The Bobst-AUB Short-term Faculty Exchange Program sponsors up to two faculty members to visit Princeton University for three to four days. The visit entails meetings with students and faculty, where the selected applicants will be expected to deliver a talk, as well as discuss their ongoing research with the Princeton community.
Eligibility: Full-time FAS professorial-rank faculty members in the social sciences (Economics, Education, History, PSPA, Psychology, and SOAM). Priority will be given to junior faculty and first-time applicants.
Application materials: Apply online. Please upload in PDF: 1. CV; and 2. Abstract of the talk to be delivered at Princeton University, including a list of Princeton faculty that you would like to meet and discuss your work with.
Application deadline: TBA
Contact: [email protected]
2026-27
- Against Symbolic Liberalism: A Plea for Dialogical Sociology
Sari Hanafi, Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES)
Based
in my book Against Symbolic Liberalism: A Plea for Dialogical Sociology
and in an era of deepening polarization, I examine how social
scientists often reproduce the very injustices they seek to challenge,
taking entrenched positions while dismissing alternative perspectives. I
introduce the concept of symbolic liberalism – a contradiction in which
individuals espouse classical liberal principles, yet act in
politically illiberal ways. This, I argue, has exacerbated the
pathologies of late modernity: authoritarianism, economic precarity and
environmental destruction, now all unfolding in a climate where
reasonable debate seems increasingly impossible. Examining key
flashpoints of contemporary polarization, I critique how symbolic
liberalism inflates the universality of rights while simultaneously
narrowing the space for dialogue. Rather than this rigid ideological
stance, he calls for a dialogical turn, a renewed public sphere where
diverse conceptions of the “(common) good” engage in genuine
conversation. Blending political and moral philosophy with sociological
critique, I offer a path forward in an age when intellectual exchange is
more necessary, yet also more imperiled, than ever.
Between Justification and Silence: Memory, Violence, and the Afterlife of the Lebanese Civil War
Makram Rabah, Department of History and Archaeology
2025
marks fifty years since the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War
(1975–1990), yet the conflict remains unresolved not only politically,
but narratively. Competing interpretations of the war continue to shape
Lebanese public life, with no consensual account of responsibility,
violence, or meaning. While some former participants still justify their
wartime actions, others have retreated into apolitical silence or adopt
a reflective, often ambivalent, stance toward their past.
This
talk draws on more than seventy in-depth oral history interviews
conducted between 2020 and 2023 with men and women from different
regions of Lebanon, as well as members of the Lebanese diaspora. Rather
than treating memory as a transparent record of the past, the lecture
approaches it as a social, political, and moral practice—one through
which individuals reinterpret violence, negotiate responsibility, and
construct coherence in retrospect.
By analyzing how interviewees
narrate their experiences, justify or disavow participation in violence,
and relate their personal trajectories to collective histories, the
lecture examines the ways in which memory both challenges and reproduces
dominant narratives of the war. It highlights recurring patterns of
justification, silence, moral reckoning, and displacement, arguing that
these memory formations reflect Lebanon’s unresolved conflicts and
persistent political fractures.
Ultimately, this talk asks to
what extent oral testimony can help us rethink—and potentially
rewrite—the history of the Lebanese Civil War. It argues that memory
should not be treated merely as a supplement to archival history, but as
a contested field in its own right—one that reveals how the war
continues to shape subjectivities, political imaginaries, and the
boundaries of the sayable. In this sense, the struggle over memory is
not a postwar phenomenon but one of the war’s enduring legacies.
- Staying with the Damage: Remaining Ruins in South Lebanon
Yasmine Khayyat, Department of English
Building on my first book, War Remains: Ruination and Resistance in Lebanon (Syracuse University Press, 2023), this talk returns to South Lebanon, physically and literarily, after Israel’s systemic assault on South Lebanon in 2023, to examine how ruins continue to structure everyday life, memory, and resistance. Rather than marking an endpoint or a new phase, the latest cycle of widespread Israeli destruction and ecocide in South Lebanon intensifies earlier patterns of damage, repair, and suspension, reinforcing ruination as a persistent mode of habitation and its corollary resistance as shaped by repetition rather than rupture.
Drawing on long-term fieldwork, memorial site visits, and close attention to material environments and ecocritical Arabic poetics, the talk traces how homes, buildings, infrastructures, and landscapes damaged across successive wars, remain caught in prolonged states of incompletion—repaired without restoration, cleared without resolution, inhabited without security. These material conditions foreground ruination not as a passive residue but as an active force that shapes social relations, spatial practices, and forms of resistance grounded in endurance. Within this terrain, monumentality emerges not through grand commemorative projects but through provisional and fragmentary forms: partial repairs, modest markers, absences that refuse substitution, and defiant poetry that emerges from the rubble. These material and metaphorical monuments do not stabilize historical meaning; they register exposure, loss, and the refusal of closure. By situating monuments within ruined environments rather than against them, the talk argues that monumentality in South Lebanon is inseparable from ruination itself.
Central to this analysis is an understanding of ruins as sites through which forms of resistance are enacted and sustained. Rubble, damaged materials, and residual infrastructures are also inhabited, repurposed, and left unresolved in ways that contest humanitarian, reconstruction, and security frameworks. Decisions to repair partially, to repurpose damaged structures, or to allow ruins to remain visible articulate practices of refusal that interrupt dominant narratives of recovery and progress. In this sense, ruins operate as nodes where endurance, memory, and political presence converge.
By approaching ruins as active sites of resistance rather than passive residues of destruction, the talk situates South Lebanon within broader debates on how material remains mediate power, constraint, and agency in landscapes shaped by protracted violence and uneven governance. These ruined environments do not simply register loss; they enable forms of staying, storytelling, adapting, and persisting that challenge the temporal and spatial regimes imposed by war and reconstruction alike. Ruination thus emerges not as managed waste, but as a material and literary condition through which resistance is grounded in everyday practices of inhabitation and remaining through rhyme and rhythm. By bringing ruination, waste, and monumentality into a single analytic frame, the talk challenges linear narratives of destruction and recovery. Extending the arguments of War Remains, it proposes ruination as an ethics of staying with damage—one that resists narratives of recovery and progress while underscoring the political and ethical significance of remaining.