CMES Seminar: A Tale of Three Brothers - Ezra, Meir and Hayyawi Sawda’I and the History of an Iraqi Jewish Cinema Business

Speaker Bio

Pelle Valentin Olsen is Associate Professor of History. He is a cultural, social, and transnational historian of the modern Middle East. His research and teaching focus on the history of leisure, labor, gender, sexuality, popular culture, and cultural production. He focuses specifically on Iraq, but simultaneously explores transregional and transnational connections, highlighting everyday perspectives and voices often left out by traditional political and state-centered histories. He received his PhD with honors from the University of Chicago in 2020. He came to Bergen via the University of Oslo, where he worked as a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow on a project about the history of cinema in Iraq.  

He is currently preparing a book manuscript entitled Idle Days and Nights: Leisure, Time, and Modernity in Iraq. The book argues that leisure in twentieth century Iraq became one of several frontiers upon which the individual and citizen came into contact with, confronted, and interacted with new ideas about gender, sexuality, class, time, labour, and discipline. Examining the new institutions, practices, and distractions of leisure that took up increasing space and time in the life of Iraqis, the book explores uncharted aspects of both modern Iraqi and Middle Eastern history.  

This seminar is part of the CMES Seminar Series.