Archive for September 29th, 2026

1. Assistant or Associate Professor for the History of the Mediterranean and its Hinterlands, 500-1500 CE, University of California Berkeley

All subfields within the history of the Mediterranean in this period will be considered. Work that explores connectedness and interactions between the Mediterranean and its hinterlands, whether to the south (Africa), east (Asia), north (Europe), or west (Iberia and the Atlantic world) is of particular interest.

Deadline for applications: 15 October 2026. Information: https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05501

 

 

 

 

 

2. Grants for Study and Research Related to and/or Undertaken in Türkiye and the Black Sea Region, British Institute at Ankara (BIAA)

BIAA is pleased to offer a range of funding opportunities, grants, and awards to support academics at all stages of their careers. Support is intended for researchers (from postdoctoral fellows to senior academics). Projects should focus on arts, humanities or the social sciences. Some of our latest op-portunities include: – BIAA Study Grants of up to £2,000. – BIAA Research Grants of up to £5,000. – BIAA Large Research Grants of up to £10,000.

Deadline for applications: 1 November 2026. Information: https://biaa.ac.uk/grants-opportunities/

 

 

 

 

 

3. ONLINE New Special Issue: “Rethinking Transnational Islamic Movements: Politics, Adaptation, and Change” in “Religion, State and Society”, Vol. 54, Issue 4, 9 September 2026, 123 Pages

Articles: – “Introduction: Rethinking transnational Islamic movements: politics, adaptation, and change” by Iman Dawood & Guy Robert Eyre. – “The halal social sphere: Muslim moral markets as counter-governmentality” by Tahir Abbas. – “Crises of the Caliphate: international crises and frame degradation within European Islamic activism” by Richard McNeil-Willson. – “Resisting the imposition of ‘British values’: conservative gender norms in evolving British Salafi communities” Iman Dawood. “‘Islamist Sufism’: spirituality and hybridity in the thought of Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī” by Usaama al-Azami. – Etc.

View: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/crss20/54/4

 

 

 

4. Zoom – Poetic Desire and Literary Thievery: Economies of Intertextuality in Arabic Literature

by Muhsin J. al-Musawi
How do we define plagiarism in literature? In this wide-ranging and innovative study, Muhsin J. al-Musawi examines debates surrounding literary authenticity across Arabic and Islamic culture over seven centuries. Al-Musawi argues that intertextual borrowing was driven by personal desire alongside the competitive economy of the Abbasid Islamic Empire. Here, accusations of plagiarism had wide-ranging consequences, as competition among poets and writers grew fierce, while philologists and critics served as public arbiters over controversies of alleged poetic thefts. Taking in an extensive remit of Arabic sources, from Persian writers to the poets of Andalusia and Morocco, al-Musawi extends his argument all the way to Ibrāhīm ᶜAbd al-Qādir al-Māzinī’s writing in Egypt and the Iraqi poet Nāzik al-Malā՚ikah’s work in the twentieth century to present ‘theft’ as a necessary condition of creative production in Arabic literature. As a result, this study sheds light on a vast yet understudied aspect of the Arabic literary tradition, while raising important questions surrounding the rising challenge of artificial intelligence in matters of academic integrity.
Cosponsors
Office of the Divisional Deans in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Organizer
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities
Contact
email address
sofheyman@columbia.edu
Notes
Free and open to the public
Registration required.

