Session 2

2–3 P.M.

Michael Kremer

Michael Kremer is the Mary R. Morton Professor in the Department of Philosophy. His chief research interests are in logic, the philosophy of language, and early analytic philosophy. He also has a strong interest in issues concerning the relationship between reason and religious faith.

3,000 Years of Greek Poetry in 60 Minutes

’’Poem’’: Greek word meaning ”creation.” From Homer to Dimoula, Greek poetry responds to all the human situations: Love, Death, War, Peace, Family, Fatherland, Democracy, Feminism. The questions that dominate our thought and soul during all the stages of human life are expressed in precious words, forming an excellent and rare art which has reached its mastery as it became more and more elaborated from century to century in ancient, byzantine, modern and contemporary time.

Chrysanthi Koutsiviti

Chrysanthi Koutsiviti is Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics. Her areas of study include Modern Greek language, linguistics, and literature.

"I Think We Will be Calm During the Next War”: Past, Present, and Future Violence in Lebanese Comics

As conflict creates epistemic and cultural ruptures, it also produces new aesthetic engagements. In Beirut, a city where the physical landscape has been altered by four decades of conflict and violent reconstruction—and which is continually under threat of further destruction—how does a young generation intervene in ongoing cultural and social debates about the violence of history, the tense and (sometimes) violent present, and the anxious future?

Ghenwa Hayek

Ghenwa Hayek is Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Her research spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Arab Middle East, focusing on the relationships between literary and cultural production, space and place, and identity formation. Hayek is also a translator whose works have appeared in the literary magazine Banipal and the anthology Beirut 39: New Writing From the Arab World, as well as in mainstream publications like The New York Times and The International New York Times.

How Printing Remade the Islamic Tradition

In the world of Islamic scholarship, the transition from a manuscript culture to a culture of printed books took place less than two centuries ago. The advent of the printing press did not merely replace one medium of recording with another; rather, it lifted almost forgotten medieval texts out of oblivion and effectively created a new canon of Islamic classics. This talk sketches the reinvention of the Islamic intellectual tradition through the printing press and sheds light on the diverse agendas that drove the process.

Ahmed El Shamsy

Ahmed El Shamsy is Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. El Shamsy studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research interests include themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law. He is the author of The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Non-Repetitive Music in Repetitive Time

What happens when we think about the history of musical modernism less as a proverbial “search for the new” than as a larger project in resisting or “breaking” repetition, whether it be the repetition of forms, laws, and languages, of genres and styles, or of themes, patterns, motives, etc.? What ramifications does this “breaking” have today for music as a repetitive practice—as a way of practicing repetition, but also of performing its very possibility?

Seth Brodsky

Seth Brodsky is Assistant Professor in the Department of Music. A musicologist by training, his research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century music and the intersection of music and philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. He is the author of the forthcoming book, From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (University of California Press, 2017).

Haun Saussy

Haun Saussy is University Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations. His interests include classical Chinese poetry and commentary, literary theory, comparative study of oral traditions, problems of translation, pre-twentieth-century media history, ethnography, and the ethics of medical care. His most recent book is The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies (Fordham University Press, 2016).

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