Cyrus Schayegh, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies at the Princeton University (USA) — 18, 30, 31/05 et 01-02/06/2017

Professeur associé à l’université de Princeton, Cyrus Schayegh rejoindra le département d’histoire de l’Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement (Genève) à la rentrée 2017. Sa thèse (Columbia University, 2004) a été publiée sous le titre Who Is Knowledgeable, Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900-1950 (California University Press, 2009). Son prochain livre (The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World) paraîtra chez Harvard University Press à l’automne 2017. Cyrus Schayegh est également co-directeur de deux ouvrages collectifs : A Global Middle East: Mobility, Materiality andCulture in the Modern Age, 1880-1940 (Tauris, 2014) ; The Routledge History Handbook of the Middle East Mandates (Routledge, 2015).

Cyrus Schayegh, an Associate Professor at Princeton, will join the Graduate Institute, Geneva, this fall. He has inter alia authored The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard UP, fall 2017). His current projects include “Globalization meets decolonization: urban links,” on Beirut, Dakar, and Singapore; “‘Anti-Geneva:’ European inter-imperial networks, 1925-35;” and “Fundamental historical questions.”

Conférences :

• Jeudi 18 mai 2017, 10h-12h, EHESS-Marseille, Centre de la Vieille-Charité

Globalization meets decolonization: the urban linkage, 1940s-70s

In the 1940s-70s, a few city hubs, including Beirut, Dakar, and Singapore, performed a distinct function in the world: each linked multiple recently decolonized countries with international trade, finance, communication, transport, and knowledge circuits. Fledgling countries still needed those cities’ links, and outside actors needed them to access decolonized countries. This also made them socio-culturally hybrid meeting places – self-described “bridges” – for actors from near and far. In sum, they formed a specific type of “global city.”

• Mardi 30 mai 2017, 14h-16h, EHESS (salle 12), 105 bd Raspail, 75006 Paris

Deprovincializing the U.S. Presidency: Views from the Third World, with Special Attention to the Case of John F. Kennedy

Dans le cadre du séminaire du CENA « Recherches nord-américanistes »

John F. Kennedy’s interest in the Third World has been oft-noted. This talk looks in the opposite direction. I ask what the history of the perception and treatment of the U.S. president as a, if not the, global president is, and how JFK fits into that history, especially as decolonization now interplayed with, and globalized, the Cold War, and as electronic media, including TV, rapidly changed around that time, too.

• Mercredi 31 mai 2017, 14h-16h, ENS (salle d’histoire), 45 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris

The Empire Strikes Back: Cold War Iran in the global 1970s

Dans le cadre du séminaire d’introduction à l’histoire du Moyen-Orient contemporain

From the late 1960s, Iran’s international status rose rapidly. In tandem, it globally projected a geo-cultural concept, tamaddon (civilization), with an imperial subtext. Harping on the «fact» that «the West» had lost its moral compass, and exploiting that the U.S. and Soviet centres of the two hitherto leading ideologies, liberal capitalism and communism, were somewhat destabilized from the late 1960s, Iran presented itself as an old-new beacon to the world.

• Jeudi 1^er juin 2017, 13h-15h, EHESS (salle 13), 105 bd Raspail, 75006 Paris

The socio-spatial making of the modern world: trans-spatialization as a new heuristic model

Dans le cadre de la réunion mensuelle du CETOBaC

The primary feature of the socio-spatial making of the modern world is the intertwinement of cities, regions, states, and global circuits in faster changing and more mutually transformative ways than before in history. This process – transpatialization – is not empirical unit, but a heuristic umbrella. Its use makes sense because the intertwinements it bundles evolved in tandem, and because it does not assign ultimate primacy to any one process or to any one scale such as ‘the global,’ ‘the national, or ‘the local.’

• Vendredi 2 juin, 15h-19h, EHESS (salle M. & D. Lombard), 96 bd Raspail 75006 Paris

Reflections on ‘scale’

Dans le cadre du séminaire Savoirs, institutions, économies. Histoires connectées et dynamiques globales. Knowledge, Institutions, Economies. Connected histories and global dynamics