University of Pittsburgh

The Arab World has been framed in many diverging ways, often lacking the truth in identity. Over time, photographers have shared their own perspective, sometimes influenced by their own understanding of the culture. However, very few have immortalized or shared its true essence, helping the culture synthetically come to life through the simplest moments. This lack of an authentic eye has reached a turning point, opening possibilities for a new sense of collective memory and identity.

*Presented in partnership with the Middle East Center.

This installment of Conversations on Europe is in collaboration with the Jean Monnet in the USA Network #JMintheUS

For the 2021-22 academic year, the European Studies Center has announced its annual programmatic theme: “Recovering Europe.” Many of this year’s virtual roundtables will speak to this theme. In the Fall semester, sessions will explore economic and public health issues related to Europe’s recovery from the pandemic. In the Spring semester, sessions will consider different, and often uneven, attempts to reckon with and recover from the enduring legacies of European colonialism. The series will be bookended by sessions devoted to important elections impacting Europe.

This installment of Conversations on Europe is a Jean Monnet Center of Excellence Roundtable.

Using the case of Soviet visual culture, this masterclass asks how scholars from various disciplines can productively engage with images. Which analytical tools are available? What is the relationship between text and image? Was Stalinist culture logocentric, was it, in other words, dominated by one category of signs? What kinds of logic become operative with visual signs, is there such a thing as an irreducible visuality - is "a picture worth a thousand words"? We will examine a variety of images, ranging from newspaper photographs to agitprop posters to easel paintings.

1991 ushered in the so-called "archival revolution," allowing scholars if Russia and Central Asia to access written sources that had been inaccessible to international scholars. The end of the Cold War also allowed first-hand engagement with people living throughout Eurasia. however, this paradigm shift has not been matched by methodological reflection on how best to combine oral history with more traditional methods.

Assembling diverse materials ranging from poetry to stories, wills, personal and model letters, manuals, and other miscellanea, majmu'as or anthologies offer fresh insights for writing the history of the early modern Persianate world. Often produced outside the state and religious institutions, they provide a distinct vantage point to the social and cultural history of the communities that produced them.

What we are witnessing in the post-9/11 era is a type and degree of profiling and targeting of Muslims that more closely resembles racial discrimination historically experienced by African American, Native American, and Asian American communities (of all faiths). Hence Muslims are being treated as a race, and more specifically a suspect race, rather than as a religious minority to be protected from persecution.