Archive for November 8th, 2025
Shii News – Acdemic Items
1.Hybrid Lecture – Navina Najat Haidar, “Ornament and Light in Mughal Architecture” – 13 November
In person, or if you are not in London join us on Zoom (for a link, please contact Matty: mb@royalasiaticsociety.org)
Follow us on YouTube: SOAS ReSIA playlist
Navina Najat Haidar
Nasser Sabah al Ahmad al Sabah Curator in Charge of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Ornament and Light in Mughal Architecture
Eventbrite link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/resia-presents-dr-navina-haidar-tickets-1828852309489?aff=oddtdtcreator
2. CFP – Arts and Crafts in the Late Ottoman Empire: Rethinking Practices and Concepts of Material Culture in Syria and Beyond (18th – early 20th c.) – May 22-23, 2026
Date: May 22-23, 2026
Venue: Lebanese American University (Beirut, Lebanon)
Convenors: May Farhat and Sarah Sabban
The conference Arts and Crafts in the Late Ottoman Empire aims to advance art historical and interdisciplinary research on practices and concepts of material culture in Ottoman lands between the 18th and the early 20th centuries. While inviting contributions on all geographies of the Empire, our call for papers foregrounds late Ottoman Syria as a case through which to expand the analytical and historical horizons of Islamic art and architecture studies and to contribute to broader debates in Ottoman and Arab historiographies of modernity. We encourage authors to consider the analytical frameworks—temporalities, epistemes, and materialities—that underpin the conference’s critical inquiry into the entangled modernities of Ottoman arts and crafts.
For the full call for papers, please visit this link.
We invite abstracts of up to 300 words, along with a short biography (max. 100 words), to be sent to MAIA.events@lau.edu.lb by January 15, 2026. Papers may be delivered in English or Arabic.
3. Nov 12 Talk on Classical Madrasa as a Liberal Arts Tradition
The next event in Zahra Institute’s online Fall Speaker Series, Wednesday, November 12.
“Forming the Mind: The Classical Madrasa as a Liberal Arts Tradition”
Date: Wednesday, November 12
Time: 12 PM Central / 1 PM Eastern
Speaker: Mahsuk Yamac, Dean of Graduate Studies, Zaytuna College
Register here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/jTAYbk7KRH-QPsIPDq_5aQ#
For details on this and other upcoming events, visit our website: www.zahrainstitute.org.
4. Open Access: Article on Mamluk Maqamas on Black Death
Muhammed Omar, Nahyan Fancy
Special issue of the Journal of Arab and Islamic Studies on Environmental Challenges in Premodern Eurasian and Mediterranean Narratives.
The article can be accessed here: https://journals.uio.no/JAIS/article/view/12790
5. Call for Applications – “The Futures of Islamic Art: Remapping the Field” – Traveling seminar organized by Khamseen
Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online is pleased to announce its new project “The Futures of Islamic Art: Remapping the Field,” supported by a Connecting Art Histories grant by the Getty Foundation. Co-directed by Dr. Christiane Gruber and Dr. Mira Xenia Schwerda, the project will include three traveling seminars to Istanbul (2027), Kuwait (2028), and Kuala Lumpur (2029).
The project is situated within the context of growing and democratizing the field of Islamic art history, which includes an expansion of geographies, a stretching of chronological brackets, a diversification of artistic and creative expression, and an unrestricted experimentation with various theoretical approaches, intellectual models, and technological tools to disseminate knowledge in a free and open manner. It places the engagement with previously overlooked materials–such as women’s embroideries, amulets and gems of various tribes and nomadic groups, photographs, posters, and prints, and diminutive coins and other ephemera–at its center.
We invite applications from graduate students and early- to mid-career scholars of Islamic art—including curators, conservators, and practicing artists—to participate in all three seminars in Istanbul, Kuwait City, and Kuala Lumpur. We especially welcome applications from students and scholars based in the region. The project will cover travel costs, including airfare, ground transportation, and accommodation.
Interested candidates should send a letter of interest explaining why these traveling seminars are important for their intellectual development and how their own areas of expertise will contribute to the group effort as well as a CV and a writing sample (of up to 25 pages) to FuturesofIslamicArt@umich.edu no later than February 1, 2026. Applicants will be contacted by March 15, 2026.
