Shii News – Academic Items
1.Open Islamicate Text Initiative Teleconference on Feb 7
We welcome all to join the Open Islamicate Text Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (OpenITI AOCP) team for a public teleconference with the OpenITI AOCP technical advisory group. The focus of this meeting will be the optical character recognition tools and datasets for Persian, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu that the OpenITI AOCP has developed.
The conference, led by Co-PI David Smith, will provide an update on the OpenITI AOCP technical work and include brief presentations from advisory group members about their own work in OCR. We will then develop recommendations for dataset and technical development in the next phase of the project.
We will virtually gather on Monday, February 7 from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. EST. Please register at the link below if you would like to participate. We will prepare a report of the conference proceedings as well as record video of the presentations and discussion for those unable to attend. Be sure to watch out for a second public teleconference to be held this spring, with a focus on the formation of Persian and Arabic OCR user groups and the presentation of our digital text production pipeline, eScriptorium (developed in collaboration with the eScripta project).
For more on OpenITI AOCP, a project generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, please see here. For any questions on the teleconference, please email John Mullan (jmullan@umd.edu) or message us on Twitter (@Open_ITI).
You are invited to a Zoom meeting.
When: Feb 7, 2022 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Register in advance for this meeting:
https://umd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUpcOGoqT4tE9aF_DRXZEXOt5uYNd6U5Fv9
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
2. Mysticism and Ethics in Islam
Bilal Orfali, Atif Khalil, and Mohammed Rustom
3. IIS: The Ismaili Special Collections Unit (ISCU) has launched an online catalogue of special collections housed at the IIS, featuring information on over 2,000 items, including manuscripts, artefacts (such as coins, coin weights, medals and other memorabilia), rare and special printed materials (including periodicals), photographs and archival materials.
Dr Wafi Momin, Head of ISCU, said “We are delighted to announce the launch of an online catalogue of the special collections housed at the IIS. This online catalogue represents a key milestone in making accessible the rich heritage of Ismaili communities from around the world to a varied audience including researchers, students and interested members of the public.”
For any queries about the catalogue, please contact Naureen Ali, Cataloguer and Adlib Officer, ISCU.
https://special-collections.iis.ac.uk/search/simple
4. Intellect is pleased to announce that International Journal of Islamic Architecture 11.1 is out now!
For more information about the journal and issue click here:
https://www.intellectbooks.com/international-journal-of-islamic-architecture
5. The Qur’an
Translated with a New Introduction
Translated by AJ Droge
Equinox, 2022
For more information and to order at 25% off quoting the code QT visit the book page:
https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/quran-translated/
6. The Barakat Trust has recently received a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fundto create a new grant scheme. In each of 2022, 2023 and 2024, this scheme will offer 3 grants of £8,000 plus in-kind support for projects in the United Kingdom (UK) that use collections of Islamic art in the UK to foster greater understanding about the cultures of the Islamic world, and involve a significant element of public engagement, ideally as part of the process of making collections more accessible. The grant will be open to UK institutions with collections of Islamic art and material culture. We are particularly interested in understudied collections. The deadline for submission of applications for this year is March 31st 2022. This project will be delivered in partnership with the Islamic Art and Material Culture Subject Specialist Network and other partners.
Interested parties should contact The Barakat Trust to arrange an initial conversation about this scheme. Please email: projects@barakat.org
7. The Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Minor at Rutgers University Newark is delighted to invite you to the first talk in the MEIS Inaugural Lecture Series on Monday February 7th, 11:30-12:50 EST, with Prof. Patricia Blessing (Art History, Princeton University), who will offer a lecture titled “Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Empire.”
Register here: HTTPS://TINYURL.COM/34AKWEN3
8. Tuesday, February 15, 2022 | 12:00 pm | Zoom
Syriac Villages in the Tur Abdin: A Microhistory of the Medieval Middle East
Marica Cassis, University of Calgary
Marica Cassis considers understudied archaeological material found in the Tur Abdin region of southeast Turkey. She will contextualize the churches as part of the network of villages and cities in the region, both in terms of the material remains and literary sources.
