Shii News – Academic Items
1.The Best Article Award in Kurdish Studies
This award, sponsored by Kurdish Political Studies Program at the University of Central Florida, recognizes the best article in Kurdish Studies by a rising scholar during the previous calendar year. In this year’s competition, social science and humanities articles published in English language peer-reviewed journals in 2020 were considered. The winning article is awarded $500. The selection committee was composed of Ceren Belge (Concordia University), Ozlem Goner (City University of New York), and Güneş Murat Tezcür (University of Central Florida).
Winner
The committee has unanimously found the following article worthy of the award.
Fırat Bozçalı (2020). Probabilistic borderwork: Oil smuggling, nonillegality, and techno‐legal politics in the Kurdish borderlands of Turkey. American Ethnologist, 47(1), 72-85.
The armed conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdish insurgents has been a central focus of scholarship. While the conflict waxes and wanes, Kurdish civilians in contested zones navigate multiple layers of judicial control and administrative surveillance in pursuit of a living. In his article, Bozçalı brings a refreshing perspective about how ordinary people engage in cross-border economic activities while aiming to avoid charges of smuggling. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in judicial and commercial settings, Bozçalı demonstrates how the state’s attempts to curtail oil smuggling via the adoption of new technologies are effectively challenged by Kurdish traders and lawyers. The latter utilize uncertainty inherent to chemical tests and exploit the ambiguity between scientific and legal knowledge production to counter charges of smuggling. While these activities do not involve an alternative political sovereignty claim, they involve mundane forms of resistance and disrupt the state’s ability to control its borders. Bozçalı’s article is a splendid example of how an immersive approach could reveal counterintuitive empirical findings, generate new theoretical insights, and demonstrate the ability of Kurdish Studies to enrich broader scholarly debates about the scope and limits of the state power in borderlands.
Honorable Mention
The committee has also unanimously found the following article worthy of an honorable mention.
Zozan Pehlivan. (2020). El Niño and the nomads: Global climate, local environment, and the crisis of pastoralism in late Ottoman Kurdistan. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 63(3), 316-356.
In this fascinating article, Zozan Pehlivan traces the climatic changes in late 19th century Ottoman Kurdistan, first linking these to the global El Nino Southern Oscillation, then tracing how the ensuing drought, extreme cold, and lack of forage affected the livelihoods of local pastoralists, whose conflicts with peasants increased. Thoroughly original, and scrupulously researched, the article promises to open new avenues of research in the intersection of environmental and Kurdish studies, and inspire new approaches to the study of communal conflict in this critical period and beyond.
2. The Master’s program Cultural Studies of the Middle East, jointly hosted by the Universities of Bamberg and Erlangen, invites applications for the Visiting Professorship 2022-23!
The deadline to apply is January 07, 2022.
3. Near Eastern Studies and Digital Scholarship Conversations @IAS Joint Event
November 10, 12:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
The Study of Pre-modern Hebrew Philosophical and Scientific Terminology as a new Chapter in the Intellectual History of Europe and the Islamicate World: PESHAT in Context.
Speakers: Giuseppe Veltri (University of Hamburg), Reimund Leicht (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Michael Engel (University of Hamburg) and Florian Dunklau (University of Hamburg).
PESHAT in Context (www.peshat.org) is a long-term research project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and located at the University of Hamburg and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It investigates the formation and development of pre-modern philosophical and scientific terminology in the Hebrew language in its multi-cultural and multi-linguistic context(s). From a historical point of view, Hebrew philosophical and scientific terminology evolved from various attempts to re-formulate the intellectual culture that had developed among Jews in the Arabic-speaking Islamicate world in a new linguistic form and to make it accessible to new audiences. The formation of the “philosophers’ Hebrew” is thus a border-transcending phenomenon with roots in the Arabic-speaking world and reaching out to the intellectual history of medieval Europe. It is one of the major aims of PESHAT in Context to document and analyze the migration of philosophical and scientific concepts and idea through the study of the development of Hebrew terminology within its multilinguistic background. For this purpose, PESHAT in Context has created a multilingual digital thesaurus of philosophical and scientific terms accessible online, which is technologically founded on a newly developed database program. As a project in modern digital humanities, it provides tools and a unique platform to access a wide range of digital resources relevant for the linguistic, terminological and conceptual study of philosophy and science in Europe and the Islamicate world.
