Communism, Radicalism, and Social Justice in the Eastern Mediterranean

The Issam Fares Institute cordially invites you to a lecture and discussion entitled “Communism, Radicalism, and Social Justice in the Eastern Mediterranean.”

Ilham Khuri-Makdisi is an Associate Professor of Middle East and World History at Northeastern University, Boston. She will give an overview of the spread of radical ideas and practices by intellectuals, workers, and dramatists in Arab societies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and will analyze ideas pertaining to social justice, as well as militant activities that promoted workers’ rights in and between Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria. Her current research project is on translation movements between Arabic and Ottoman Turkish between 1860 and 1914.

Sana Tannoury Karam is a Ph.D. Candidate in Middle East and World History at Northeastern University specializing in the history of communism in the Mandate Levant. She will discuss the development of ideas pertaining to social justice and equality within the communist movement in Lebanon during the Mandate period. She will focus on a group of communist intellectuals and workers, arguing that the ideas they propagated on social justice developed out of an interaction with and contestation over domestic as well as global issues, such as national liberation, anti-colonialism, and anti-fascism.

Location: Issam Fares Institute