While scholarly work on the churches of the Tur Abdin dates back to the work of Gertrude Bell, and subsequently continued off and on through the twentieth century, the focus of most research has consistently been the churches in the region. However, churches are the heart of communities, whether villages or monasteries, and need to be considered as part of the whole. What has not been considered in detail is the importance of contextualizing churches in the villages and cities in the region, both in terms of the material remains and the literary sources.
Advance registration required. Register: https://eastofbyzantium.org/upcoming-events/
Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.
An East of Byzantium lecture. East of Byzantium is a partnership between the Arthur H. Dadian and Ara Oztemel Chair of Armenian Art at Tufts University and the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture that explores the cultures of the eastern frontier of the Byzantine empire in the late antique and medieval periods.
9. Consider submitting your work to postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies
After more than a decade of publication, the journal postmedieval has a new team of editors and a new editorial board and we are looking for contributions from the H-Mideast Medieval community!
postmedieval has long published theoretically driven scholarship on premodernity and its ongoing reverberations, and the aim of the new editorial leadership is to continue this while expanding the disciplines and subject-areas from which articles are drawn. To that end, we are actively seeking open-topic submissions from a wide variety of fields and disciplines. We’re writing in the hopes that you’ll spread the word and will also keep the journal in mind as a potential venue for your own work. We are currently seeking open-topic submissions between 6,000 and 12,000 words, accepted on a rolling basis.
To say a bit more—over the last year, the journal’s editorial team has worked to harness postmedieval’s foundations in conceptual adventure, ethical and political urgency, and stylistic experiment, while also stretching its scope to additional language traditions, geographic locales, and the work of scholars from identity groups that have not heretofore been featured consistently in our journal, or in other mainstream outlets for medieval studies. The new editorial board includes scholars working fields like Byzantine studies, art history, the Hispanophone early modern, medievalism, religious history, Jewish studies, the environmental humanities, film studies, Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Japanese, French, medieval Ethiopia, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, Premodern Critical Race Studies, manuscript studies, and the digital humanities. We are eager to cultivate a pool of submissions that reflects such varied scholarly traditions.
In addition to the broadened content parameters of the journal, we have also imagined new scholarly genres. These include meditations on critical terms in the field, an essay-form we are calling “terms of art;” brief translations or other presentations of primary sources that extend their accessibility to wider readerships; “dialogues,” in which scholars share a conversation in print; and “reports from the field” that summarize and contextualize important field-specific discussions held at a recent symposium or exhibition. We envision these genres as supplements to the traditional essayistic articles and book-review essays that we will continue to publish and for which the journal has long been distinguished.
We encourage you to read more about these new genres, and about our vision for the future of academic publishing in medieval studies, in the free-to-view introduction to our editorial team’s inaugural issue, entitled “What Might a Journal Be?.” For remarks from some of the board members, you might have a look at this piece as well.
We hope that you will share with colleagues, students, and scholarly networks our invitation to submit new work. We can promise that all submissions will be treated with scholarly generosity and care. The editorial team embraces an ethics of peer review and publication that values the intense labor required to bring an essay to print, and we center in our review process the anti-racist and inclusive editorial practices outlined by the RaceB4Race Executive Board. Feel free to reach out to me with specific queries or ideas, and the editorial team is always happy to answer questions at our journal email address, postmedievalED@gmail.com.
10. Online Lecture- Social Fabrics: Inscribed Textiles from Egyptian Tombs
Please join us on March 11, 1:00 p.m. (EST) for a virtual lecture as curator Mary McWilliams discusses her research for The Harvard Art Museums’ exhibition Social Fabrics: Inscribed Textiles from Egyptian Tombs (January 22, 2022–May 8, 2022, University Research Gallery) looks at “tiraz” – highly prized textiles enhanced with woven, embroidered or painted Arabic inscriptions – to trace the structure of medieval Egyptian society during a transformative period. It reveals a story as interwoven and complex as these delicate objects themselves.
For more information and registration, visit: https://museum.gwu.edu/member-program-social-fabrics-inscribed-textiles-egyptian-tombs
(Ed note – Membership required.)
