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Archive for January 27th, 2016

Shii News – Academic Items

1. Workshop: “Holistic Approaches to the Study of Early Islam and the Late Antique World”, Indiana University, Bloomington, 15-17 April 2016

The workshop invites scholars of late antique Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Mandaeanism, Buddhism and other religious communities to IU to work with scholars of early Islam.

Deadline for abstracts: 15 February 2016. Information: https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/106661/workshop-holistic-approaches-study-early-islam-and-late-antique

2. Postgraduate Symposium: “Muslims in the UK and Europe”, University of Cambridge, UK, 13-15 May 2016

The aim is to bring together graduate students from British, European and American universities to present their research, discuss their findings and engage in debate about the issues that face Muslims in the European context. Topics vary widely, from Sufism to Salafism, from charity to burial rites, religious travel to therapy, Islamophobia, deradicalisation initiatives and more.

Deadline for abstracts: 28 February 2016. Information: www.cis.cam.ac.uk/activities/annual-graduate-symposia/

3. Workshop: “The Main Intellectual Currents in the Late Ottoman Empire”, University of Basel, Switzerland, 20-21 May 2016

This two-day workshop will concentrate on the major intellectual currents of late Ottoman history. The main thread of the workshop will follow intellectual history in a broad sense, but other topics including social, religious, and political history will receive some coverage as well.

Deadline for registration: 15 March 2016. Information: https://nahoststudien.unibas.ch/fileadmin/orientsem/user_upload/redaktion/Dokumente_MUBIT/Mubit_Call_for_Applications_Hanioglu_1.1.pdf

4. Fourth International Congress of Turkology: “Turkic Peoples through the Ages and Lands”, University of Warsaw, 21-23 September 2016

The main area of interest will be contemporary studies and research on the history, culture and language of Turkey and Turkish (Turkic) peoples, as well as lands they inhabit now and in the past. This year we would like to continue the discussion on the development of Turkic studies and their methods, theoretical basis for research, promotion of research results, as well as teaching Turkic languages and cultures of Turkic peoples.

Deadline for abstracts: 31 March 2016. Information: www.orient.uw.edu.pl/turk_conf/4KT_CallForPapers_eng.htm

5. Conference: “The Levant and Europe: Shipping and Trade. Networks of People and Knowledge”, Levantine Heritage Foundation, London, 2-4 November 2016

This conference will emphasize the theme of trade as the central dynamic in the creation of a Levantine world, with complex economic networks giving rise to equally complex social, cultural, political, and material interactions and syntheses.

Deadline for abstracts: 1 February 2016. Information: http://humweb.ucsc.edu/mediterraneanseminar/news/index.php?id=606

6. Training Programme on Ottoman and Archival Studies, London Centre for Social Studies, 23-27 May 2016

The Programme is designed to fill the gap for much-needed short-term programmes aimed at helping researchers and students working in the field of Ottoman Studies. As a result, the Programme will give you access to the finest Ottoman resources available in the UK and guide you on key archival research methods.

Deadline for registration: 29 April 2016. Information: www.socialstudies.org.uk/Events/Training/23589/Training-Programme-on-Ottoman-and-Archival-Studies

7. Articles on “The Middle East after the Arab Spring” for Issue of “The Canadian Journal for Middle East Studies, The Researcher“

We are interested in articles that focus on the Middle East in a wide range of contexts, and encourage articles from humanities and social science perspectives. “The Researcher“ engages in serious, scholarly exploration of the forms, representations, meanings, and historical influences of radical social movements.

Deadline for submission: 30 March 2016. Information: https://submissions.scholasticahq.com/sites/the-canadian-journal-for-middle-east-studies/post/38

8. Florida State University – Postdoctoral Associate – Middle East
History
http://www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=52482

9. La prochaine séance du séminaire “Sociétés, politiques et cultures du monde iranien” se tiendra le jeudi 4 février 2016de 17 h à 19 h,à l’Université Sorbonne nouvelle – Paris 3, centre Censier, 13 rue de Santeuil, salle 410 (4^e étage), Paris.

Nous accueillerons Jean-Pierre Digard, ethnologue, directeur de recherche au CNRS émérite, Mondes iranien et indien : « Questions épistémologiques autour d’Une épopée tribale en Iran (CNRS Éditions, 2015) ».

Nous vous attendons nombreux !

Matteo De Chiara (Inalco), Denis Hermann (CNRS), Fabrizio Speziale (Paris 3 – CNRS), Julien Thorez (CNRS).

