Please join us for a talk by Professor Max Weiss (Princeton University), who will be discussing his new book on cultural production in Ba’thist Syria, Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Baʻthist Syria (Stanford University Press, 2022). Revolutions Aesthetic reconceptualizes contemporary Syrian politics, authoritarianism, and cultural life. Engaging rich original sources—novels, films, and cultural periodicals—Weiss highlights themes crucial to the making of contemporary Syria: heroism and leadership, gender and power, comedy and ideology, surveillance and the senses, witnessing and temporality, and death and the imagination. Revolutions Aesthetic places front and center the struggle around aesthetic ideology that has been key to the constitution of state, society, and culture in Syria over the course of the past fifty years.

Lunch will be served.  Any graduate students would like a copy of his book, please contact muhdavis@ucsc.edu.