HAREM IN HISTORY & IMAGINATION
a symposium sponsored by The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT (AKPIA@MIT)

This two-day symposium offers an opportunity to debate the harem as an institution, an actual space, and a literary and artistic trope, and through these themes to critically review the spaces of women in Islamic cultures, both real and imagined and both in the past and present. Papers will deal with specific examples of historical (or contemporary?) harems, with legal and politicized debates about harems, and with representations of the Harem in art, literature, and present-day media in the east and west, with all associated theoretical and political implications.

Abstracts and bios page
Program PDF
Poster PDF

Friday, May 7th

Introduction

5:30-5:40

Welcome:
Dean Adèle Naudé Santos
Department of Architecture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

5:40-5:45

Introductory Remarks:
Nasser Rabbat
Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

1st Session: Representing the Harem

5:45-6:15

"Scenes and Types"
Jananne Al-Ani
Artist, London

6:15-6:45

"Whose Harem?
Harem Photographs from the Late Ottoman World"
Nancy Micklewright
Getty Grant Program, Los Angeles

6:45-7:15

"The Harem and the Houseboat:
Writing against Respectability in 1920s Egypt"
Marilyn Booth
Department of Comparative & World Literature
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

7:15-7:45

Discussant:
Caroline Jones
Department of Architecture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Saturday, May 8th

2nd Session: Power Plays

9:30-10:00

"Panoptic Bodies:
Black Eunuchs in the Topkapi Palace"
Jateen Lad
Architect, London

10:00-10:30

"Transformative Thresholds and Gendered Harems
in the Ottoman Sultanate"
Leslie Peirce
Departments of History and Near Eastern Studies
University of California, Berkeley

10:30-11:00

"The Harem as Biography:
Domestic Architecture, Gender and Nostalgia in Modern Syria"
Heghnar Watenpaugh
Department of Architecture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

11:00-11:30

Discussant:
Susan Slyomovics
Anthropology Program
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

11:30-12:00

Coffee Break

3rd Session: Houses and Harems

12:00-12:30

"Colonial Visions, Civilizing Missions, and the Algerian House"
Zeynep Celik
School of Architecture,
New Jersey Institute of Technology

12:30-1:00

"Capture and Catharsis:
A Woman's Space in Contemporary Pakistan"
Kishwar Rizvi
Department of Art History
Barnard College, Columbia University

1:00-1:15

Discussant:
Joan DelPlato
Department of Art History
Simon's Rock College of Bard, Great Barrington

1:15-2:30

Lunch

4th Session: Strategies of Identity

2:30-3:00

“Sons and Mothers:
Lineage, Polemic and Filial Bonds among Fifteenth Century ‘Ulama’”
Shaun E. Marmon
Department of Religion
Princeton University

3:00-3:30

"Education in the Harem:
A Means of Individuation of the Person?"
Randi Deguilhem
Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman
Aix-en-Provence

3:30-3:45

Discussant:
Everett Rowson
Department of Middle Eastern Studies
New York University

3:45-4:00

Coffe Break

5th Session: Harem and the Construction of Gender

4:00-4:30

"Harem as Gendered Space and
the Spatial Reproduction of Gender"
Irvin C. Schick
Researcher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

4:30-5:00

"The Pull of the Harem:
The Socializing Effects of Segregated Spatiality"
Reina Lewis
School of Cultural & Innovation Studies
University of East London

5:00-5:15

Discussant:
Erika Naginski
Department of Architecture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

5:15-6:00

General Discussion and Closing Remarks
Moderator:
Nasser Rabbat
Department of Architecture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

6:00-7:00

Refreshments