Category: Lectures

Ussama Makdisi (University of California Berkeley), 8 May 2025, 4-6 pm

Palestine, Gaza, and the Question of Genocide Denial

Auditorium G, T2 – Technicum blok 2

Shir Hever (Coordinator of the Military Embargo Campaign for BDS), 25 April 2025, 1-3pm

A Political Economy of the Genocide in Gaza: The Case for Military Embargo

Campus Tweekerken, Hoveniersberg 24

Refqa Abu-Remaileh (Freie Universität Berlin), 24 April 2025, 4-6pm

The Parallel Geographies of Palestinian Literary History 

Auditorium G, T2 – Technicum blok 2

Abstract: Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature is a digital-born project that retraces and remaps the global story of Palestinian literature in the 20^th century, starting from the Arab world and going through Europe, North America, and Latin America. Sitting at the intersection of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, Country of Words creates a digitally networked and multilocational literary history—a literary atlas enhanced. The virtual realm acts as the meeting place for the data and narrative fragments of this literature-in-motion, bringing together porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into an elastic, interconnected, and entangled literary history.

 

Bio: Refqa Abu-Remaileh is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Film at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. As Principal Investigator, she led the European Research Council project PalREAD (2018–2023). She is author of Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature (Stanford University Press, 2023) and creator of the Arabic-language podcast Balad min Kalam: Conversations on Palestinian Literature available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Guest Lecture with Professor Noura Erakat: The Sovereign Right to Kill. A Critical Appraisal of Israel’s Shoot-to-Kill Policy in Gaza

Where/when: Wednesday 26 March 17h30-19h30 (Auditorium D – André Devreker, Hoveniersberg, Campus – Hoveniersberg 24)

Abstract: Professor Erakat will discuss how Israel’s military laws effectively shrink the category of “civilian” as applied to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Drawing on racialized tropes of the Palestinian body as a security threat, these laws are intended to expand the scope of violence that might be justified under the banner of “self-defense,” and to expand the scope of the Palestinian population that might be deemed “legitimate” military targets. Erakat historicizes Israel’s shoot-to-kill policy as merely one contemporary mode of displacing and dispossessing indigenous populations. At the same time, however, Israel’s legal practices introduce a novel technology into the arena of armed conflict—“the legal technology the ‘shrinking civilian’”.

Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick in the Department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice. Her research interests include human rights law, humanitarian law, national security law, refugee law, social justice, and critical race theory.  Noura is a Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya, an electronic magazine on the Middle East that combines scholarly expertise and local knowledge. She is the author of Justice for Some: Law and in the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019),  winner of the 2019 Palestine Book Awards sponsored by the Middle East Monitor and winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award’s  Bronze Medial in Current Events/Foreign Affairs.