Global Middle East Studies Inaugural Annual Symposium

The Global Middle East Studies (GMES) invites to you our first Annual Symposium, a day of stimulating presentations and lively exchange that is critically oriented, historically attuned, and community-engaged. The symposium will highlight multi-disciplinary and emerging research, creative activities, and an interactive workshop led by UIC students, faculty, and guests. We look forward to coming together in a space of shared reflections and nourishment.

Symposium: 9:30 am - 5:00 pm

9:30                  Registration
10:00                Welcome by Nadine Naber
10:15 - 11:45    Coloniality, Identity, and Structures of Exclusion  /    Nostalgia, Visions of Modernity, and Governance

11:45 - 12:30   Lunch

12:30 - 1:45     KEYNOTE: Global Middle East Studies: New Directors and Threats to Scholarship, A Conversation with Norma Claire Moruzzi and Dima Khalidi

2:00 - 3:30      Technologies And Discourses Of Power and Policing   /   Interactive Skills Building Workshop – Experiences of Being Othered

3:30                 Break

3:45 - 5:00     Political Economic Transformations and Sovereignty   /   Gendering State and Imperial Violence

5:00 – 5:15     Closing by Zeina Zaatari

5:30 – 7:00    Our Stories Matter: A Celebration of Middle East Studies, Poetry, Music, and Awards

Join us for an evening to celebrate UIC's Global Middle East Studies Minor and to launch the anthology Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing from the Diaspora, with musician Rami Gabriel, and writers Layla Azmi Goushey, Joel Farran, Zeina Rousan, and Sahar Mustafah.

Art and Digital Display Exhibition all day.

Dima Khalidi is the founder and director of Palestine Legal. She oversees Palestine Legal’s array of legal and advocacy work to protect people speaking out for Palestinian freedom from attacks on their civil and constitutional rights. Prior to founding Palestine Legal in 2012, Dima worked with the Center for Constitutional Rights as a cooperating attorney on the Mamilla Cemetery Campaign, submitting a Petition to United Nations officials to stop the desecration of an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, and advocating on behalf of Palestinian descendants of individuals interred in the cemetery.  As a volunteer and Ella Baker intern at CCR, she also worked on numerous cases that sought to hold Israeli officials and corporations accountable for Israeli violations of international law, as well as on CCR’s Guantanamo Bay docket.  As a law student, she interned with the People’s Law Office in Chicago, assisting in the acquittal of Palestinian-American Muhammad Salah on major federal criminal charges. Dima has a JD from DePaul University College of Law, an MA in International and Comparative Legal Studies from the University of London – SOAS, and a BA in History and Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan.  Prior to studying law, Dima worked at Birzeit University, heading a research project on the role of informal justice mechanisms in the Palestinian legal system. Dima has advocated on Palestinian rights issues in media forums such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Hill, Democracy Now!, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, The Birmingham News, In These Times, Jacobin, NPR, Law and Disorder Radio, and KPFK's Middle East in Focus, among others.

Norma Claire Moruzzi received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Johns Hopkins University. She is Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender and Women’s Studies, with Affiliations in History and Art History, Director of the International Studies Program, and Co-Chair of the Middle East and Muslim Societies Cluster at UIC. She is an Associate Editor for the journal Iranian Studies, and a past chair and member of the editorial committee of the journal Middle East Report. Prof. Moruzzi’s research and teaching address the politics of social identity, with particular emphasis on the intersection of gender, religion, and nationalisms. Trained as a political and feminist theorist, she also makes use of archival and ethnographic methods in her scholarship and in the classroom. Her first book, Speaking through the Mask: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity (Cornell University Press: 2000) won the 2002 Gradiva Book Award. She has published on women’s and gender issues and cinema in Iran and the Middle East, as well as contemporary and historical issues of the politicized discourses of gender and identity in global context. From 1998-2008 she regularly conducted field-work in Iran, while also participating in and conducting workshops for women’s groups and contributing to local journals. Her book analyzing transformations in Iranian women’s lives since the 1979 Revolution, Tied Up in Tehran: Women, Social Change, and the Politics of Daily Life in Postrevolutionary Iran, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in Spring 2025.

Layla Azmi Goushey is a Professor of English in St. Louis, MO. She is also a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her creative work has been published in journals such as Yellow Medicine Review, Mizna, Sukoon, FIYAH, Strange Horizons, Anthology of Arab American Creative Non-Fiction, Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction (2024), HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US: Palestinian Poetry (2025) and other publications. She is the editor of Baladi Magazine.

Joel Farran elevates Palestinian voices to foster positive representation and advance just pursuits of self-determination through the power of narrative. In partnership with Cinephilia Productions, Farran is creating The Re-Collect, an Arab-futurist episodic series. He is also the Executive Producer of Discovering Tino, a feature documentary in development celebrating the 100-year mystique of Club Deportivo Palestino in Chile.

Zeina Rousan (she/her) is a Jordanian-Palestinian American writer, journalist, and Special Education Teacher. She writes screenplays and short stories focused on the meeting point between fiction, comedy, and memory. Inspired by her roots, Zeina's work is often grounded in themes of liberation and dreams.

Sahar Mustafah’s debut novel The Beauty of Your Face was named a 2020 Notable Book and Editor’s Choice by New York Times Book Review and was a finalist for the Palestine Book Award. Her most recent fiction is featured in The View from Gaza published by The Massachusetts Review, and her second novel is forthcoming this fall. Sahar writes and teaches outside of Chicago.

Rami Gabriel is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Columbia College Chicago. He is a multi-instrumentalist and composer. His main instruments are Electric and Acoustic Guitar, Oud, Buzuq, and Riqq. He draws from the Middle Eastern Classical Tarab tradition as well as popular and folk music from the region. Rami also plays in a range of American musical traditions including blues, jazz, country, soul, and rock n’ roll. He studied with Dr. Scott Marcus, Dr. Eric Ederer, Dr. Alfred Gemil (Cairo), Osama Zeadan (Cairo), Mehmet Bitmez (Istanbul), and Alfonso Ponticelli. He collaborates with Egyptian Percussionist, Karim Nagi, as The Arab Blues. He has performed in venues across the world including in Millennium Park, Disney Hall, World Music Festival, Chicago Cultural Center, and more.

Event is sponsored by the Arab American Cultural Center and the Institute for the Humanities