11. MEM Panel Sponsorship at MESA 2022
As part of the efforts of Middle East Medievalists (MEM) to raise the profile of medieval studies at MESA, the MEM Board of Directors announces our 2022 call for panel sponsorship. MEM is a MESA affiliate and thus may sponsor up to three panels at each annual meeting. MEM sponsorship does not guarantee inclusion on the program, nor does it come with financial support. However, sponsorship highlights a panel to the MESA program committee, and, if it is accepted, the panel will appear as MEM-sponsored on the final program. We will also publicize MEM-sponsored panels to our membership and in MEM’s annual “Medieval MESA” circular. We encourage all medievalists organizing panels for MESA 2022 to send us abstracts for both individual papers and the panel as a whole, as well as the names of participants, by February 7, 2022, so the MEM board may consider them for sponsorship before the MESA submission deadline. Please email your materials and/or any questions to Rob Haug (haugrt@ucmail.uc.edu).
12. Call for Papers for:
Travellers in Ottoman Lands: The Balkans, Anatolia and Beyond
Wednesday 24 August – Friday 26 August 2022
The Faculty of Islamic Studies of the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
An international three-day seminar organised by ASTENE (the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East), in association with the Faculty of Islamic Studies of the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Topics to be considered include: • travellers to Bosnia, the Balkans and the wider Ottoman world from other parts of Europe and elsewhere• travellers from the region to other parts of Europe and the Middle East• pilgrims and pilgrimage within the region• travel from the Balkans to the holy places of the Middle East, both Muslim and Christian• artistic and literary representations of the Balkans and other parts of the Ottoman world• the horticultural legacy of the region.
Proposals should be submitted (in English) to: ottomanlandsastene@gmail.com by 30 April 2022 at the latest.
For more details, including confirmed Keynote Speakers, proposal submissions and registration details, please go to:
https://www.astene.org.uk/current-events/travellers-in-ottoman-lands
13. UCLA:
Bilingual Lecture Series – Love at Eighty Film Screening and Panel Discussion
Sunday, March 13, 2022 at 11:30am Pacific Time via Zoom
Film in Persian with English Subtitles/Panel in Persian
Simin Behbahani: Love at Eighty is a retrospective of Simin Behbahani’s life and unique poetry. Largely in her own words, using family and period photos, interviews with noted poets and critics, this portrait traces her poetic development from her family roots, modern poetry movement, and reinventing Ghazal to explore the social, political, cultural, and moral issues of Iranian society.
14. Webinar on “Analyzing the Middle East Social Dynamics Using NLP and Big Data Methods”
Prof. Eric Atwell is inviting us all to join this online panel webinar on “Analyzing the Middle East Social Dynamics Using NLP and Big Data Methods” – as part of the CHSS Middle East Conference 2022.
Sunday Feb 6, 2022, 18:00-19:30 Qatar Time (15:00- 16:30 UK GMT)
Registration form to get the Webex links: https://lnkd.in/dXJQnbJC
Full Conference Program: https://www.hbku.edu.qa/en/mec/agenda
Chair: George Mikros, Professor in Digital Humanities, Middle Eastern Studies Department (HBKU)
Moderator: Wajdi Zaghouani, Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities, Middle Eastern Studies Department (HBKU)
- Kareem Darwish, Principal Scientist, Principal Scientist, aiXplain Inc:
“News Consumption in Time of Conflict: 2021 Palestinian-Israel War as an Example”
2. Muhammad Imran, Senior Scientist, Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI):
“Two Billion Multilingual COVID-19 Tweets with Sentiment, Entity, Geo, and Gender Labels”
3. Walid Magdy, Reader, School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh:
“Understanding the Arab Region from Social Media: What can we learn?”
4. Eric Atwell, Professor of Artificial Intelligence for Language, School of Computing, University of Leeds:
“Understanding the Quran: A Challenge for Artificial Intelligence”
If you have any questions, please feel free to email : wzaghouani@hbku.edu.qa
Posted in: Academic items- February 05, 2022
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