Description:

Please join the International Studies Program for dinner and conversation with Shayna Silverstein, Assistant Professor in the Department of Performance Studies and an affiliate faculty member of the Middle East and North African Studies Program at Northwestern.

Professor Silverstein’s research examines the politics and aesthetics of sound and movement in the contemporary Middle East. She is currently completing a book manuscript about popular culture in pre-war Syria that focuses on how the national performance tradition of dabke dancing engenders belonging across class, religion, and ethnicity. By attending to both the historical trajectories and lived experiences that constitute Syrian popular culture, her book illuminates the ways in which ordinary Syrians negotiate the interrelated logics of postcolonial difference and postsocialist capital and class through body, performance, and culture.

Dinner will be provided!