The Middle East Lectures Series, 2025:

The University of New Mexico’s International Studies Institute, along with the Departments of History, Anthropology, Languages, Cultures, & Literatures, Political Science, and the Religious Studies Program, invite you to our lecture series on: Minorities & Migration in the Middle East.

Reading Room, 3rd Floor, Ortega Hall / 3:30pm – 4:30pm ISI 

Contact:  sbishop@unm.edu / asturiya@unm.edu

MELS-2025 Guest Lectures

Lecture #1: Surviving Borders: Armenian Lives in the Shadow of Genocide

• Tuesday March 25, 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
• Reading Room, 3rd Floor, Ortega Hall

This lecture examines the experiences of Armenian communities in the Middle East during the first half of the 20th century, focusing on the profound effects of displacement, genocide, and nation-state formation. Post-World War I international diplomacy played a pivotal role in dividing Armenian lives between scattered diaspora communities and those who remained as Turkish citizens, often marginalized within the very state that had sought their erasure. Exploring the concept of "denativization," the talk traces how Armenian identities were renegotiated across borders, revealing the enduring legacies of survival and adaptation in the shadow of genocide and displacement.

Hakem al Rustom

Hakem A. Al-Rustom is the Alex Manoogian Professor of Modern Armenian History, assistant professor of history and of anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is author of Enduring Erasures: Afterlives of the Armenian Genocide (forthcoming, July 2025) and the coeditor of Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (2010).

Lecture #2: Environment, Migration, and Political Stability in the Middle East: Past and Present

• Tuesday April 1, 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
• Reading Room, 3rd Floor, Ortega Hall

The Middle East is known in popular culture to be a space of climatic extremes on the one hand and migration-inducing political instability on the other. We often tend to consider such phenomena separately, with no regard to their possible interlocking patterns. Moreover, we are often tempted to view the climate change of our age and the challenges it entails as unprecedented in time and space. This talk will draw connections between different historical case studies in the Middle East to shed light on some of the most crucial historical patterns and observations with respect to climate, migration, and political order throughout the region’s history. It will illustrate the ways in which recent and current events correspond with the past, and that vulnerability to environmental hazard is seldom without socio-political dimensions.

Amit Sadan

Amit Sadan is a postdoctoral fellow in the International Studies Institute at the University of New Mexico. His fields of expertise are the modern and early modern Middle East, environmental history, and Jewish Studies. Amit’s current book project examines the environmental history of twentieth-century Iran, analyzing environmental projects such as the construction of transportation infrastructures, dam building, forestry and de-desertification policies, and natural disaster management.

MELS Lecturer #3: How Migration Shaped 1990s-2000s Iraqi Kurdistan

• Tuesday April 8, 3:30pm – 4:30pm
• Reading Room, 3rd Floor, Ortega Hall

This presentation will offer an ethnographic retrospective of the 1990s and 2000s in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Bookended by the 1991 Gulf War and Kurdish uprising, and the beginning of oil exports in 2009, this was a period of great paradoxes. Millions of people suffered as a result of multiple wars, and many migrated to Europe and elsewhere. But many migrants returned as the region settled into an autonomous governance that has held to the present. During this period of Iraqi Kurdistan’s history, I conducted consistent ethnographic research there. In this talk, I will cover both broad historical developments, as well as consider how out-migration, return migration, and diasporic coming and going during the 1990s and 2000s profoundly shaped everyday life and led to the deep connections with the outside world that the people of the region have today.

Diane E. King

Diane E. King is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. Her Ph.D. is from Washington State University (2000). She has conducted ethnographic research in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq since 1995. She is currently working on projects having to do with community, citizenship, sectarianism, and descent categories in the modern Middle Eastern state. She has published an edited volume, Middle Eastern Belongings (Routledge 2010), a monograph, Kurdistan on the Global Stage (Rutgers 2014), a co-authored book with Linda Stone, Kinship and Gender, now in its 7th edition (Routledge 2025), and a number of articles and book chapters. In 2022, she gave the prestigious Fredrik Barth Memorial Lecture at the University of Bergen.

