NYC Event: Juan Cole

Iona College I will be giving a talk at Iona College on Thursday, Oct. 13, 2016 at 7PM. The talk will be on Muslims in America, Islamophobia, and the Presidential election.

Are the Arts Essential?. Specialists will take the customary deliberations about arts and culture into new, substantive, and shaping discussion. Beyond “leisure” or “entertainment,” beyond art’s personal impacts, beyond contributions to tourism, community building, or the classroom, do the arts and culture power progress? This convening will ask if (and how) the arts provide structures and strategies for social change, how they help define peoples and nations, how they deal with actual matters of life and death. Are the arts essential in ways that economics and medicine and politics are? If so, how is this manifest? What are the theoretical…

I am pleased to announce I have joined Our Shared Future as a member of the Advisory Board and as part of their Opinion Leaders Network. Our Shared Future aims to improve the public conversation about Muslims and intercultural relations in the US by providing hard facts, evidence-based arguments, and research findings by reputable academics and experts.