Register in advance here https://bit.ly/2Y9MAtv. After registering, you will receive an email containing information about joining the webinar.
Hosted by Sabine Schmidtke (School of Historical Studies, IAS) and María Mercedes Tuya (Digital Scholarship, IAS). For additional information email ds@ias.edu.
4. Global Performance Studies Journal – Call for Proposals – Issue 5.1: “Decolonisation and Performance Studies” (September 2022)
Call for Proposals
Issue 5.1: “Decolonisation and Performance Studies” (September 2022)
Proposal Deadline: 15 November 2021
This issue is multilingual. Proposals are accepted in Arabic, English, and Spanish. See links below for the CFP in the three languages:
Issue Editor
Dr. Nesreen N. Hussein (Middlesex University, London)
Co-Editors
Dr. Kevin Brown (University of Missouri)
Dr. Felipe Cervera (LASALLE College of the Arts)
5. Panel: Writing a Dissertation in Islamic Art & Architcctural History
Panelists: Catherine Asher (University of Minnesota), Martina Rugiadi (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Chanchal Dadlani (Wake Forest University), Zohreh Soltani (Ithaca College)
Date & Time: Monday, November 15, 2021 at 12 pm (Eastern)
Register at: https://umn.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEkdeyuqDkoG9PjMJJFMDvn8LI_pQ2rXtM1
This panel discussion is open to all graduate students working in topics related to Islamic art.
We encourage faculty members to circulate this announcement to their students.
To make the discussion as relevant as possible, we ask participants to complete this questionnaire in advance: https://forms.gle/7PpkdiVoZ9VhC3E39
Please submit responses by Monday, November 8, 2021.
6. New Exhibition – Cartier et les Arts de l’Islam: Aux sources de la modernité/Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity – MAD/DMA 2021-2022
Heather Ecker:
I wanted to announce the opening of our exhibition in Paris at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs (October 21, 2021 – February 20, 2022) and in Dallas at the Dallas Museum of Arts (May 14, 2022 – September 18, 2022). The exhibition, a culmination of a project of more than three years, is co-organised between the MAD and the DMA with the special collaboration of the Louvre and with Cartier. Diller, Scofidio + Renfro is the scenographer. It is a project in which archival materials (drawings, plaster casts, prints for glass plate negatives, books from Louis Cartier’s design library and notebooks of ideas) take pride of place alongside the jewels that emerged from those studies. It is a study of one firm’s creative response to the ornamental designs copied, catagorised and reprinted by theoreticians of the 19th century including Owen Jones, Jules Bourgoin, Collinot and Beaumont, Prisse d’Avennes and others, and its frank admiration for artists from the Islamic lands whose work was available in exhibitions, catalogues and Louis Cartier’s personal collection of manuscripts, paintings and objects. Indeed, inspirations from the ornaments produced by these artists appear to be at the root of Cartier’s modern style, including what became known as Art Deco. At each venue, the exhibition includes a partial reconstruction of Louis’ dispersed collection, much of it now at Harvard Art Museums. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, published by MAD, in two editions, English and French, edited by the four curators: Evelyne Possémé, Judith Henon-Raynaud, Sarah Schleuning, and myself. The English edition will be released in April 2022, distributed by Thames & Hudson.
https://madparis.fr/Cartier-et-les-arts-de-l-Islam-Aux-sources-de-la-modernite
7. Digital Dictionaries of South Asia
https://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/
8. New National Book Critics Circle translation prize
Starting with the 2022 publishing year, the National Book Critics Circle is launching a new Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize to honor the best book of any genre translated into English and published in the United States (including publishing houses based abroad but which distribute in America). The prize recognizes books for their excellence and artistry and is open to translations of books authored by living or deceased writers; new translations of previously translated books will also be considered (this is a game changer for classicists — a new Beowulf or Iliad would count, as would any premodern title in any language tradition). The prize will judge the translated English-language book as a work itself.
