Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.

Book Launch & Talk: Andrew Gayed, Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art

March 21, 2024 at 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM

Location:Club SAW, 67 Nicholas Street, Ottawa, ON, K1N 7B9
Cost:Free
Audience:Alumni, Current Students, Faculty, Staff and Faculty

Please join us on Thursday, March 21, 2024 at Club SAW (67 Nicholas St, Ottawa) for a talk and Q&A with Dr. Andrew Gayed, PhD about his new book, Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art, published with the University of Washington Press.

Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art interrogates the performances of queerness, Arabness, and their intersections by reflecting on modern sexual identity, its relationship to colonialism, and how contemporary queer visual artists disrupt linear identity narratives.

Dr. Gayed will give a short talk about the book, followed by a discussion with respondents, Dr. Ming Tiampo (Art History) and Dr. Carolyn Ramzy (Sociology and Anthropology). A Q&A will close the event.

The event will take place from 6:30 pm – 8pm with doors open at 6pm.

Books will be available for sale at the event courtesy of Octopus Books.

About the Author

Dr. Andrew Gayed is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at OCAD University where he teaches courses on global contemporary art. An Egyptian-Canadian art historian, Dr. Gayed has an academic background in diasporic art, queer visual culture, and Middle Eastern art histories. Before joining OCADU, Dr. Gayed was the Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Gayed holds a PhD in Art History and Visual Culture from York University, an M.A. in Art History from Carleton University, and a B.F.A. in Visual Arts from the University of Ottawa. Dr. Gayed’s scholarship has appeared in books, including the Routledge Handbook of Middle Eastern Diasporas, and Unsettling Canadian Art History, and peer-reviewed journals including Journal for Studies in Art Education.

About the Respondents

Dr. Ming Tiampo is Full Professor of Art History, co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis, and cross-appointed to the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture. She is a specialist of transnational modernisms, with a particular interest in worlding, global microhistories, circulation, and comparative diasporas. She has published on Japanese modernism, global modernisms, contemporary diasporic art in Canada, the connections between Inuit and Japanese prints, and post-imperial histories of the UK and France.

Dr. Carolyn Ramzy is an ethnomusicologist who focuses on Egyptian Christian popular music in Egypt and a growing diaspora in the U.S. and Canada. Specifically, Dr. Ramzy examines how Orthodox music culture shapes the Coptic community’s gendered subjectivities, and the use of virtual technologies to challenge traditional understanding of (holy) belonging, sexuality, and faith. This work builds on Dr. Ramzy’s dissertation, “The Politics of (Dis)Engagement: Coptic Christian Revival and the Performative Politics of Song” (2014) that followed a powerful religious revival that used popular song to combat, and at times, comply with structural marginalization as well as sectarian conflict in Egypt and abroad. Dr. Ramzy also traces how these song and hymns, now translated for the diaspora, facilitate important conversations about Coptic experiences of racialization, assimilation, and belonging in an American and Canadian diaspora.