MELS Lecturer #4: Denied Citizens: Baha’is in the Post-1979 Revolution of Iran

• Thursday 4/17th
• Reading Room, 3rd Floor, Ortega Hall / 3:30pm – 4:30pm

The Baha’i Faith was founded in 1844 in Iran. Today, the Baha’i community constitutes the largest non-Muslim religious minority in the country. Despite this, Baha’is are denied recognition as citizens. Since the 1979 revolution, their circumstances have deteriorated further, with systemic persecution that includes exclusion from official employment, higher education, legal marriage recognition, and dignified burial services. This talk examines the struggles of the Baha’i community in Iran, placing these challenges within a broader historical context. It also examines the impact of the regime’s suppressive response to the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement on the Baha’i community.

Saghar Sadeghian

• Saghar Sadeghian is an Associate Professor of History at Willamette She began her higher education in Iran at the clandestine Baha’i Institute for Higher Education (BIHE) before earning a master’s in Historical Research from Lancaster University (U.K.) and a Ph.D. from Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3.
• Sadeghian has served as a Post-Doctoral Fellow of Iranian Studies and a Rice Faculty Fellow at the MacMillan Center at Yale University. Her first book, Iranian Non-Muslim Communities: Exploration and Negotiation of Social Space during the Constitutional Revolution (1891–1911), is currently under revision for publication.
• She has been awarded the Gerda Henkel Fellowship for the calendar year 2025 to work on her new book project, Green Gold: An Environmental History of the Caspian Forests (1800–Present). Her research interests include environmental history, minority groups, women, and gender studies. At Willamette, she teaches courses on the modern Middle East.

MELS Lecturer #5: The Jewish Exodus from the Muslim Middle East: Is 1948 rightfully taken as the breakpoint?

• Date: Tuesday 4/22nd
• Location: Reading Room, 3rd Floor, Ortega Hall / 3:30pm – 4:30pm

This talk examines the history of the Jewish communities in the Middle East throughout the 20 ^th century. It explores the recorded history of Jewish participation in national movements, responses to Zionism, and decolonization. At the core of the talk, we will examine the convention that 1948 was the breakpoint of Jewish history in the Middle East and North Africa and juxtapose it with the unfolding of decolonization. Additionally, we will discuss the existence of a Jewish community in Iran in the 21 ^st century, Turkey, Morocco, and Jewish memory across the region.

Lior Sternfeld

• Lior Sternfeld is the William and Charlotte K. Duddy University Endowed Fellow in the Humanities and Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Penn State University.
• Sternfeld is a social historian of the modern Middle East with an emphasis on Iran and the Jewish communities of the region.
• He is the author of Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth Century Iran (Stanford University Press 2018) and the co-author of Jews of Iran: A Photographic Chronicle (Penn State University Press 2022).
• His current research focuses on the Iranian-Jewish diaspora communities in the US and Israel.

MELS Lecturer #6: Supporting Refugee Communities from the Middle East in Albuquerque

• Tuesday April 29, 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
• Reading Room, 3rd Floor, Ortega Hall

United Voices for Newcomer Rights (UVNR) is a community-led organization that was founded in 2019. UVNR works to improve the lives of newcomers by addressing both immediate needs as well as longer-term systemic change. Recognizing the commonalities in resettlement challenges, UVNR uses the inclusive, non-stigmatized term “newcomers” to encompass refugees, immigrants, asylum-seekers and other migrant groups to emphasize the importance of building solidarity among these groups.To do this effectively, UVNR believes in working with newcomer Community Advocates and building the capacity of local communities to address issues concerning them. UVNR works towards social justice, racial equity and inclusion, leadership development, and policy and system change that promotes the well-being of newcomers, while also providing direct services that address newcomers’ urgent needs, and facilitate their engagement in their communities and in social change efforts.

Jessica Goodkind

Jessica Goodkind studies the mental health of recently resettled refugees and immigrants from around the world; she puts that expertise to work in New Mexico and around the country by advising newcomer organizations and resettlement agencies on how best to build on the strengths of refugees and immigrants to promote their well-being and enable them to contribute their knowledge, skills and ideas to American society and how to create system and policy changes that support newcomer well- being.

Jessica is also the Co-Director of DEI Curricular Development for the UNM School of Medicine, a role in which she uses her expertise to develop and implement health equity and culturally effective health care curriculum for medical students, faculty and staff. Finally, she is a Board Member of UnitedVoices for Newcomer Rights and provides evaluation consultation to community-based organizations and tribal communities in New Mexico.

Jessica is the director of the Refugee & Immigrant Well-Being Project (RIWP) at UNM, through which much of this research and community engagement is run. For more information, go to the RIWP website.