2023 Fall Practitioner-in-Residence Program Workshop

Modern Nudes: Bodies, Representations, and Imaginations of the Middle East

To assume that “Arabs have never dealt with nudes,” is pure Orientalist fantasy. Yet, ongoing histories, displays, and even political debates assume this as a fact. While introducing students to one missing history of Middle Eastern creativity and modernity, this workshop will provide skills for searching out other intercultural histories and developing exhibition spaces that confront stereotypes and surpass fitting non-western art in. 

Our focus on the missing history of modern Middle Eastern nudes lets us explore why that history seems so improbable and how it relates to contests over “Arab” society today. For example, the 1920s-1960s nudes provide evidence of a proliferation of ideas about Islam that have been quashed not only through state bureaucracies but also through insensitive scholarship. While highlighting major artworks, the workshop tracks processes of institutionalization that marginalized women, defined modernity and sexuality in tandem, and, also, opened new avenues for piety.

This Practitioner-in-Residence workshop is part of the NYU Kevorkian Center's ongoing collaboration with the Global Engagement Initiative at the American University of Beirut.

Registration Deadline: September 11, 2023

Please submit this google form to register.

*NYU graduate students who want to take the course for credit must also register through Albert with the following course number: NEST-GA 3005: Topics in History and the Middle East: Practitioner-in-Residence 

Kirsten Scheid is Professor of Anthropology at the American University of Beirut, and affiliated faculty in Fine Arts and Art History. She holds a PhD in Anthropology of Art, with a designated focus on the modern Middle East, from Princeton University, and a BA from Columbia University, where she will be a guest lecturer in the Art History Department. Her exhibitions also include Jerusalem Actual and Possible: the 9th edition of the Jerusalem Show (Jerusalem, 2018), The Arab Nude: The Artist as Awakener (Beirut, 2016), and Historical

Modernisms in the Middle East (2008-2010) with four artist retrospectives, at the ArteEast Virtual Gallery. Scheid’s research has been supported by The Clark Art Institute, Williams College, L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her scholarly writing has appeared in Aggregate, Anthropology Now, ArtMargins, International Journal for Middle East Studies, MERIP, Museum Anthropology, and Jadaliyya. She has also co-founded a cultural resource center and an Arabic children’s book line (Hikayat walad min Bayrut 2004) in Beirut.