Masterclass Mondays
Our hybrid series hosted by Columbia Global Center Amman connects Columbia University faculty online on Zoom with a live, in-person audience in Amman.
This series explores culture and creative practice — from the craft of filmmaking and the life of manuscripts to the ways we preserve and present our shared history.
Designed for the curious, join us for an evening of meaningful intellectual exchange. Each session brings together faculty insight and open discussion, creating space for ideas to be shared and explored across disciplines, geographies, and experiences.
Registration is open for all sessions. While the series is free to join, please reserve a spot in advance for each session as in-person space is limited.
Join us on July 6 for a session on Saving Culture - Occupying Museums in Palestine, featuring faculty Brian Boyd. For more information and to register, click here
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Featured faculty: Brian Boyd, Director, MA in Museum Anthropology; Co-Director, Center for Palestine Studies
Who decides what is worth keeping? This session examines how a community’s legacy is built through cultural preservation. From physical exhibitions to digital archives, discover what is selected, elevated, or left out, and how these choices shape the record we inherit. We will look at the relationships between museums and representations of the Nakba, the looting of property and antiquities from Palestinian villages and cities, and the journeys of these items to Israeli museums, kibbutzim, and cultural institutions. While bearing in mind concerns about using the epistemologies of the global north at the expense of indigenous frameworks, how can we conceptualize the obligations of a decolonialized museum for the Palestine context?
Hybrid, 6-8 p.m. Amman time
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Featured faculty: Rania Attieh, Award-winning filmmaker and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Film, School of the Arts
What transforms an idea into a compelling film? This session explores the craft of directing, from shaping narrative structure to developing visual storytelling and cinematic language, exploring how to make creative decisions that bring a film to life from concept to screen.
Hybrid, 6-8 p.m. Amman time
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Featured faculty: Matthew L. Keegan, Moinian Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures, Barnard College
Arabic manuscripts sometimes contain documentary evidence about the people who read or listened to the text in the form of attendance records and other marginalia. How do we interpret these sources? What can these sources tell us about the practices of reading? This session traces the life of a single manuscript of the Masari' al-'Ushshaq of al-Sarraj, a collection of poems and stories about love that was widely read in the late Abbasid and Mamluk eras.
Hybrid, 6-8 p.m. Amman time