 

 

 

 

 

5. JOHN P COOPER

‘EMBARK IN THE NAME OF ALLAH’: RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR MEANING IN THE ‘DECORATIVE’ PRACTICES OF YEMENI BOATBUILDERS 

Monday Majlis Online on the 5th of October, 17:00-18:30 (UK time)

Centre for the Study of Islam, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter

Register please on this link: https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/zwiawURxR2-0zVYBR-Ck5Q

 

 

 

 

 

6. To learn about our New Masters Degree in Persian Studies, Our Undergraduate Journal Roshangar, Professor Miller’s New Book,

A New Documentary About Mohammad Mosaddegh, A wonderful Iranian poet Translated into English,

A book on Persian Proverbs, Modern Art influenced by Rumi,  Roshan’s Recent Grants

And other Good News

Mark Your Calendars to Join us On Sunday, October 4th,2pm EST

https://umd.zoom.us/j/5378789861?pwd=LJyvjqWX0uOyAeSIbVJS6jmaRiQBEM.1&omn=98107424421

 

 

 

 

 

7. Arabic Pasts workshop
Please join us at the Aga Khan Centreon 8 – 9 October for the annualArabic Pastsworkshop, co-hosted with Queen Mary!

Running since 2009 at AKU, this workshop features exciting new research in history and historiography.

We’ll tackle questions like: Who does history represent, and how? How does poetry shape our understanding of the past? What traces of past times survived to influence later societies?

Key details:

8 – 9 October 2026

Aga Khan Centre, London (in-person)

10 Handyside St, London N1C 4DN

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/arabic-pasts-histories-and-historiography-tickets-1999773151328.

Programme: https://kitab-project.org/documents/Arabic_Pasts_Schedule_2026.pdf.

Lunch is provided, so please do RSVP to ensure we can accommodate everyone.

 

 

 

 

 

8. Critical Digital Archives. Travel, Translation, Transformation.  

A Hybrid Symposium on Archives in and from the SWANA Region. 

21-22nd January 

Senate House, London 

This symposium aims to provide a forum for scholars, archivists, community and cultural organizations interested in critical approaches to digital archives containing materials from and about the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region, understood as a geographic, historical, and cultural space. In this space, archives have been historically imposed, looted, extracted, dispersed, destroyed, but also rescued, rebuilt and reinvented, pioneering practices of resistance, reparation and return that raise compelling ethical, theoretical and practical questions for scholars and stakeholders (Ghaddar, 2025). Building on Itza Carbajal and Michelle Caswell’s framework (2021), our approach seeks to advance a language-sensitive understanding of reparative archival practices that are attentive to and accountable for the technological, social, and environmental impacts of digital archives.

We are interested in digitisation as a transformative process that reshapes archival practices, knowledge production, and power relations.

Conceived as a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and horizontal forum, the symposium invites participants, both in person and online, to engage in discussion and exchange around three interconnected themes and interpretative lenses. Two keynote speakers – Sara Salem (LSE) and Amanda Egbe (UWE) – will act as discussants, facilitating collective reflection and dialogue around participants’ contributions. The three themes of the symposium are Travel, Translation and Transformation:

Travel: Archives in Movement 

This strand explores journeys and movement both as subjects represented in archival collections and as conditions shaping the archive itself, opening up questions of archival looting, dispersal and dispossession as well as care, stewardship, and reparation. Discussions may engage with spatial humanities approaches, including digital mapping and gazetteers; the displacement and mobility of archives; practices and ethics of archival solidarity and return; and questions of heritage, ownership, and identity from indigenous and diasporic perspectives.

Translation: Languages in the Archive 

This strand will examine issues relating to languages and translation, both in the records and in the archival metadata that make them searchable by and accessible to stakeholders. We will especially welcome contributions reflecting on the role of metadata as descriptive as well as interpretative text, exploring the potential for linguistic, semantic and epistemological translations.  We will also welcome contributions that explore the multilinguality of archival records as enduring representations of human activity and consider the practices and ethics of reparative translation in digital archives.

Transformation: Digital Futures and Ethics of Dematerialization 

The third strand will look at digitisation as a transformative process for the archive that involves new materialities and highlights new absences. We aim to discuss the impact of digital projects on key stakeholders (users, subjects of records, source communities). We invite contributions on the fragility of digitised and born-digital heritage, as well as the specific biases and risks that digitalisation processes may introduce, particularly through the reproduction, by digital tools, of historical and ongoing harms to people and the environment.

