Mahmoud Darwish at Berkeley University

Chairperson
of the BZU Department of
Philosophy and Cultural
Studies and Director
of BZU’s Master’s
Program in Arab Contemporary Studies, Dr. Abdul-Rahim-al-Shaikh, visited the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley)
from 3-11 December 2011. He was invited by Dr. Judith Butler, who is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric
and Comparative Literature and the Co-director of the Program of Critical
Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Al-Shaikh
was invited to give a
series of lectures and
conduct workshops at
Berkeley’s Department of Rhetoric, as well as in the Critical
Theory and
Comparative Literature programs. The
visit included
several academic, intellectual and cultural events, including a lecture delivered on 6 December 2011, hosted by the Berkeley Townsend Center for the
Humanities, entitled: "Mahmoud Darwish:
In Defense of Little Differences." Al-Shaikh
also lectured at the Middle
Eastern Studies program at
the University of Santa Cruz.

For more
information, please visit: http://townsendlab.berkeley.edu/critical-theory/events/abdul-rahim-al-sh...“…-defense-little-differences”

It is worth
noting that Judith Butler visited BZU in early 2010, and is expected to visit again in April 2012. She will be accompanied by one of the most influential French philosophers, Etienne Balibar.