Talk
In conjunction with Abbas Akhavan's exhibition cast for a folly, scholar Sara Farhan will deliver a talk drawn from her current research "Archive Fever." This project repositions Freud’s Thanatos (death drive) as interpreted by Jacques Derrida to contextualize the feverish obsession with "recovering" and "restoring" archives in regions experiencing conflict, specifically Iraq. Farhan frames this process as an orientalist pursuit to command historical narratives through the restructuring and transplanting of archives in occidental spaces.
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Biography
Sara Farhan is a social and cultural historian of the modern Middle East. She is an assistant professor at the Department of History at the University of Northern British Columbia. Her research traces the history of medicine, science, and technology in the modern Middle East, as well as the ethical and political implications of archives and cultural material acquisition.