News and Announcements

Prof. Ousseina Alidou has been awarded The African Studies Association 2025 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize for her latest work, Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change: Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Media in Hausa Society across Borders (University of Michigan Press, 2024).  

In their commendation, the Selection Committee stated that they

…found Protest Arts to be an important book that reimagines the importance of gender to the study of popular arts to highlight how creative works engage with advocacy and position creatives as activists who uplift marginalized voices and open up conversations around difficult topics like gender-based violence, child marriage, and health inequities. [The book] offers a compelling theorization from marginalized perspectives, examining a vibrant collection of artworks and performances to illuminate the capacity of art to challenge dominant elite narratives. The book also makes a significant contribution by complicating assumptions about religion and placing emphasis on intraregional conversations around faith, vulnerability, and social change. This is an innovative book that thinks through the complications of resistance and is deeply attentive to the dynamism of popular culture.

The book provides a model for those seeking to understand the defiance of male domination through locally and regionally inflected feminist perspectives. In addition to showcasing how women artists engage in political work beyond formal politics, it also examines how men articulate their responsibilities in challenging patriarchal structures. The book excels in its detailed exploration and sophisticated analysis of the visual, performative, and lyrical components of artistic expression. Through its study of popular art traditionally seen as mundane, the book demonstrates how women’s artistic innovations serve as vital sites for understanding gendered power dynamics and important engines for social transformation. It was truly a pleasure to read.

Prof. Anjali Nerlekar’s The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures (co-edited with Ulka Anjaria, Oxford UP 2024) has been shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize for Editions, Anthologies, and Collections published in 2023 or 2024.

The Hindi-Urdu Language and Culture Association, otherwise known as HULCA, is a space for students who are interested in Hindi and Urdu languages. Students are presented with an opportunity to learn the language, explore its literature, and celebrate its culture while connecting with other Hindi-Urdu enthusiasts. Students are able to engage and explore both languages outside of the classroom and create social connections with their peers. Their next event, “Khanay Shanay Night,” is a recipe scrapbooking night highlighting desi cuisines. Reminisce on your favorite foods on Wednesday, March 27th at 8:00 PM. The meeting will take place at the Cook Student Center in the Merle V. Adams room. Biryani will be served!

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin is holding a Middle Eastern Science Fiction translation contest open to all translators of languages from the MENA region.

The winner will receive $1000 and the winning translation will be published in the fall issue of Y’alla: A Texan Journal of Middle Eastern Literature. Y’alla is a biannual publication that features fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction translated from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, and other languages of the MENA region. The contest deadline is July 1st, 2024.

Read more: Middle East Science Fiction Translation Contest

The Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South, at the John W. Kluge Center of the US Library of Congress, focuses on the history and cultures of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia and Oceania. Professor Alidou will be using the immense foreign language collections in the specialized reading rooms of the Library of Congress to pursue her research on "Life and Being Human in West Sahel African Women's Cultural and Literary Narratives."

Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change: Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Media in Hausa Society across Borders (University of Michigan Press) examines how a new generation of novelists, popular songwriters, and musical performers in contemporary Hausa society are using their creative works to effect social change. This book empathizes with the reality of the forms of oppression, social isolation, and marginalization that vulnerable and underprivileged communities in contemporary Hausa society in Northern Nigeria and the Niger Republic have been experiencing from the mid-1980s to the present. It also highlights the ways in which song performances produce an intertextual dialogue between their lyrics and visual dramatic narratives to raise awareness against social ills, including gender-based violence and social inequalities exposed by biomedical health pandemics such as HIV and COVID-19. In these creative Hausa narratives, the oppressed and marginalized have agency in articulating their own experiences.

Read more: Professor Ousseina Alidou's new book published on International Women's Day

The Institute for Research on Women is dedicated to fostering interdisciplinary feminist scholarship, activism, and community at Rutgers. Programming includes a weekly seminar for faculty and graduate students, the IRW Distinguished Lecture Series, and an undergraduate learning community—all tied to an annual theme. In 2024-2025 the IRW Seminar theme is “Knowing Otherwise: Haunting, Conjuring, and Spectral Encounters.”