On Thursday, Sept. 26, professor Margaret Litvin from Boston University will give a lecture titled "Russian-Arab Worlds: Shaking Up Area Studies" at 5:30 p.m. in Gearhart Hall 102.

The roots of the Arab world's current Russian entanglements reach deep into the tsarist and Soviet periods. What is at stake in digging up these fraught histories? In this talk, literary historian Litvin will reflect on the process of co-editing the recently published Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (2023), asking what studying Arab-Russian and Arab-Soviet ties can teach us about transregional solidarities, intrepid border-crossing individuals and the area studies framework itself.

Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University. A historian of transregional cultural flows, she is the author of Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost (2011) and is completing a monograph titled Red Mecca: The Life and Afterlives of the Arab-Soviet Romance. She also co-edited the anthology Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History for Oxford University Press (2023), the subject of her talk.

This lecture is sponsored by the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies, the Arkansas Humanities Center and the Russian Program of the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Contact professor Nadja Berkovich at nadezdab@uark.edu.