FTVM Graduate Talks & Speaker Series 2021 

Each semester, our "graduate student talk" venue provides our graduate students with the opportunity of sharing the results of their research with their peers and with faculty members, and of receving constructive feedback.

Our monthly speaker series brings a diverse range of prominent scholars to campus, often combining research presentations with professionalization sessions for graduates. 

In this year-end gradutate student talk, Tanite introduced Egyptian Melodrama as a genre that thrives on complexities -- especially in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s era of “reform and modernization” (1954) -- by putting women on the forefront, as representatives of a nation that was much oriented towards conservative Islamic traditions.

How did Nasser’s “modernization” of Egypt clash with religious traditionalism that is so much integrated within the nation’s cultural identity, on-screen, via gender roles? And how does the nuclear family and motherhood (or its absence), play into this?