PSU Professor of history Jon Mandaville will speak on Palestinian arts and the difficulty of creating a national culture in a time of statelessness at 7:30 p.m. today in Smith Memorial Student Union, Room 338. Mandaville’s lecture evening is part of an ongoing series of forums co-sponsored by local organization Palestine Lebanon Emergency Action (PLEA) and PSU’s Middle East Studies Center.
History professor to speak on Palestinian art
PSU Professor of history Jon Mandaville will speak on Palestinian arts and the difficulty of creating a national culture in a time of statelessness at 7:30 p.m. today in Smith Memorial Student Union, Room 338.
Mandaville’s lecture evening is part of an ongoing series of forums co-sponsored by local organization Palestine Lebanon Emergency Action (PLEA) and PSU’s Middle East Studies Center. He will be speaking on the theme “Palestine: History and Culture.”
“I’m going to talk about Palestinian culture–art, music, [and] film,” Mandaville said, “but in the context of the challenge of identity when you’re stateless.”
Mandaville teaches classes on Iraq, Palestine/Israel and the Ottoman Empire, and his writings include the book History of the Arabian Peninsula.
Previous speakers in the PLEA-Middle East Studies Center forums have included Mercy Corps’ Landrum Bolling, who showed a film he had shot interviewing ordinary Israelis and Palestinians about their hopes for the future; the University of Arizona’s Charles D. Smith, discussing ideas and misconceptions about Israel and Palestine; and professors John Damis and Aomar Boum, who spoke about Hezbollah.
PLEA and the Middle East Studies Center designed this series of forums in the hopes of providing Portlanders with a context to consider current events in the Middle East. Mandaville’s lecture is the fourth in a series of 12.
PLEA was founded by local activists Peter Miller, Lee Knightly, Rima Ghandour, Samar El Khoury and Hala Gores.
