Today I am at the American University of Beirut for a one-day conference looking back on the impact of Edward Said’s seminal and polemical Orientalism, first published in 1978. The conference, “Orientalism and its Critics,” is sponsored by The Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Philosophy. Here is the line-up, for those who want to pseudo-twitter the event.

9:30 Basim Musallam (Cambridge University)
A First Reading of Orientalism

10:30 Daniel Varisco (Hofstra university)
Orientalism’s Wake: The Ongoing Politics of a Polemic

12:00 Ahmad Dallal (Georgetown University)
Cultural History and the Persistence of Orientalism: The Case of the 18th Century

1:00 Robert Irwin (University of London)
Pulp Orientalism

4:00 Robert Spencer (University of Manchester)
The War on Terror and the Backlash against Orientalism

5:00 Sadiq Jalal al-Azm (University of Damascus)
Political Said

My talk will be published this fall in a special issue of Viewpoints, an online forum of the Middle East Institute. It is a follow-up to my 2007 book, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid, published by the University of Washington Press.