Klaeber Court, our temporary home during Folwell's remodel, is indeed far far away from Nolte Hall. Thus I was delighted to get an email from Greta Bliss detailing some of her activities as an Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. She gave her presentation to colleagues on her dissertation project, (entitled "Untranslating the Maghreb: Reckoning with Gender in Literature and Film from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia") and got useful feedback from fellows in multiple social science and humanities disciplines, which she put to use for a paper she gave last month at the Middle Eastern Studies Conference in San Diego. There she presented on the films A Door to the Sky by Farida Benlyazid and Bedwin Hacker by Nadia El Fani.
She writes:
IAS is a great environment in which to push my working questions further while being "haunted" (in a good way) by an array of methodological approaches and disciplinary concerns. Colleagues doing inspiring work in fields from Geography to Performance Studies have asked strange and stimulating questions, helping me think more extensively about the contours and content of my project--and where I want to go with it.
Working with questions from the different disciplinary angles she's encountered this semester, she'll be finishing up a dissertation chapter, "Narrative as Fault-Line in Maïssa Bey's Surtout ne te retourne pas (2005)" on which she'll also be presenting a paper at the ACLA conference in Vancouver this coming Spring...
Write us again and tell us how it goes, Greta!
