榴莲视频

Naseeb Shaheen Memorial Lecture Series

About The Shaheen Memorial Lecture Series

The Shaheen Memorial Lecture Series was established after the death, in 2009, of Dr. Naseeb Shaheen, who was a professor in the English Department at the University of 榴莲视频 for many years. Dr. Shaheen wrote extensively about early modern literature, chiefly Shakespeare. His books on biblical references in Shakespeare's plays (1999, 2002) and Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1976) remain the definitive work in this field. He also published a two-volume Pictorial History of Ramallah (Palestine) (1992, 2006). In addition to his scholarly work, Dr. Shaheen was a noted philanthropist and collector of pre-King James English Bibles. The Shaheen Memorial Lecture Series is sponsored by the Department of English and the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities. 

The Sixteenth Annual Naseeb Shaheen Memorial Lecture

Fall 2026 Lecture Series

Dr. Zahid R. Chaudhary, Princeton University
"What is Truth?"

Date: October 29th, 2026
Location: University Center River Room (300)
Reception: 5:30pm
Lecture: 6:00pm

We often hear that we are living through a crisis of truth. But what, exactly, do we mean by 鈥渢ruth鈥濃�攁nd what does it mean to call our moment 鈥減ost-truth鈥�? This lecture examines some of the defining symptoms of our contemporary crisis: moments when demonstrable facts seem to carry little weight, when lies circulate as entertainment, and when propaganda can openly announce itself as propaganda and still shape what we take to be real. Rather than simply asking whether we can distinguish truth from falsehood, the lecture asks what has happened to the cultural and political value of truth itself. What do changing practices of truth-telling reveal about the ways power, media, and political life now operate?

Zahid R. Chaudhary specializes in postcolonial studies, visual culture, and critical theory. His first book, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India, provides a historical and philosophical account of early photography in India, analyzing how aesthetic experiments in colonial photographic practice shed light on the changing nature of perception and notions of truth, memory, and embodiment. His second book, Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth (Fordham UP, 2025) is a psychosocial account of contemporary cultural politics, including conspiracy cultures, anti-democratic social movements, and new media networks. His third book (in progress), 鈥淚mpunity: Notes on a Global Tendency,鈥� analyzes juridical, economic, political, and aesthetic aspects of the practices of impunity from the Cold War to the present, from postcolonial states to the United States. 

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of English and Mapping Post-Truth Across the Disciplines Conference.

Past Shaheen Lecturers

9/25/2025	Dan Sinykin, Emory University 鈥淚t Is Difficult to Get the News from Poems: Close Reading and Artificial Intelligence鈥�
10/24/2024	Ayesha Hardison, University of Indiana, Bloomington "Some Notes on the Literature of the Civil Rights Movement: Maya Angelou's Reconsideration of History"
4/12/2024	Marjorie Garber, Harvard University "After 'After the Humanities'"
10/13/2022	Emily Lordi, Vanderbilt University "Bringing it Home: Whitney Houston's Black Creative Vision and Agency"
10/6/2022	Florence Dore, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "Modernism, Music, 榴莲视频"
11/18/2021	Rob Nixon, Princeton University "Slow Violence and Environmental Justice in 2021"
10/3/2019	Stephanie Burt, Harvard University  "Shipping Containers"
10/4/18	Hannibal Hamlin, Professor of English, Ohio State University "Seven Types of Allusion: Texts Talking with Texts from Shakespeare to the Present"
11/2/17	Yolanda Pierce, Professor and Dean, Howard University School of Divinity "I have shaken rivers out of my eyes: Black Poetry and Prophetic Rage"
10/20/16	William J. Maxwell, Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis "Born-Again, Seen-Again James Baldwin: State Surveillance, Afro-Pessimism, and the Literary History of Black Lives Matter."
10/22/15	Nicholas Watson, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English, Harvard University "The Word of God in the Mother Tongue, or Why most of what we assume about the history of Bible translation is wrong."
10/2/14	Paul Stevens, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern Literature and Culture, University of Toronto "Churchill's War Horse: Children's Literature and the Pleasures of War"
11/21/13	Achsah Guibbory, Ann Whitney Olin Prof. of English, Barnard College "British Israelism: Three Centuries of a Forgotten History"
10/18/12	Katherine Bassard, Professor of English, Virginia Commonwealth University "Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible"
11/10/11	Robert Alter, Professor of Hebrew Language and Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley "The King James Bible and the Question of Eloquence"
9/21/10	Debora Shuger, Distinguished Professor of English, UCLA "The Girls of Little Gidding: The Forgotten Masterpiece of Radical Feminism"

 

PAST SHAHEEN SYMPOSIA

10/26/17       "Conversations Across Concentrations"
10/14/16       "Reading Resistance: Bodies, Lessons, Movements"
10/16/15       "Keepin' it Real: The Languages of Authenticity"
9/26/14         "Producing Heroes"