10. Lecture – Burak Erdim, “”The Academical State: Rethinking the American Campus in the Cold War Middle East” (UVA, 8 Feb)

TJSAH (Thomas Jefferson Society of Architectural Historians) is hosting Burak Erdim (MArh ’04, MArch ’05, PhD ’12) on Monday, February 8, at 6 pm in Campbell 153. His lecture is titled “The Academical State: Rethinking the American Campus in the Cold War Middle East.” Reception will follow. We hope you can join us!

-Thomas Jefferson Society of Architectural Historians, University of Virginia

Précis:

Recent studies of the postwar university indicate that the reorganization of, for instance, Harvard University’s School of Fine Arts by Joseph Hudnut and Walter Gropius, was part of a broader reconceptualization of the American university and campus during the first half of the twentieth century. This lecture examines the establishment of the Middle East Technical University in Turkey in 1956 as the most ambitious and comprehensive manifestation of the ideas that were changing the university both here and abroad. While James B. Conant and Clark Kerr worked in a rigorous but piecemeal way to transform the American university at home, a group of architects and administrators from the University of Pennsylvania had the opportunity to design the ultimate postwar university from the ground up and interestingly within the political context of the Cold War in the Middle East.

11. The “Dangerous Classes” in the Middle East and North Africa

Conference: 26 January 2017

Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford

Call for Papers

The concept of the “dangerous classes” was born in mid-nineteenth century Europe and became famous after the publication in 1872 in New York of a book with the same title by the American social reformer Charles Loring Brace. The “dangerous classes,” the lumpenproletariat of Marx and Engels, described all those who had fallen out of the working classes into the lower depths of the new industrial and urban social environments, and survived there by their wits and by various amoral, disreputable or criminal strategies. They included beggars and vagrants, gypsies, pickpockets and burglars, prostitutes and courtesans, discharged soldiers, ex-prisoners, tricksters, drug-dealers; the unemployed or unemployable, indeed every type of the criminal and marginal, and were drawn from among women as well as men, and juveniles as well as adults. Such representatives of the “dangerous classes” were well-represented in literature, notably by Zola, Dickens and Victor Hugo in the nineteenth century and Brecht in the twentieth, and in popular culture of all kinds.

The “dangerous classes,” sometimes barely distinguishable from the new working class recently concentrated in the urban industrial centres, were a constant preoccupation of the emerging bourgeoisie. Fear of both permeated social policy, including among reformers, and was central to the establishment of new methods of control, policing and judicial, and even medical and psychiatric systems. Although the term fell into disuse in the twentieth century West, it is often argued that the concept remains embedded in elite discourses of connections between propertylessness, poverty, immorality, criminality and the “underclass.”

This conference takes as its central theme this notion of the “dangerous classes” and invites abstracts examining its explanatory power when applied to the Middle East and North Africa in the period from around 1800 to the present. Topics include but are not limited to: narratives of the lives of members of the “dangerous classes”; the social conditions in which they emerged; their relationship with “respectable” society and especially with the police; their political inclinations and potential; the attitudes towards them of elites; their role in shaping elite formulations of systems and institutions of discipline and control, legal/judicial, prison/asylum, medical; notions of the biological basis of criminality; their representation in literature and in popular culture. Abstracts which examine both collectivities (eg lutis or baltagiya) as well as individual strategies, and colonial/imperial as well as indigenous discourses and policies are welcome.

Abstracts of papers of no more than two hundred and fifty words are invited for consideration for inclusion in the conference.

Deadline for submission of abstracts is 30 June 2016.

Abstracts and enquiries should be addressed to Stephanie Cronin <Stephanie.cronin@orinst.ox.ac.uk>

12. Exhibition – Mystic Travellers: Sufis, Ascetics and Holy Men (Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin)

PRESSEMITTEILUNG online www.smb.museum/presse/pressemitteilungen/detail/56427.html

Museum für Islamische Kunst – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Pergamonmuseum, Museumsinsel Berlin

Bodestraße, 10178 Berlin

Öffnungszeiten: Mo – So 10 – 18 Uhr, Do 10 – 20 Uhr

Mystische Reisende. Sufis, Asketen und Heilige Männer

Januar – 24. April 2016

13. Cambridge Lectures in Islamic Art:

‘Legends of Authority: Inscriptions and Decoration on Citadel Walls in Medieval Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt’

Professor Scott Redford (Nasser D. Khalili Professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology, SOAS, University of London)