Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/09/2025
5:00 pm

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Franke Institute for the Humanities Regenstein Library

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CHICAGO, IL

Russia has been deeply entangled with the Arab world since the 19th century, but it is only recently that scholars have begun to examine these connections seriously. Three veteran scholars who have edited a source book together on the topic—Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (Routledge, 2023)—will join forces to think together about the state of the field, potential sources and directions for future research, and to contemplate how the past relates to current events in Israel/Palestine and Syria. This event should be helpful for students seeking to conduct research in the region, but it is also designed to be accessible for general audiences curious about what is happening in the Arab world today and why. The conversation will be followed by a reception.

If you cannot attend in person, you may register to watch this event on Zoom.

Sponsored by CEERES, CMES, and the Department of Middle Eastern Studies

Moderated by Orit Bashkin (Department of Middle Eastern Studies)

Eileen Kane is Professor of History at Connecticut College, where she teaches courses on modern Europe and the Middle East. She is the author of Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (2015). She is now writing a book about emigration from Russia/USSR to the Middle East.

Masha Kirasirova is an Assistant Professor of History at New York University Abu Dhabi and the author of The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union’s Anticolonial Empire (Oxford University Press, 2024). She is also a co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties Between Protest and Nation-Building (Routledge Press, 2018). Her work broadly explores exchanges between Soviet Eurasia and the Middle East, focusing on state-led efforts to transform the natural environment and political culture during the Cold War. She is also interested in visual cultures of development in the Middle East, Soviet and Arab films, theories of empire, and histories of the future.

Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University. A historian of transregional cultural flows, she is the author of Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (2011) and is writing a book titled Red Mecca: The Life and Afterlives of the Arab-Soviet Romance. Her research has been recognized with Mellon, ACLS Burkhardt, Humboldt, and Radcliffe fellowships, and she has been awarded a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant to translate a Syrian civil war novel featuring a giraffe.