Archive for July 2nd, 2019
Shii News – Academic Items
1.An Ocean of Paper Database Search Guide
An Ocean of Paper seeks to stimulate new research in the social history of the Sultanate by collecting, cataloging, and publishing the thousands of deeds (called waraqas) produced by Omanis in South Arabia and East Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These deeds, which exist in private and public collections in Oman and East Africa, recount transactions in money, property, and commodities between Omanis from different parts of the country who engaged in activities around the Indian Ocean. Individually, they tell stories of the lives, fortunes, and trajectories of Omani migrants; together, they constitute some of the richest written records we have on any community in the region, and promise to completely reshape the foundations of Omani social and economic history in the Indian Ocean.
Ocean of Paper is a part of Indian Ocean in World History educational resources project of Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center.
See: http://www.indianoceanhistory.org/oceanofpaper/
2. 3rd Annual Conference of the International Working Group on “State, Society and Dynamics of Political Change in MENA”: “Values and Institutions: What has Changed in post 2011 North Africa?”, Tangier, 25-26 October 2019
This symposium aims to contribute to a preliminary assessment of the political transformations that resulted from the first wave of the Arab uprisings of 2011 from the perspective of the supposed mutual influence between democratic institutions and the democratic value system. Social scientists interested in taking part in this debate are invited to submit their abstracts.
Deadline for abstracts: 7 July 2019. Information: https://www.kas.de/web/marokko/veranstaltungen/detail/-/content/call-for-papers-3
3. 15th International Congress of Ottoman Social and Economic History (ICOSEH), University of Zagreb, 13-17 July 2020
The Executive Committee of ICOSEH and the Organizing Committee invite the submission of abstracts of individual papers as well as pre-organized panels/sessions and workshops. Papers are expected to address various aspects of the economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire. We encourage panels and workshops on any aspects of the Ottomans and the Mediterranean and the Ottomans and Central Europe.
Deadline for abstracts: 15 December 2019. Information: https://networks.h-net.org/node/11419/discussions/4222924/icoseh-zagreb-2020-cfp
4. Rosalind Franklin Tenure Track Professorship for Female Scholar in the Research Field of “Islamic Thought and Culture”, University of Groningen
The positon will contribute to one or more of our common themes of inquiry, such as cultural heritage, intellectual history, history of religion, ethics and philosophy, and the contemporary governance of religion. Qualification: PhD degree in Theology/Religious Studies or another field appropriate to the position; etc.
Deadline for applications: 29 August 2019. Information: https://www.rug.nl/about-us/work-with-us/job-opportunities/?details=00347-02S000730P
5. Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track) in Middle East / North Africa History, Appalachian State University, North Carolina
Minimum Qualifications: ability to teach courses in area of specialization and global history required. Ph.D. in history or a related field, teaching experience, and evidence of scholarly potential expected. Candidates who are ABD will be considered, but the position requires completion of all doctoral requirements by August 2020.
Review of applications will begin on 16 September 2019 and continue until the position is filled. Information: https://www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=58651
6. Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track Position) in Law and Politics in Global or Middle East Context, Whitman College, Washington
Candidates should have experience in fieldwork, archival, historical institutional, political theoretical, and/or legal textual approaches. They might offer courses in international law; international politics; decolonization; human rights; theories of empire; comparative constitutionalism; indigenous politics; and/or area-specific courses on Asia and Africa.
Deadline for applications: 15 August 2019.
Information: https://www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=58653
7. PhD Dissertation Award 2019 of the “Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS)”
Dissertations from across the disciplines and a variety of perspectives are invited. They must primarily focus on the Arabian Peninsula, but can be inclusive of the transnational flows of people, material and ideas across the Gulf, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean. PhD dissertations (in English) accepted for the degree of PhD between 1 July 2018 and 30 June 2019 are eligible.
Deadline for submissions: 31 August 2019. Information: https://agaps.org/agapsmesa/mesa-awards/
8. Graduate Paper Prize 2019 of the “Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS)”
The research papers must have been written between 1 July 2018 and 30 June 2019 and primarily focus on the Arabian Peninsula but can be inclusive of the transnational flow of people, goods and ideas across the Gulf, Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Papers should include an engagement with literature, a clear methodology, and make an original contribution to scholarship in the field.
Deadline for submissions: 31 August 2019. Information: https://agaps.org/agapsmesa/mesa-awards/
9. École d’été : “Sources et méthodes pour l’étude du phénomène missionnaire au Moyen-Orient (fin XIXe-nos jours)”, EFR Rome, 3-7 juin 2019
Écrire l’histoire des missions orientales à partir des archives romaines. Centralisation, classification, conservation?
Programme : http://iremam.cnrs.fr/IMG/pdf/prog-ed-062019-d.pdf
10. Articles on “Sufism and Peace Studies“ for the “Research Journal of Philosophy and Practice“
Research scholars, authors are welcome for submitting their valuable research work related to Sufi practice, philosophy and teaching of Sufi saints.
Deadline for articles: 30 September 2019.
