Category Archives: Blog

I had the honor and pleasure of serving on this year’s faculty selection committee for the Founders Day student essay contest at the American University of Beirut. Students were invited to write about a time when they learned something important from an unexpected source. At today’s Founders Day ceremony, first-prize winner Majd Salim Nassan read his essay, “Never Forget Passion” (about being a Syrian student adrift in Beirut), and Dr. Marwan Muasher, former foreign minister of Jordan and current vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, delivered his keynote address on the importance of diversity, pluralism, and liberal arts education in creating social change and stability in the Middle East. “There is no reason why AUB cannot serve as a collective Mandela, Gandhi, or King,” he said.

CELEBRATION OF FREEDOM – 25 YEARS OF DEMOCRACY
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 7PM
Czech Center/Bohemian National Hall
321 East 73rd Street
NY 10021 New York
Free admission

FRAGILE FREEDOM
A multi-genre, multimedia performance dedicated to the legacy of Václav Havel and twenty five years of freedom, reimagining the magical number 89 in music, dance, film, photography and literature. The event will feature 12 contemporary music composers, 13 American musicians, Czech and American dancers and actors together with leading proponents of political and cultural life from both countries. Fragments of forbidden theater plays, texts and essays, created during the time of oppression, will be introduced during this event. This will include Vaclav Havel, one of the most important figures of dissent, a human right advocate and playwright, who in 1989 became president.

The work of Eva Kantůrková, the female proponent of forbidden literature who was imprisoned for her subversion of communist ideas, will also be shown–together with staged essays of philosopher Pavel Tigrid and other important texts that contributed to the fight for freedom performed live. The overview of historic events forming the free Czech Republic will be seen through the eyes of photographers and cinematographers. A strong Czech tradition, puppet theater, will be used to introduce the fall of the iron curtain with a witty point of view, followed by fragments of the essential leitmotifs of Dvořák’s New World Symphony, whose original manuscripts return to US for the first time and will be heard in a special arrangement.

We don’t know when it began,
nor when it will end,
this un-season we’ve learned to savor,
this infinite in-betweeness.
We look at the sea. We imagine
seaweed sprouting out
of drowned shoes,
taking in the sunlight…

— Zeina Hashem Beck, We Who Have Decided to Live in Autumn

For today’s Civilization Studies Program Brown Bag at the American University of Beirut, I’ve invited Dr. Mario Kozah to speak about his latest research on Syriac, asceticism, and literature. I’m really looking forward to discussing this topic today with my colleagues in Beirut…

Life According to Václav Havel (Život podle Václava Havla, 2014, 72 min)
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 6 PM
Czech Center
321 East 73rd Street
NY 10021 New York

US premiere of the new documentary about President Václav Havel directed by Andrea Sedláčková. Q&A with Marta Smolíková, director of the Václav Havel Library and Šimon Pánek, director of People in Need. Czech with English subtitles.

Showing as part of:

THE PLAY’S THE THING: VÁCLAV HAVEL, ART AND POLITICS
This film series focuses on Václav Havel, the dissident and imprisoned dramatist who went on to become a world-renowned statesman as first president of the Czech Republic. This program is based on the places and people that Havel knew, from the influential Theatre on the Balustrade, where his theatrical career began, to his friendships with filmmakers of the Czech New Wave, and to his political ascendancy in Prague. For a list and schedule of all the films being shown, please click here.  All films will be shown in Czech with English subtitles.

Tonight in Beirut, I had the pleasure of having dinner with David Nevin, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s lawyer, after his talk at the American University of Beirut, entitled: Defending Khalid Shaikh Mohammad: A Guantanamo Lawyer’s Perspective on the ‘Trial of the Century.’ I’m grateful for the stimulating, educational, and truly fascinating conversations that unfolded all night long about torture, the constitution, Guantanamo Bay, and U.S. foreign policy–it was a nourishing evening on all levels…

Thursday, November 20th
American University of Beirut
5:00 pm in Bathish Auditorium West Hall

Through the stories of Assaad Shaftari, a former high ranking intelligence officer in a Christian right wing militia, responsible for many casualties in the protracted civil war in Lebanon and Maryam Saiidi, the mother of Maher, a missing young communist fighter who disappeared in 1982, Sleepless Nights (2012) digs into the war wounds and asks if redemption and forgiveness are possible…

After a semester of studying hieroglyphs in the classroom in Beirut, my students and I took a field trip to Nahr el-Kalb to analyze the hieroglyphs left behind by Ramses the Great on his way to battle the Hittites at Qadesh in “Syria.” Unfortunately, we could only make out a few hieroglyphs, since most of them have disappeared from extensive erosion…