For ten years, the Committee for Undergraduate Middle East Studies (CUMES) has organized the Undergraduate Research Workshop and Poster Session, creating a space where undergraduate students can present their work, receive feedback, and learn more about career paths related to Middle East studies. In 2016, I was fortunate enough to participate in the session, an experience that not only marked my entry into MESA but also showed me what generative scholarly engagement can look like. From the care that faculty participants took in their comments to the engagement during the poster presentations, my experience with the workshop has guided my own approach to providing student feedback, and it is an honor to have the space to reflect on this past experience and engage with the work of current undergraduates at the 2023 workshop.
The small selection of papers here are drawn together by their use of and attention to media, from traditional print and film media to novels and comic books. Together these authors, touching on a range of time periods, locales, and actors, articulate the ways that these media sources offer space to understand the entanglements between various communities and political trajectories.
Arianna Werner and Rachel Beth Acker take up this task by looking at Iran. Werner uses discourse analysis to highlight the ways in which Iranian nationalism is constructed and incorporated into bodybuilding. Focusing on the trajectory of Iranian bodybuilder Hadi Choopan, aka “The Persian Wolf,” Werner traces the ways that the visuals and discourses deployed around bodybuilding reaffirm the ties between masculinity and nationalism. Acker brings her attention to the United States, tracing the expressions and contours of American exceptionalism between the Iran Contra Affair and 1953 coup. Weaving together news media, comics, and government hearing transcripts, Acker argues for a greater consideration of the ways in which American exceptionalism is tied to upholding American masculinity. Acker's brief analysis of one issue of the T-Man series served as an anchor that featured the threads of Orientalism, anti-communism, racism, and perceptions of inter-state relations that animated American exceptionalism, threads which are then further traced through her other source materials.
Miriam Alrahil shifts our attention to mahjar literature, particularly from the Colombian-Lebanese author Juan Gossaín. Alrahil underscores the hybridity of identity and the notion of phantom-nostalgia represented in Gossaín's writing in the ways that he mobilizes cuisine and flora. Stella Metcalf, like her peers, draws attention to the precise language and content of the print materials produced from Giovanni Battista Raimondi's press, but her discussion of Raimondi and his work also examines print technology. In doing so, Metcalf posits a reading of Raimondi that places him closer to the Catholic Church's colonialism. Through this discussion, Metcalf turns an eye to the intertwined dynamics of print technology, distribution, and content as part of empire expansion. Moving away from written media, Jayakumari Nair reads the 2004 reforms made to Morocco's Family Code through film, articulating the many spaces of exclusion and exploitation still left despite the changes. Through the story of Rajae, Nair highlights the significance of relationalities in how the 2004 reforms touch down into the everyday. Nair counters the exclusion encompassed within the law and seen through Rajae's relationship with her pimp and with her love interest, by underscoring the ways that inclusion along other lines – namely friendship – create new pathways for the future as the law closes traditional avenues.
From gender and masculinity to diasporic identity and empire, this selection of papers from CUMES’ Undergraduate Research Workshop touches on several discussions within Middle East studies, with an even broader range of topics having been represented in November during the poster presentations at MESA's annual meeting. As CUMES embarks on its second decade of work, bringing in and engaging more undergraduate students with MESA, I look forward to seeing the growth and development of discussions had by undergraduate students as part of this initiative.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Victoria Hightower, one of the CUMES co-chairs, for inviting me to respond to the selected papers from the workshop and reflect on the workshop as a whole.
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