Ages 21 | Yale MacMillan Center Council on Middle East Studies

Ayse Zarakol- Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders

Ayse Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Politics Fellow at Emmanuel College. Her research is at the intersection of IR and historical sociology, focusing on East-West relations in the international system, history and future of world order(s), conceptualizations of modernity and sovereignty, rising and declining powers, and Turkish politics in a comparative perspective.

Cosponsored by the Fox International Fellowship

The Kurds in the Middle East: Does America Need a New Strategy for Iraq, Syria, and the Kurds?

The Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, in partnership with the nonprofit organization Justice for Kurds, will host a four-part virtual discussion series on “The Kurds in the Middle East.”
Panel discussions will feature an impressive array of American, European, and Middle Eastern practitioners, including senior Kurdish representatives from Iraq and Syria.

The Kurds in the Middle East: Kurdish Perspectives from the Region

The Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, in partnership with the nonprofit organization Justice for Kurds, will host a four-part virtual discussion series on “The Kurds in the Middle East.”
Panel discussions will feature an impressive array of American, European, and Middle Eastern practitioners, including senior Kurdish representatives from Iraq and Syria.

Columbus & Islam

Christopher Columbus lived the vast majority of his life in a Mediterranean world in which the Ottoman and Mamluk Empires dominated the eastern part of the sea and were in constant economic, political, and confrontational interaction with the Christian states of Europe. This talk considers the importance of Islam in shaping Columbus’s life and voyages. In doing so, it thinks critically about the role of Islam in the Spanish decision to send him across the ocean and in the early history of the Spanish Caribbean.

InterAsia Initiative Online Lecture: Professor Manan Ahmed

In this talk, drawn from my book *The Loss of Hindustan*, I sketch an intellectual geography for understanding the history of Firishta, written in early seventeenth century Deccan. The world of the Deccan is both connected to the Indian Ocean circuits, sketched in Arabic merchant accounts and histories, as well to the network of city-states, represented by the Persian histories produced in Uch or Delhi. The immediate milieu of Firishta under the ʿAdil Shahi was a polyphonic Hindustan where the exchange of knowledge, letters, and histories was foundational.

InterAsia Initiative Online Lecture: Professor Arash Khazeni

The City and the Wilderness recounts the journeys and microhistories of Indo-Persian travelers across the Indian Ocean and their encounters with the Burmese Kingdom and its littoral at the turn of the nineteenth century. As Mughal sovereignty waned under British colonial rule, Indo-Persian travelers and intermediaries linked to the East India Company explored and surveyed the Burmese Empire, inscribing it as a forest landscape and Buddhist kingdom at the crossroads of South and Southeast Asia.

InterAsia Online Lecture - Connecting People, Places and Things: Itineraries of Chinese Porcelain in around the Arabian Peninsula

In the early eighteenth century, the Red Sea served as the maritime crossroads for a number of different commodities that captivated global consumers, such as Arabian coffee, eastern spices, Chinese porcelain, and Indian textiles. But, the Red Sea was not only a transit route, these items were also consumed and used in the port cities around the coasts of this body of water and their adjacent hinterlands.

InterAsia Virtual Two-Day Workshop: Itinerant People and Moving Objects Across Islamic Asia

This workshop requires reading of pre-circulated material to participate, since the goal is to provide critical feedback to junior scholars working on their first monographs. Conceptually, the goal of the workshop is to think critically about itinerant communities and moving objects. By privileging the lens of mobility, and in some cases immobility, as an analytical tool, the workshop reconsiders and rearticulates ideas about space and space-making, boundaries or borders that are formed and defied, and issues of longing and belonging.

InterAsia Virtual Two-Day Workshop: Itinerant People and Moving Objects Across Islamic Asia

This workshop requires reading of pre-circulated material to participate, since the goal is to provide critical feedback to junior scholars working on their first monographs. Conceptually, the goal of the workshop is to think critically about itinerant communities and moving objects. By privileging the lens of mobility, and in some cases immobility, as an analytical tool, the workshop reconsiders and rearticulates ideas about space and space-making, boundaries or borders that are formed and defied, and issues of longing and belonging.