environmental Health, Africana and Latin American Studies at Colgate University, is a medical anthropologist and global health scholar with research focused in southern Africa on issues of gender, migration, reproductive health and the implications of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

LACS Public Issues Forum

Co-sponsored by Cornell Cinema, Literatures in English and Creative Writing, History of Art and Visual Studies, Performance and Media Arts, Romance Studies, and Society of the Humanities

Chile ’73: Fifty Years Later
Machuca follows the lives, over the course of a school year in 1972/73, of two young schoolboys in Santiago, Chile. One is from an upper-middle-class family; the other from a working-class family. Both attend the private boys school St. Patrick’s, whose principal seeks reduce the class segregation typical to Chile at the time and to follow the lead of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government. The story follows the boys’ friendship and its relationship to the politics of the time, including the growing tensions in the city around Allende’s government and the right-wing reaction that would eventually result in a coup d’etat on September 11, 1973. Based on a screenplay written by Roberto Brodsky and director Andrés Wood whose own experiences mirror those of the protagonists, Machuca was released to wide acclaim in 2004. For the 20th anniversary of its release, this screening will include a talkback after the film with writer Roberto Brodsky.

Additional details can be found on the Cornell Cinema site.