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The Center for Middle Eastern Studies is pleased to present
Zena Agha
PhD Candidate, Newcastle University; Visiting Fellow, CMES
This talk examines the geographical imaginaries of mapping practices in Palestine-Israel and the potential of counter-mapping in a project of decolonisation. Informed by the extensive archive at the Harvard Map Collection, scholarship around the censorship of satellite imagery and the presentation of destroyed villages through interactive maps, the talk examines the ways we have (re)imagined and (re)drawn the land over the past 100 years, particularly around the partition of Palestine in 1948. It takes as its case study the destroyed village of Al-Dalhamiyya on the Israel-Jordan border and examines what counter-mapping and return look like in a destroyed place.
Zena Agha is a Palestinian-Iraqi writer, poet and multi-disciplinary artist from London. She is the author of Objects from April and May (Hajar Press, April 2022) and has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Zena’s short film, ‘The Place that is Ours’ premiered on Nowness in November 2021 and was selected for the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival among several others. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The Independent, Foreign Affairs, The Margins, NPR and El País. Zena previously served as the US Policy Fellow for Al-Shabaka: the Palestinian Policy Network, and is currently a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington D.C. She is currently an ESRC-funded doctoral candidate at Newcastle University exploring colonial cartography in Palestine and a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
Contact: Liz Flanagan