Inaugural Lecture Series: Professors Rachel Harrison and Dina Matar
Key information
- Date
- Time
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6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Gallery
- Room
- SOAS Gallery Lecture Theatre
- Event type
- Lecture & Event highlights
About this event
Professor Rachel Harrison from the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics and Professor Dina Matar from the Department of Media Studies deliver their inaugural lectures on two different and distinctive themes.
Professor Harrison's inaugural lecture is titled Inviting Interconnections: How Thai Cultural Studies Makes a Difference to the Wider World. This lecture explores what we can learn more widely from Thai cultural studies, reflecting on its relevance to world literature, world cinema and postcoloniality. How does it shape our appreciation of cultural difference, intercultural communication, genders and sexualities? And what basis does it provide for new theoretical perspectives?
Professor Matar's inaugural lecture is titled Unsettling the field of media and communication studies during Genocide. This lecture addresses the challenges the heavily mediated livestreamed genocide in Gaza poses to the critical study and practices of media and communications. Matar suggests that the genocide constitutes a seismic temporality that has forced many Palestinian scholars in the West to come to terms with the embedded and normalised racism in our field and to engage in the slow, necessary, anti-colonial project of unsettling it. It is also a moment when the so-called 'free' media dutifully occlude and obscure mass violence, enabling and reproducing liberal democracies by justifying some lives grievable and others not quite human enough, and therefore dispensable. The lecture begins with Professor Matar's academic journey to and in the field before addressing its limitations.
About the speakers
Professor Rachel Harrison
Rachel Harrison is Professor of Thai Cultural Studies and Head of the Doctoral School at SOAS University of London. She convenes the MA Cultural Studies programme in the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies within the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. Her research focuses on modern Thai literature and cinema, gender, sexuality, popular culture, and the cultural impacts of Thailand’s post-colonial relationship with the West. She is currently leading an interdisciplinary project linking culture, well-being, and public health with medical practice in Northeast Thailand. Her teaching develops cultural studies theory from Asian, African, and Middle Eastern perspectives. She also edits the quarterly journal South East Asia Research.
Professor Dina Matar
Dina Matar is Professor of Political Communication and Arab Media at SOAS. Her research explores the intersection of politics and communication, media and conflict, cultural politics, diasporas, activist cultures, and media and memory studies in the Middle East. She co-founded the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication and served as editor of Media, War and Conflict (2021–2023). Her books include What it Means to be Palestinian (2010), The Hizbullah Phenomenon (2012), and Producing Palestine (2024). She co-edits the Political Communication in the Middle East and North Africa series and the SOAS Palestine Studies series. Before academia, she worked as a foreign correspondent.
SOAS Inaugural Lecture Series
The SOAS Inaugural Lecture Series recognises that research is an integral part of university life and offers a platform for newly appointed and promoted professors to share their significant contributions to their field while also showcasing the overall strength, depth, and vitality of research at SOAS.