As a member of NBCC, I’m thrilled to be on the prize committee along with Adam Dalva, Tara Wanda Merrigan, Shelly Frisch, Jane Ciabattari, and other talented authors, translators, and reviewers. Please reach out with any questions!
Best wishes,
Kevin
————————————————————————-
Kevin Blankinship, PhD
Assistant Professor, Arabic Language and Literature
Contributing Editor, New Lines Magazine
Brigham Young University, 3058 JFSB
Provo, UT 84602 | (801) 422-4684
kevin_blankinship@byu.edu | Homepage
Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Academia | MuckRack
The purpose of this call is to assemble contributions from scholars – both established as well as early career – for an academic conference exploring the cultural exchanges between Arabic, Turkic, and Persian-speaking peoples and traditions across the medieval and early modern eras.
Prospective contributors should apply with a 200-word abstract of their proposed presentation/essay by 30th November 2021.
Twelve successful applicants will be notified before the end of the year, and invited to partake in a digitally held conference held on Tuesday 4th May 2022.
More information is available at this link.
10. Fellowship: Bahari Visiting Fellowships in the Persian Arts of the Book.
Deadline 30 November 2021
The Bodleian Libraries are now accepting applications for Visiting Fellowships to be taken up during the academic year 2022-23. Fellowships support periods of research in the Special Collections of the Bodleian Libraries, across a range of different subjects.
Details of the Fellowship terms and application process can be found on our Fellowships webpage. Please note that this year’s Bahari Visiting Fellowship applicants will be required to submit an article-length sample of their work along with their application.
Former Bahari Visiting Fellows presented their studies at the Persian Arts of the Book Conference in July 2021, and some of them are included in a series of short films created for the Bodleian.
The films can be watched on the YouTube channel of the Bodleian Librariesand one of them features Dr Arezou Azad, BIPS Trustee and former Bahari Visiting Fellow. The video can be watched here.
11. The seventh (2022) round of the BRAIS – De Gruyter Prize is now open for submissions, with the deadline set for 5pm GMT on Friday 7th January 2022.
For further information, including how to submit, please click here: http://www.brais.ac.uk/prize/2022.
12. Call for Book Manuscripts: The Early and Medieval Islamic World Series
I.B.Tauris, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, is seeking manuscripts and book proposals for The Early Medieval and Islamic World book series. For more information, including, series description, new and forthcoming titles and how to submit a proposal, please see the series page on our website and read below, or contact Rory Gormley, Commissioning Editor for Middle East history & culture (rory.gormley@bloomsbury.com).
Series Description
As recent scholarship resoundingly attests, the medieval Mediterranean and Middle East bore witness to a prolonged period of flourishing intellectual and cultural diversity. Seeking to contribute to this ever-more nuanced and textured picture, The Early and Medieval Islamic World academic book series promotes innovative research on the period 500–1500 AD with the Islamic world, as it ebbed and flowed from Marrakesh to Palermo and Cairo to Kabul, as the central pivot. Thematic focus within this remit is broad, from the cultural and social to the political and economic, with preference given to studies of societies and cultures from a socio-historical perspective. The series showcases unique voices on the medieval Islamic world, shining light into its lesser studied corners.
Key areas of focus are:
- Transition to the ‘medieval’ world, especiallyarchaeological approaches
- Close textual readings and translations
- Trade and the economy
- Travel and exploration
- Government and warfare
- Societies and communities
- Material culture and art
- History of ideas
- Inter-religious contact, conflict and exchange
- Prominent and influential figures
The series is published in collaboration with the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean. The society is dedicated to all aspects of the academic study of Mediterranean history and culture, from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries AD. It aims to foster cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary investigation, create a forum of ideas and encourage debate on intercommunal and transnational crosspollination within the medieval Mediterranean. For more information see: http://www.societymedievalmediterranean.com
For more information see the series website https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/early-and-medieval-islamic-world/, or to submit a proposal, please contact:Rory Gormley, Editor, Middle East history & culture rgormley@ibtauris.com
Posted in: Academic items
- November 06, 2021
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