Category Archives: Blog

Symposium: Women in Archaeology
Where: Widener Lecture Hall at the University of Pennsylvania Museum
When: March 29th 9 AM – 5 PM

Archaeology is a field that has traditionally been dominated by men, and even though women tend to outnumber men in undergraduate programs, their numbers decline significantly through graduate school and ultimately in tenured positions. Why such a decline occurs is one of the questions this workshop will explore. Women rarely take on the role of Project Directors, and instead are more typically included as senior personnel, lab specialists, or collaborators. This event will consider how the situation that archaeologists face have changed over the last fifty years. By bringing together women of all ages, we will be able to address the question of whether these issues have improved over the past several decades, if they have stayed the same, or even deteriorated.

Today in Lebanon, a Syrian refugee set herself on fire in Tripoli in front of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and a gas station owner–in a separate incident–set himself on fire in the western Beqaa. Both survived and were hospitalized.

Piano in a Factory
NYU Skirball Center

Q&A Post Screening with director Zhang Meng
April 12th, 7 PM

Set among the “lost generation” of workers in the heavy industrial area in northeastern China who were hit by the policies of reform and economic openness in the 1990s, we see them rekindle their skills and rediscover the joy of working.

When Chen’s estranged wife (QIN HAI-LU) reappears asking for a divorce and custody of their daughter, the young musician decides she will live with whoever can provide her a piano. When efforts to borrow money and even steal a piano fail, Chen (WANG QIAN-YUAN) concocts a preposterous plan – to make a piano from scratch! He persuades a bunch of reluctant but loyal misfit friends to help him forge the instrument in a derelict factory from a heap of scrap steel.

A few months ago, I blogged about my friend Ben’s new film, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. Tonight, this same film is being shown at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center as part of New Directors/New Films.

Born out of a genuine concern for our perilous present, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness is a post-existentialist attempt to invoke utopia in the now–a meditation on how we may move forward at a time when “things are moving to the dystopic.” How might film itself offer us a way out of the darkness?

A SPELL follows an unnamed character through three seemingly disparate moments in his life. With little explanation, we join him in the midst of a 15-person collective on a small Estonian island; in isolation in the majestic wilderness of Northern Finland; and during a concert as the singer and guitarist of a black metal band in Norway. Marked by loneliness, ecstatic beauty and an optimism of the darkest sort, A SPELL is a radical proposition for the existence of utopia in the present…an inquiry into transcendence that sees the cinema as a site for transformation.

Return to Homs
With director Talal Derki
New Directors/New Films
Mar 25, 6:15 PM – Museum of Modern Art (Titus 1)
Mar 26, 9:00 PM – Walter Reade Theater

As immersive a documentary of active war as has ever been made, this unsparing account of the struggle for Homs follows-from August 2011 to August 2013-two close friends whose lives are completely altered when their beloved city is bombed into a ghost town. We witness Basset, a charismatic 19-year-old soccer player and iconic performer of protest songs, and Ossama, a 24-year-old media activist who captures the revolution with his camera, transform from peaceful protesters to armed resistance fighters. Derki’s camera, placed inside bombed-out buildings, records insurgents defending their city under siege as battles intensify, panicked civilians run for shelter, and a rising number of comrades are injured or killed. The soundtrack features Basset’s songs interrupted by gunfire and the occasional comment from the director. The images speak for themselves.

Arabic Literature of the African Sahara
Columbia University Faculty House
Professor Xavier Luffin
Thursday, March 27
Dinner at 6:00 pm and talk at 7:00 pm

Drawing from studies of Arabic literature from Mali to Eritrea, this talk will explore the multiple social, cultural and political dimensions of Arabic literature on the African periphery, as a language of narration and an object of conscious and unconscious cultural representations for authors and readers alike.

Professor Xavier Luffin teaches Arabic Language and Literature at Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). He has translated a dozen of books (novels, short-stories, drama), mainly from Arabic into French. His research focuses on the cultural relations between Africa and the Arab world. In his most recent publication, he analyzes the representation of Africa and the Africans in the Contemporary Arabic Literature (Les fils d’Antara. Représentations de l’Afrique et des Africains dans la littérature arabe contemporaine, Bruxelles, Safran, 2012 [in French]). He is currently working on two projects: the Representation of the African-Americans in the Contemporary Arabic Literature, and a survey of the Contemporary Arabic Literature in Saharan Africa.

While I was excavating this winter with colleagues in Sudan, we found several post-Meroitic burials from the Christian period on our site. My Egyptology students in Beirut are always intrigued by my slides of “Christian” mummies from Egypt and Sudan. In fact, an upcoming exhibit at the British Museum, “Ancient Lives: New Discoveries,” will be showcasing a female mummy from Sudan with a tattoo on her right leg honoring the Archangel Michael.

A 3,000-year-old skeleton recently found by archaeologists from Durham University in northern Sudan is shedding light on the history of cancer. While I was excavating skeletons like the one above this winter in Sudan, I looked for any clues I could find to determine each body’s cause of death. Clear imaging of lesions on bones, however, is done with radiography and a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Durham’s new discovery is significant because it the oldest complete example of metastatic cancer in the archaeological record.

Love is entirely a matter of direct experience whose reality cannot
be acquired by learning. By God, is that not wonderful?
The very exigencies of love clothe me in the garment of opposites,
so that I am as one who is consciously unconscious…

— Ibn Arabi

Since I’ve been blogging a lot lately about the Monastery of St. Anthony–and its early printing press–in the Qannoubin Valley of Lebanon, I was excited to see that UNESCO chose the same valley as the photo for its latest magazine cover.

And let your best be for your friend.
If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also…

— Khalil Gibran

Today in Beirut, my students and I discussed the “Guide for the Perplexed” by Maimonides, and noted the profound influence of Maimonides’ writings on St. Thomas Aquinas…

Since it is a well-known fact that even that knowledge of God which is accessible to man cannot be attained except by negations, and that negations do not convey a true idea of the being to which they refer, all people, both of past and present generations, declared that God cannot be the object of human comprehension, that none but Himself comprehends what He is, and that our knowledge consists in knowing that we are unable truly to comprehend Him…

— Maimonides

A new photo exhibition in Lebanon brings together two of my favorite places in the world: Mali in West Africa, and Deir al-Qamar in Lebanon. The French Cultural Center of Deir al-Qamar is currently showing photographs taken in Mali by Jean-Claude Frisque and Nomwinde Vivien Sawadogo. The exhibition is part of this year’s Francophone Month, which celebrates French culture through workshops, film screenings, and art exhibitions. The last time I traveled from Beirut to Deir al-Qamar by motorcycle, it took about an hour and a half. This week, I’m hoping to hop back on the bike, and catch a glimpse of Mali in the mountains of Lebanon…