Contact Email
6. CfS: 2026 British Association for Islamic Studies (BRAIS) Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World
In the 2026 British Association for Islamic Studies (BRAIS) Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World is now open for submissions. The submission deadline is 5pm GMT on Friday 30 January 2026. Full details about the submission process, including all rules and regulations, can be found here: https://www.brais.ac.uk/prize
This international prize is awarded annually to an outstanding doctoral thesis. English-language submissions on any aspect of the academic study of Islam and the Muslim world, past and present, including Muslim-minority societies are accepted.
The award includes a cash prize of £1000 which will be officially presented at the Annual Conference of BRAIS.
Should you have any queries, please email brais.prize@ed.ac.uk .
7. Book Talk: ‘Building Local Support: Architectural Patronage for Multiconfessional Communities in Ottoman Greece and Albania’
Emily Neumeier (Temple University)
Thursday, November 13, 2025
10:00–11:20 AM
110 Warren, Room 312, Rutgers University–Newark
In the early nineteenth century, some of the most consequential developments in Ottoman architecture unfolded not in Istanbul but on the empire’s frontier. This talk explores the ambitious building program of Ali Pasha of Ioannina (r. 1788–1822), the renegade governor of Greece and Albania whose architectural patronage ranged from mosques to dervish lodges and even Orthodox Christian monasteries. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival sources, we will explore how Ali Pasha’s constructions redefined the sociopolitical order by challenging imperial norms of patronage and consolidating regional authority. His unprecedented support for multiple faith traditions reveals how architecture became a powerful tool of negotiation in a diverse, contested landscape.
Contact Information
Alex Dika Seggerman
Contact Email
URL
https://sites.rutgers.edu/islam-humanities/event/book-talk-building-local-suppo…
8. CFP: International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA) Special Issue–“Reimagining Islamic Architecture in the 20th and 21st Centuries”
Thematic volume planned for July 2028)
Guest Editors: Emily Neumeier & Jennifer Pruitt
Proposal submission deadline: 15 December 2025
We invite submissions for this special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture that investigates the modern reimagining of historical architecture from the Islamic world. Specifically, we are interested in the phenomenon of architects working in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who refer to premodern Islamic monuments in their own practice. These ‘sites of citation’ can be understood to serve diverse functions and contexts, ranging from proclaiming connections to a perceived glorious imperial past, crafting new national identities through architectural revivals, recollecting a nostalgic homeland for diasporic communities, or even incorporating orientalist tropes to convey luxurious consumption or cosmopolitan sophistication.
Within the disciplines of Islamic art and architectural history, scholars have debated the logical terminus for the field’s timeline. Most of the major survey texts intended for undergraduate courses have ended around 1800, prior to the rise of European colonialism in the nineteenth century. This creates the distinct impression that the diverse regions of the Islamic world took up modernization efforts that were, at best, mimetic of western Europe, and therefore not worthy of investigation. As a corrective to these temporal restrictions and the resulting lacunae in the scholarship, a resounding call to extend the chronological framework of the field into the modern period has emerged in the past two decades (Flood 2007; Flood & Necipoğlu 2017). Yet scholars are only beginning to investigate how the forms and narratives of precolonial Islamic art history inform postcolonial architectural practice. In this special issue, we seek to build on the work of historians such as Nasser Rabbat and Mercedes Volait, who have demonstrated the importance of investigating revival architecture beyond a western European context to the Islamic world. We also take as a point of inspiration the scholarship of Kishwar Rizvi, whose examination of the transnational mosque open up discussion on a variety of state-sponsored religious constructions built in the postmodern and present neoliberal eras, all of which consciously adopt historicizing elements in their design.
