Maya Mikdashimikdashi

Faculty Fellow
Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers
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Maya Mikdashi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her current research/manuscript focuses on law, citizenship, secularity, religious conversion, sexual difference, and the war on terror. She has been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow from 2014-2016 at Rutgers University, and a Faculty Fellow/Director of Graduate Studies, Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University (2012-2014).  She is a co-founding editor of Jadaliyya.com, co-director of the feature length documentary About Baghdad (2004) and co- founding member of filmmaking cooperative Quilting Point Productions. A film she co-conceptualized and co-wrote with Carlos Motta, deseos/raghbat, is currently playing in international art and film festivals.

How might we think about archival refusal–archives that are not history and archives that are absent or missing–in order to re-imagine the political possibilities of the present in a War on Terror era Middle East? This paper explores these questions from the vantage point of the archive and archivists at Lebanon's highest court, focusing on civil war era archival files.