Hafez Kotain is the Percussion Director at Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, Keystone State Boychoir and The Arab Percussion Ensemble at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a master percussionist fluent in both Arab and Latin rhythms–a fluency he honed in his native countries of Venezuela and Syria. In 2013 he received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a prestigious award given to Philadelphia artists of exemplary talent. He began playing the doumbek at the age of seven years, made his first stage performance at nine years, winning the national percussion competitions in Syria for five consecutive years. Kotain first began his career as an educator, teaching a variety of percussion styles to dedicated students, musicians and music teachers. In 2010 and 2011, Kotain taught at the Arab Music Retreat led by the internationally acclaimed Arab music performer, Simon Shaheen. He has performed with Lebanese composer, singer, and oud master Marcel Khalife and Al Mayadine Ensemble in their latest US and Canada tour for “Fall of the Moon: An Homage to the Poet Mahmoud Darwish.” Kotain has also toured with singer George Wassouf in Canada and the US, and has performed with acclaimed artist Sting, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Artolerance, Arabesque Music Ensemble, composer Kareem Roustom and with actor and tenor Mandy Patinkin.

The 94th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place in Philadelphia on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. The meeting is jointly hosted by the Medieval Academy of America, Bryn Mawr College, Delaware Valley Medieval Association, Haverford College, St. Joseph’s University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Villanova University. This year’s meeting spotlights the “global turn” in medieval studies, treating the Middle Ages as a broad historical and cultural phenomenon that encompasses the full extent of Europe as well as the Middle East, southern and eastern Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The program will feature three plenary addresses and seventy concurrent sessions, representing a range of threads, including “Expanding Geographies of the Middle Ages,” “Approaches to Historiography,” “Interfaith Encounters: Real and Imagined,” “Gender Matters,” “Intersections Across Disciplines and Borders,” Digitizing the Global Middle Ages,” “Transmission and Technologies of Knowledge,” and cover topics addressing the natural world, the arts, material culture, literary studies, legal traditions, race and ethnicity in the global Middle Ages, to name a few. Roundtables, hands-on workshops, and lightning talks will highlight concepts and practices in K-12 education, diversity and race in the medieval studies, pedagogy and research in global medieval contexts, and practices and ethics of digital scholarship.