We invite papers that will expand the investigation of Islamic architectures to include a diversity of architectural typologies. This special issue seeks case studies ranging from the late nineteenth century until the present, drawn from a wide geographical range inclusive of the Middle East, North and West Africa, the Americas, Europe, and South and Southeast Asia. We particularly welcome papers that address cross-cultural exchange and the transnational networks of architects, designers, and patrons. Case studies might address extant sites as well as ephemeral examples, like the pavilions from international expositions and theatre scenery. We envisage submissions that will investigate the reimagining of imperial Ottoman forms in twenty-first-century Turkey; the orientalizing anachronism of Shriner architecture in the United States; representations of Islamic spaces in theme parks and video games; or the adaptation of historical forms for restoration and cultural heritage projects in the Middle East. We are especially interested in examining how scholarly narratives of precolonial Islamic art history have shaped architectural projects, and thus also invite abstracts that explore how the built form references or translates the visual representations of historic monuments (i.e., etchings, photographs, ground plans, satellite views, 3D mapping) found in academic publications and mass media. In so doing, we seek to offer new insights that emerge specifically from the connection between modern and contemporary architecture and the historiography of Islamic art.
Additional questions may be addressed by contributors to this special issue:
- To what extent has the reinvention of historical Islamic architecture prompted a revival, reactivation, or appropriation of traditional craft practices and building technologies? Who are the agents, institutions, and sources key to this transmission of knowledge?
- Do modern and contemporary case studies reflect present-day conceptions about the ‘quintessential’ elements or forms of Islamic architecture? Is it possible to identify a canon of historical monuments?
- How might our understanding of a single site shift when taking into account both top-down perspectives (i.e., architects, designers, patrons and donors, cultural organizations, and government institutions) and the everyday experiences of users and visitors? How can these meanings persist or change over a long period of time, in the course of subsequent mediations or renovations during the life of a particular monument or site?
- Are specific practices of citation in architecture embedded within historical legacies, or an opportunity to think beyond colonialism, orientalism, and modernism? To what extent does architectural revival create a sense of anachronism, authenticity, and/or nostalgia for the past?
- What negotiations or translations can take place when forms that were originally developed for Islamic sacred spaces are reinterpreted for non-religious purposes? Can such reimagining of Islamic architecture open up possibilities to revisit deep-seated assumptions about the separation of the sacred and secular?
- In an age of consumption and neoliberalism, how do the demands for tourism, entertainment, and spectacle impact the designs of built environments that are marketed as looking to the historical architecture of the Islamic world?
Articles offering historical and theoretical analysis (DiT papers) should be between 6000 and 8000 words, and those on design and practice (DiP papers) between 3000 and 4000 words (notes are included in the word count). Practitioners are welcome to contribute insofar as they address the critical framework of the journal. Urbanists, art historians, anthropologists, geographers, political scientists, sociologists, and historians are also welcome. Please send a title and a 400-word abstract to the guest editors, Emily Neumeier (neumeier@temple.edu) and Jennifer Pruitt (jpruitt@wisc.edu), by 15 December 2025. Authors of accepted proposals will be contacted soon thereafter and will be requested to submit full papers by 1 July 2026. All papers will be subject to blind peer review and a rigorous editing process. For author instructions, please consult: www.intellectbooks.com/ijia
Contact Email
URL
https://www.intellectbooks.com/international-journal-of-islamic-architecture
9. New Program: Master of Professional Studies in Persian at UMD
Starting Fall 2026, the Capstone Year of the Persian Flagship Program will become the Master of Professional Studies (MPS) in Persian. University of Maryland Persian Flagship Students complete this program toward their Flagship Certification. The Language Flagship Program is an initiative of the Defense Language and National Security Education Office, within the U.S. Department of Defense.
For more information:
https://sllc.umd.edu/special-programs/arabic-persian/persian-flagship/capstone
10. Modernists and Muslims: E. J. Pace and His Islam-Inspired Cartoons
STEVEN BEMBRIDGE
Journal of American Studies, Volume 58 / Issue 5, December 2024, pp 661 – 688
doi: 10.1017/S0021875824000641
11. South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Toward a Historical Ontology of the Law
Faisal Chaudhry. 529 pp.
