Iraqi professor to speak on Iraqi culture at Baker Institute

Iraqi professor to speak on Iraqi culture at Baker Institute

FROM RICE NEWS STAFF REPORTS

Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi-born academic who is currently a faculty member at New York University’s Gallatin School, will discuss “Debris and Diaspora: Iraqi Culture Now” Wednesday during a free public lecture at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.
 

	SINAN ANTOON

The event is part of the lecture series “The Arab World: History, Politics and Culture.” The series is co-sponsored by the Rice University History Department, the Baker Institute and the Arab-American Educational Foundation Lecture Endowment.
 
Antoon received his bachelor’s degree from Baghdad University, his master’s from Georgetown and his doctorate from Harvard. His teaching and research interests lie in premodern Arabo-Islamic culture and contemporary Arab culture and politics. His dissertation, ”The Poetics of the Obscene,” is the first study of the 10th-century Arab poet Ibn al-Hajjaj.
 
In 2002, he was awarded a Mellon grant to support his research in the Middle East. Antoon’s poems and essays (in Arabic and English) have appeared in The Nation, Middle East Report, Al-Ahram Weekly, Banipal and the Journal of Palestine Studies, among others. He has published a collection of poems, “Mawshur Muballal bil-Huroob” (A Prism; Wet with Wars), and a novel, “I`jam” (Diacritics), both of which are forthcoming in English versions. His poetry was anthologized in “Iraqi Poetry Today.” He has also contributed numerous translations of Arabic poetry into English.
 
He returned to his native Baghdad in 2003 as a member of InCounter Productions to film a documentary, “About Baghdad,” about the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam-occupied Iraq, which he co-produced and co-directed. He is a senior editor of Arab Studies Journal, a member of PEN America, a contributing editor to Banipal and a member of the editorial committee of Middle East Report.
 
The event begins at 6:30 p.m. in Baker Hall’s Kelly International Conference Facility. A reception will follow.