11. CfP: Sharḥ, tafsīr, and ḥāshiya. A workshop on the form, function and context of pre-modern commentary-writing in Arabic
University of Zurich, 15-16 June 2020
The pre-modern Arabic literary landscape is full of commentaries meta-commentaries and auto commentaries of various shapes and sizes, such that commentary-writing indisputably stood as one of the main forms of scholarly textual output over the centuries Some features of this tradition have received their fair share of attention; others remain yet to be explored. While the importance of, for example, Quranic or philosophical commentary as a source for Muslim intellectual history has been recognised in the last decades, commentaries in other fields are often mentioned only for the purpose of proving the popularity of the commentated text. The questions of why commentaries were composed in the first place, in what institutional settings, according to what conventions and with what techniques remain under-explored. This workshop will focus on two principal aspects of the study of commentary and commentating practices: (1.) the techniques of commentary-writing; and (2.) its audience and reception. In the first area, we are interested in the interaction and connections between text and commentary. This could be summarised with the simple question, “how does commentary work?”. In the second, we encourage papers that give consideration to readers and likely readerships of commentaries, either by studying the para-texts of commentaries (e.g. marginalia etc.) or sociologically, by looking at groups of readers, and owners of manuscripts. This could be summarised with the question, “how was commentary used?”.
We invite papers dealing with commentaries written in Arabic any time before roughly the 15th century, belonging to any genre (philosophy, theology, literature, medicine, sciences, etc.).
Possible questions to be dealt with may include (but are not limited to):
- How does a commentary work? Which elements of a text receive what kind of attention, which parts are not commentated upon? What kinds of relationship exist between the text and the commentary?
- What is considered a good commentary, a bad commentary?
- Why was it ever important to write a commentary? Are there different kinds of motivation that lead to different kinds of commentary?
- Who wrote commentaries and when? Is commentary writing something a beginner does or rather the opposite? Do people write different kinds of commentaries at different stages in their careers?
- Who are the intended readers and audiences?
- Who really commissioned, read, owned, or taught a commentary? Where were they composed?
- How are commentaries presented in their manuscripts? How is the link between the base-text and the commentary established, both linguistically and at the level of layout?
- Why are there so many “auto-commentaries”, i.e. commentaries written by the author of the commented work?
Please send a 400-word abstract to james.weaver@uzh.ch and forster@zedat.fu-berlin.de not later than August 31, 2019.
The selected participants will be notified by October 30, 2019.
Speakers’ costs for travel and accommodation will be covered.
Conveners:
Dr James Weaver, University of Zurich
Prof Dr Regula Forster, Freie Universität Berlin/University of Zurich
12. Call for papers for the session “Ethnic Diversity and Spatial Segregation; Cities in Motion in the World of Islam” at the European Association for Urban History Conference, Antwerp, 2-5 Sept. 2020: https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/conferences/eauh2020/papers/. The call will be open until 4 October 2019.
13. In the period 2009-14 a relational prosopographical database MP3 was constructed at Ghent University for the study of late medieval Syro-Egyptian political elites, institutions and practices, in the context of a specific collaborative research project on ‘Mamluk’ state formation. In the period 2015-16 new funding was obtained to create from MP3’s Filemaker 12 database a more widely accessible, connected and multifunctional research infrastructure and to expand its textual component and analytical potential. This project is currently known as the MPP project, and it now is conceptualised as a pilot project for the Islamic History Open Data Platform(IHODP) that we are developing.
IHODP will be an Open Source & Open Access Data Platform for ’Medieval’ Arabic Humanities Research. It is being constructed from, and integrates, several interconnected open data projects, including MPP and the Arabic historiography project MMS-II. IHODP will be a flexible, sustainable, user-friendly and multi-purpose solution and allowing for the creation of multiple independent and/or integrated data projects with freely definable multiple user roles, default back up and export facilities, and opportunities to work with various metadata ontologies, annotation tools, and Arabic text corpora.
After extensive testing we are ready to launch a beta-version of the Islamic History Open Data Platform (IHODP) in which MPP runs as a first project. Two other related and interconnected projects, Corpus: Texts from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria (Corpus) and Bibliography of 15th Century Arabic Historiography (BAH), are soon going to be launched on IHODP too. You can find a detailed explanation with demo’s of IHODP and MPP on our MMS-website.
Kind regards,
Maya Termonia
Jo Van Steenbergen
14. Annual meeting at Leeds, UK (1-4 July), the International Medieval Congress, “Europe’s largest forum for sharing ideas in medieval studies”.
With at least 65 papers relevant for Arabic and Islamic Studies (accessible via https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imc2019/programme/ > paper keyword > Islamic and Arabic Studies) the IMC has a lot to offer to Middle East Medievalists.
For the 2020 meeting (6-9 July) the special thematic strand will be ‘Borders’, a term that is meant to designate a wide variety of phenomena, from physical boundaries and material borders to dynamic social and spatial relationships. The IMC welcomes session and paper proposals related to this special thematic strand, or to any other aspect of the study of the period 300-1500 CE.
Individual paper proposal deadline: 31 August 2019; session proposal deadline: 30 September 2019.
For further information, and online proposal guidelines, please visit the IMC website at www.imc.leeds.ac.uk
- July 02, 2019
- by Andrew Newman
- 0 Comment