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2024.
https://academic.oup.com/book/57374?login=true
12. Genealogical History in the Persianate World
Jo-Ann Gross (Anthology Editor) , Daniel Beben (Anthology Editor)
Bloomsbury, 2025
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/genealogical-history-in-the-persianate-world-9780755649808/
13. HYBRID Lecture “Digital Citizen Science and the Co-construction of Omani National and Cultural Identity: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis” by Dr. Najma Al Zidjaly (Sultan Qaboos University), Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, 11 Novembre 2025, 17:00 – 19:00 CET
This presentation forms part of a larger longitudinal, ethnographic project spanning over two decades that examines the evolving relationship between human agency and emerging forms of creative media in the Arab world, with a particular focus on Oman. The study conceptualizes Omani social media users as active contributors to collective knowledge production and cultural meaning-making.
Information and registration: https://tinyurl.com/cemweem9
14. Conference “Forms of (Un)Freedom: Emancipation and Post-Slavery in the Red Sea Region”, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, 13-14 November 2025
This conference aims to further consolidate the subfield of Red Sea slavery studies by expanding the scope of inquiry beyond the processes that enslaved people and held them in bondage. The conference will focus on what happens “afterwards” – i.e. when human bondage ends. In the Red Sea Region, abolition and emancipation have been incompletely implemented. This has had complex ramifications that continue to reverberate at the individual, communal, and societal level.
Information and programme: https://tinyurl.com/484zmjhd
15. Symposium “The Translation Movement Between East and West, with a Special Focus on the Late Translation Movement”, Al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation, London, 19-20 November 2024
During the medieval period, as a result of the famous Graeco-Arabic translation movement, Arabic emerged as a ‘lingua franca’ of scientific exchange. For most of the medieval and early modern periods, Latin was the ‘lingua franca’ of scientific exchange. Then, we started to see the reverse translation movement from different European languages into Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman.
Information and detailed programme: https://tinyurl.com/2m9kfmch
16. Five Residential Fellowships (12 Months) in Germany for Scholars at Risk at Universities in Dortmund and Essen, Academy in Exile
Eligible are scholars from any country who have a PhD in the humanities, social sciences, or law, and who are at risk because of their academic work and/or civic engagement in human rights, democracy, and the pursuit of academic freedom. “Academy in Exile” fellowships give scholars the opportunity to continue their careers in Germany and to work on a research project of their own choosing in a multidisciplinary environment.
Deadline for applications: 15 November 2025. Information: https://tinyurl.com/y6anapuj
17. Assistant or Associate or Full Professor in Comparative Literature (Focus Arabic Literature), Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (DI), Qatar
Preference will be given to candidates with specializations in literary theory, approaches to World Literature and the new comparative literature, and with demonstrable expertise in Arabic literature and an Asian, African or Latin Ameri-can literature. The candidate must be able to teach in Arabic. High proficiency in English is required.
Deadline for applications: 15 January 2026. Information: https://tinyurl.com/yc4udv3f
18. Omar Khayyam Postdoctoral Research Associate (1 Year) in Iranian Studies, Brown University
The position is open to candidates whose work explores topics related to modern or contemporary Iran, with a preference for work in the humanities or the humanistic social sciences (e.g., anthropology, sociology, history). We especially welcome candidates who thrive in an interdisciplinary environment and whose work is informed by comparative and global perspectives.
Deadline for applications: 6 December 2025. Information: https://apply.interfolio.com/175851
19. University of Notre Dame Postdoctoral Fellowship (9 Months) in Byzantine Studies, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
This Fellowship is open to qualified applicants in all fields and sub-disciplines of Byzantine Studies, such as history (including its auxiliary disciplines), archaeology, art history, literature, theology, and liturgical studies, as well as the study of Byzantium’s interactions with neighboring cultures. The fellowship holder will pursue research in residence at the University of Notre Dame’s famed Medieval Institute during the academic year.
Deadline for applications: 1 February 2026. Information: https://apply.interfolio.com/176059
20. Research Fellowships in Islamic Law and Civilization (2026-2027), Yale Law School
The fellowships are meant to a promising scholars time to make significant progress on their writing and research agenda in subjects related, however loosely, to Islamic law and civilization while contributing to the intellectual life of the Law School and Yale University more broadly.
Deadline for applications: 30 November 2025. Information: https://tinyurl.com/4yzzh97y
- November 08, 2025
- by Andrew Newman
- 0 Comment