We also aim to assess the potential of digital technology, especially non-corporate and low-threshold, to act as vectors of resistance and tools against erasure.

Convenors:

Barbara Spadaro, University of Liverpool

Valeria Vitale, University of Sheffield

Please send via email a 300 words abstract and short bio to b.spadaro@liverpool.ac.uk and v.vitale@sheffield.ac.uk

Deadline: 30 September 2026 

The event is funded by the British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies in collaboration with the British Institute in East Africa and the Centre for British Research in the Levant. It is jointly hosted by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, at the School of Advanced Study, London.

A limited number of travel bursaries will be offered to participants travelling to the symposium in London.

Contact Email

b.spadaro@liverpool.ac.uk

URL

https://ics.sas.ac.uk/news-events/events/critical-digital-archives-travel-trans…

 

 

 

 

9. Séminaire « L’Afghanistan à travers les âges » – séance mardi 6 octobre 18h-19h30

nous avons le plaisir de vous convier à la première séance du séminaire « L’Afghanistan à travers les âges », qui se tiendra mardi 6 octobre 2026, 18h-19h30, en Amphi 2 à l’INaLCO (65 rue des Grands Moulins, Paris XIII, 2^e étage).

Nous sommes heureux d’accueillir M Alastair Northedge, Universite Paris 1 – Pantheon-Sorbonne, pour une conférence intitulée : Paysages desséchés médiévaux du Déhistan (Misriyan, Turkménistan).

 Vous trouverez l’intégralité du programme 2026-2027 du séminaire mensuel de recherche « L’Afghanistan à travers les âges » en ligne sur le site du CeRMI: L’Afghanistan à travers les âges – Centre de recherche sur le monde iranien

Vous trouverez également ici le lien de connexion: https://zoom.us/j/96136711428?pwd=jqZ3lotYx6re8bpoU4uAYPl9GRM1CF.1

Bien cordialement,

Arezou Azad et Matteo De Chiara
CeRMI – CNRS UMR 8041
Centre de Recherche sur le Monde Iranien
Campus CNRS Ile-de-France Villejuif
7, rue Guy Môquet – 94800 Villejuif – FRANCE
cermi@cnrs.fr  – https://www.cermi.cnrs.fr

 

 

 

 

10. October Speaker Series & Mini Courses

Can States Be Built Without Recognition? Empirical Evidence from 35 Years of German–Iraqi Kurdish Relations

Speaker: Silvia Nicola
When: Wednesday, October 7, 2026 | 12 PM CT / 1 PM ET
Registration Link: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/gGIoKqxeQ2e59P6chnxdNw#

The Kurdish Madrasa and the Making of an Intellectual Tradition

Speaker: Serdar Sengul
When: Wednesday, October 21, 2026 | 12 PM CT / 1 PM ET
Registration Link: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/BDet8R1sS2atRJc-uvzBag#

Mini Courses: Registration Open

Our next month-long synchronous mini courses, Qur’an in Historical Context and Contemporary Kurdish Literature, begin October 10 and 11, 1–3:30 PM Central Time.

Each mini course includes:

• Four live online sessions (2.5 hours each)
• Minimal homework
• Curated supplemental readings

Also coming this fall: Islamic Constitutionalism and Said Nursi’s Munazarat, beginning November 8

Learn more and register: https://zahrainstitute.org/Mini_Courses.html
Questions: admissions@zahrainstitute.org

 

 

 

 

 

11. Call for paper presentations for “Critical Muslim Geographies,” a proposed paper session at the 2027 American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in New York City.

The session is organized by Saba Fatima (University of Washington) and Dr. Timur Hammond (Syracuse University).

Submission Deadline: October 11, 2026
Interested participants may submit a 250-word abstract to sabafat@uw.edu and twhammon@syr.edu. Accepted presenters will be notified by October 14 and asked to submit through the AAG submission portal by October 15.

Full session details and submission information can be found here: Critical Muslim Geographies – Call for Papers