Upcoming Events

Please join us for a talk and discussion by Professor Hana Morgenstern (University of Cambridge) on her two new books, Cultural Co-resistance in Palestine/ Israel, and A People's Literature of Palestine/ Israel: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing.

Cultural Co-resistance in Palestine/ Israel follows experiments in building cultures of solidarity under conditions of extreme inequality, illustrating a theory and practice of cultural co-resistance. The book reads key periodicals such as al-Jadid and al-Ittehad as counter-institutions of cultural reconstruction and innovation, and shows how early Mizrahi Hebrew fiction is shaped by Palestinian and Arab Marxist literary aesthetics.

For the first time in English translation, A People's Literature of Palestine/ Israel: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing brings together Arabic short stories, solidarity poems and essays by Emile Habiby, Sami Michael, Tawfiq Zayyad, Shimon Ballas, Hana Ibrahim, Jabra Nicola, David Semah and Muhammad Naffa. The collection gathers personal accounts of partition, expulsion, and life in the transit camps alongside chronicles of fleeing refugees and organising that linked local struggles in occupied Palestine/ Israel to global anticolonial and socialist movements, from Egypt and Iraq to Vietnam.

The talk and discussion will be followed by a reception.

Speaker bio:

Dr Hana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Middle Eastern Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at Newnham College. She is a scholar of Middle Eastern literature and cultural histories of the Left, with a specialisation in Palestine and Israel, including Jewish, Hebrew, Palestinian and Arabic literatures and literary cultures.

Morgenstern is co-founder and co-investigator of Revolutionary Papers: a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of anticolonial and anti-imperial production. She is also co-founder of Archives of the Disappeared, an interdisciplinary research initiative for the study of communities, social movements, spaces, literatures and cultures that have been destroyed through acts of political repression and mass violence.

Co-sponsored by Department of English, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, Middle East Center, and Wolf Humanities Center.

Prof. Day writes: "Asian/Americans have long been associated with a threatening overproductivity: an unnatural, excessive efficiency that devalues white labor. My talk explores the construction of Asian overproductivity in the post-Fordist era, where economic reorganization has shifted capital's center of gravity from production to circulation. I demonstrate that the destructive overproductivity that Asians evoke is objectified less in the form of exploited "cheap" labor than by the dead labor embedded in constant capital: the infrastructures, machines, and technologies that facilitate the movement and flow of capital. I argue that techno-orientalism animates the threat of dead labor, symptomatic of the crisis of value in the long downturn."

This interactive workshop offers students the opportunity to speak with a panel of graduate instructors and English professor Dr. Lilith Todd as they reflect on their pedagogy’s development across each stage of teaching. From grading and leading a recitation, to lecturing outside of the department, to teaching graduate students, attendees will gain a sense of the pedagogical skills to be attained and practiced in each of these roles and beyond. This workshop will provide students with a timeline for accomplishing pedagogical milestones, preparing for fellowship and job opportunities, and adapting to a range of course styles and institutional teaching contexts.

Register here: https://cetli.upenn.edu/event/pedagogy-in-progress/

More details to be announced!