Keynote Lecture: Aslı Iğsiz, "Rethinking Displacement and the Humanities in the Civilizationist Present"

Aslı Iğsız is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.

Trained as a comparatist, her work examines facets of the history of the present, examining the multiple connections between designated pasts and a given present. Specifically, Iğsız’s scholarship explores the interconnections between the repertoires of the humanities and demographic engineering projects, their afterlives, and the institutional, social, and academic interfaces generated in the process.

Building upon her first book, Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, which examined liberal and historicist humanism alongside the underlying racialized logics of population transfers, partitions, segregation, apartheid, and border walls, she is currently working on two projects: one on the notion of civilization and related social and cultural politics with demographic claims and territorial visions, and another one on post-1945 cultural politics and initiatives to reform Humanities curricula to counter fascism and racism.