Shii News – Academic Items
1. Exhibition preopening weekend: The Heart’s Desire – Sufi Collections and Contemporary Art Exploring Shawq (Longing)
The Heart’s Desire
Musée d’Art et de Culture Soufis MTO, Chatou, France
3 October 2026 – 12 September 2027
The Heart’s Desire, curated by Jessica Cerasi, explores longing in all its forms and its particular resonance within Sufi thought. Bringing together new works by six contemporary artists in dialogue with the collection of the Musée d’Art et de Culture Soufis MTO (MACS MTO), the exhibition considers what it means to live with absence, to sustain hope across distance, and to allow longing to become a means of connection, transformation and spiritual depth.
Inaugurated in 2024, MACS MTO explores the principles, cultural heritage and artistic expressions associated with Sufism through a collection spanning from the Achaemenid period to the present day. Its annual exhibitions bring this collection into dialogue with contemporary artistic practices.
Pre-opening weekend: 3–4 October 2026
A special pre-opening weekend will take place on Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 October, with a programme of talks, encounters and activities offering visitors opportunities to engage further with the themes of the exhibition.
Access during the pre-opening weekend is reserved for ticket holders for the programme.
Full exhibition information and pre-opening programme are available on the museum’s website.
Contact Information
Musée d’Art et de Culture Soufis MTO
6 avenue des Tilleuls
78400 Chatou, France
Opening hours
- Wednesday, Thursday and Friday: 11 am – 6 pm
- Saturday and Sunday: 10 am – 6 pm
The garden is open and free to access from Wednesday to Sunday during the same opening hours as the museum.
Getting there:
- By train: Approximately 30 minutes from central Paris on RER A, alighting at Chatou–Croissy.
- By bus: Lines D and E, alighting at Gare de Chatou–Croissy.
- By car: From Paris, take the A14, then the A86. Take exit 35a towards Chatou. Free parking is available on the street near the museum and on the Île des Impressionnistes.
Contact Email
URL
https://www.macsmto.fr/en/the-hearts-desire/
2. Cornell University – Modern Middle East – Open Rank
https://networks.h-net.org/jobs/70368/cornell-university-modern-middle-east-open-rank
3. Call for papers
Cfp: Critical Digital Archives. Travel, Translation, Transformation.
A Hybrid Symposium on Archives in and from the SWANA Region.
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.
Keynote speakers:
Sara Salem is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the London School of Economics. Her first book, published with Cambridge University Press, is entitled Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony (2020). Her second book, co-authored with Mai Taha, is entitled Anticolonial Radios: On the Sonic Lives of Internationalism, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Along with Mai Taha, she curates Archive Stories, a platform exploring radical and creative archives.
Amanda Egbe is a Senior Lecturer in Media Production at the University of the West of England and leads Heritage Futures, a practice-led research programme building infrastructure for heritage at risk through archives, film, and digital systems. Her research focuses on how cultural memory is documented, governed, protected, transformed, or lost in contexts shaped by social change, technological transformation, environmental stress, and historical inequity.
Convenors:
Barbara Spadaro, University of Liverpool
Valeria Vitale, University of Sheffield
The event is jointly hosted by the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (ILCS) and the Institute of Classical Studies (ICS) at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London, and funded by the British Institute for Libyan and North African Studies (BILNAS).
Please send via email a 300words abstract and short bio to b.spadaro@liverpool.ac.uk and v.vitale@sheffield.ac.uk
Deadline: 30 SEPTEMBER 2026
A limited number of travel bursaries will be offered to participants travelling to the symposium in London.
URL: https://ics.sas.ac.uk/news-events/events/critical-digital-archives-travel-translation-transformation
Contact Email
URL
https://ics.sas.ac.uk/news-events/events/critical-digital-archives-travel-trans…
- Exhibition preopening weekend: The Heart’s Desire – Sufi Collections and Contemporary Art Exploring Shawq (Longing)
The Heart’s Desire
Musée d’Art et de Culture Soufis MTO, Chatou, France
3 October 2026 – 12 September 2027
The Heart’s Desire, curated by Jessica Cerasi, explores longing in all its forms and its particular resonance within Sufi thought. Bringing together new works by six contemporary artists in dialogue with the collection of the Musée d’Art et de Culture Soufis MTO (MACS MTO), the exhibition considers what it means to live with absence, to sustain hope across distance, and to allow longing to become a means of connection, transformation and spiritual depth.
Inaugurated in 2024, MACS MTO explores the principles, cultural heritage and artistic expressions associated with Sufism through a collection spanning from the Achaemenid period to the present day. Its annual exhibitions bring this collection into dialogue with contemporary artistic practices.
Pre-opening weekend: 3–4 October 2026
A special pre-opening weekend will take place on Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 October, with a programme of talks, encounters and activities offering visitors opportunities to engage further with the themes of the exhibition.
Access during the pre-opening weekend is reserved for ticket holders for the programme.
Full exhibition information and pre-opening programme are available on the museum’s website.
Contact Information
Musée d’Art et de Culture Soufis MTO
6 avenue des Tilleuls
78400 Chatou, France
Opening hours
- Wednesday, Thursday and Friday: 11 am – 6 pm
- Saturday and Sunday: 10 am – 6 pm
The garden is open and free to access from Wednesday to Sunday during the same opening hours as the museum.
Getting there:
- By train: Approximately 30 minutes from central Paris on RER A, alighting at Chatou–Croissy.
- By bus: Lines D and E, alighting at Gare de Chatou–Croissy.
- By car: From Paris, take the A14, then the A86. Take exit 35a towards Chatou. Free parking is available on the street near the museum and on the Île des Impressionnistes.
Contact Email
URL
https://www.macsmto.fr/en/the-hearts-desire/
- Cornell University – Modern Middle East – Open Rank
https://networks.h-net.org/jobs/70368/cornell-university-modern-middle-east-open-rank
- Call for papers
Cfp: Critical Digital Archives. Travel, Translation, Transformation.
A Hybrid Symposium on Archives in and from the SWANA Region.
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.
Keynote speakers:
Sara Salem is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the London School of Economics. Her first book, published with Cambridge University Press, is entitled Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony (2020). Her second book, co-authored with Mai Taha, is entitled Anticolonial Radios: On the Sonic Lives of Internationalism, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Along with Mai Taha, she curates Archive Stories, a platform exploring radical and creative archives.
Amanda Egbe is a Senior Lecturer in Media Production at the University of the West of England and leads Heritage Futures, a practice-led research programme building infrastructure for heritage at risk through archives, film, and digital systems. Her research focuses on how cultural memory is documented, governed, protected, transformed, or lost in contexts shaped by social change, technological transformation, environmental stress, and historical inequity.
Convenors:
Barbara Spadaro, University of Liverpool
Valeria Vitale, University of Sheffield
The event is jointly hosted by the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (ILCS) and the Institute of Classical Studies (ICS) at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London, and funded by the British Institute for Libyan and North African Studies (BILNAS).
Please send via email a 300words abstract and short bio to b.spadaro@liverpool.ac.uk and v.vitale@sheffield.ac.uk
Deadline: 30 SEPTEMBER 2026
A limited number of travel bursaries will be offered to participants travelling to the symposium in London.
URL: https://ics.sas.ac.uk/news-events/events/critical-digital-archives-travel-translation-transformation
Contact Email
URL
https://ics.sas.ac.uk/news-events/events/critical-digital-archives-travel-trans…
Posted in: Academic items
- September 15, 2026
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