February 11th, 2022: Spanish Diasporas: Affect and Laws of Return

Charles A. McDonald (Northwestern) presents his talk, “Sepharad’s Returns: Historical Sensibilities and the Politics of Inclusion.” Benjamin Hary (NYU Tel Aviv) and Alicia Campos (UAM/NYU) respond to Dr. McDonald and join him in discussion. 

 

 

Charles A. McDonald holds the Sava Ranisavljevic Postdoctoral Fellowship in Judeo-Spanish Studies at Northwestern University, where he is appointed in Spanish, Jewish Studies, and Anthropology. Before joining Northwestern, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Jewish Studies at Rice University. He received his PhD in anthropology and historical studies at the New School for Social Research, where he continues to serve as the Managing Director of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI). His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Posen Foundation, and the Center for Jewish History, among others. His most recent article, “Rancor: Sephardi Jews, Spanish Citizenship, and the Politics of Sentiment,” was published in Comparative Studies in Society and History. He is currently finishing his first book, Return to Sepharad, which is an experimental ethnography of the return of Jews and Judaism in contemporary Spain.

 

Professor Benjamin Hary is the Director of NYU Tel Aviv and a Professor at the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. He is the author of Multiglossia in Judeo-Arabic (1992), Translating Religion (2009) and Daily Life in Israel (2012, with R. Adler). He is also the editor and co-editor of Judaism and Islam (2000), Corpus Linguistics and Modern Hebrew (2003), and Esoteric and Exoteric Aspects in Judeo-Arabic Culture in 2006, in addition to numerous articles on Judeo-Arabic, and Arabic and Hebrew linguistics. His recent Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present (2018, with Sarah Benor) demonstrates his focused research on issues such as why and how Jews (and for that matter, Christians and Muslims as well) speak and write differently from people who are not Jews or Christians and Muslims. His research interests include Jewish language varieties in general and Judeo-Arabic in particular, Jews in the Islamic world, the politics of Arabic language use in Israeli society, corpus linguistics, Language and Religion, dialectology, and sociolinguistics. Hary is also the current President of the Israeli Association for the Study of Language and Society.

 

Alicia Campos Serrano is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and develops her work within the framework of African Studies and the Anthropology and History of International Relations. Her doctoral thesis was on the decolonization of Equatorial Guinea (published as De colonia a estado: Guinea Ecuatorial 1955-1968, CEPC, 2002). She has published widely on Spanish colonial history in Africa, oil extraction in the Gulf of Guinea, and the international relations of post-colonial African states. She is a member of the Grupo de Estudios Coloniales: Sáhara Occidental and the Grupo de Estudios de las Transformaciones de la Economía Mundial. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora, NYU and she is conducting research at the United Nations Headquarters on African diplomacy at international organizations.