Shii News – Academic Items

1.The first International Ottoman Studies Congress (OSARK) took place in Sakarya, Turkey, from October 14-17, 2015. The next OSARK was held in Tirana, Albania, from October 17-20, 2018.

We would like to inform you that the third OSARK will be held in Istanbul, Turkey, from September 7-9, 2022, at Istanbul Medeniyet University. OSARK 2022 welcomes and encourages individual paper and thematic panel proposals within any field of Ottoman History.

For further details see:

http://www.ottomanstudies.org

2. The MLA Global Arab and Arab American Forum invites proposals for the following panels at the MLA Convention in San Francisco (5-8 January 2023):

Writing and Cultural Production as Oppositional Work

Oppositional work of writing and cultural production in the Arab region and global Arab diaspora, including protest and dissident literature/art/activism that resists surveillance and discursive/cultural practices of domestication and containment. 250-word abstract & bio by March 15, 2022 to rc49@soas.ac.uk (Rasha Chatta, Freie Universität)

Migrants as Working Subjects

Literary and artistic representations of migrant labor in the Arab region and global Arab diaspora, as inflected by class, race, ethnicity, language, nomenclature, and sociocultural/economic practices including sponsorship. 250-word abstract & bio by March 15, 2022 to azstanton@psu.edu (Anna Ziajka Stanton, The Pennsylvania State University)

3. Rescheduled: UCLA Bilingual Lecture Series – Latest Developments in Afghanistan Panel

Sunday, April 10, 2022 at 11:30am Pacific Time via Zoom

Panel in Persian

Registration Required

Ahmad Nader Nadery

Former Chair of Independent Civil Service Commission in Kabul, and Member of the Peace Negotiation Team for Afghanistan

The Taliban’s Return to Power and Its Implications for Afghanistan and Iran

Homeira Qaderi

Afghan Writer and Women’s Rights Activist, and Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University

How Women in Afghanistan have Strived for Their Rights
Farah Karimi

Head of the Dutch Parliamentary Delegation to the OSCE PA and Former UN Consultant for Capacity Building of the Afghan Parliament

4. 2022 AMECYS Friday Digital Author Series Schedule

Spring 2022 AMECYS Friday Digital Author Series

Throughout the spring on the 2^nd Friday of each month, digitally join AMECYS’ authors, who will discuss their most recent monographs, articles or book chapters. Sessions will consist of a 30-minute interview with AMECYS board member (unless noted otherwise) followed by Q&A from audience.

Friday March 11, 11 am CST

Dr. Hedi Viterbo, Associate Professor of Law,

Queen Mary University of London

Author of Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood

In Israel/Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Interviewed by Sunaina Maira (Professor, University of California, Davis)

Friday April 8th, 11 am CDT

Mr. Shivan Fazil, Researcher, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

Dr. Bahar Baser, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies,

Durham University

Editors of Youth Identity, Politics and Change in Contemporary Kurdistan (Transnational Press London, 2021)

Friday May 13, 11 am CDT

Dr. Rania Kassab Sweis, Associate Professor of Anthropology

at the University of Richmond

Author of Paradoxes of Care: Children and Global Medical Aid in Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2021)

Links for series will be sent to all AMECYS listserv members, so make sure signed up for the listserv! Digital medium for series is Zoom (https://zoom.us/download).

For information, email dylan.baun@uah.edu or hmorrison@uwlax.edu

5. Jaleh Esfahani Poetry Prize 2022

Date: 18 February 2022 Time: 6:00 PM

Finishes: 18 February 2022 Time: 8:30 PM

Venue: Brunei Gallery Room: Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre (BGLT)

Type of Event: Performance

This is the first in-person Annual Jaleh Esfahani Poetry Prize event that will be held since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. This year’s prize also coincides with the 100th birth anniversary of the late Jaleh Esfahani.

The event marks the 12th year of the poetry prize, in which young (under 30) Persian poets from Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and the diaspora, compete. At this year’s event the winners, from among the three shortlists of 5 poets, for each country, which were selected from nearly 200 original participants, will be announced.

During the event well-known Persian language poets and the judges will speak, and the winners will read samples of their poems, intertwined with music from Persian-speaking countries and a Sama (Whirling) Dance.

Programme

6.00pm: Reception in the foyer of the BGLT

6.30pm: Event starts

* Please note that the language for this event’s proceedings will be in Persian.

Admission is free and open to the public, however, donations of £5 are greatly appreciated.

Organiser: Jaleh Esfahani Cultural Foundation in association with the SOAS Middle East Institute

Contact email: fsp@parand.co.uk

6. The Leiden University Centre for Islamic Thought and History (LUCITH) is hosting a two-day international conference on Wisdom Literature in Early Islam.

12-13 September, 2022

The conference will have a mixed format, with both in-person and online presentations. The conference will address the question of wisdom literature, as a tool of persuasion, to deliberate its content, to analyse its philosophical and ethical messaging, and identify major themes and tropes in Arabic literature, philosophy, intellectual history, linguistics, and ethics, among other things, in Early Islam (broadly conceived of as the first few centuries).

Themes the conference could address:

Transmission of wisdom literature, aphorisms, and texts
Recurring tropes and themes
Devotional piety and wisdom literature
The Qur’an and wisdom literature
The Arabic reception of ancient wisdom literature
Tools of persuasion and rhetoric
Philosophical and ethical dimensions

For consideration, please send a 300-word abstract in English to lucith@hum.leidenuniv.nl by the 15th of March 2022. The conference will be held in English.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, only participants located within Europe will be invited to join us in person and will be offered a one-night stay with their travel and accommodation costs covered by the conference organiser. Participants located outside of Europe will be invited to join us online.

Contact Info:

Tamar Tros, Conference Coordinator

Contact Email:

lucith@hum.leidenuniv.nl

7. The latest issue of Mamlūk Studies Review(XXIV [2021]) is now available for download from our website:

http://mamluk.uchicago.edu/browse-download.html

8. Al-Maqrīzī’s al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar. Volume IV, Section 2: The Idols of the Arabs.Critical edition and introduction by Michael Lecker, annotated translation by Yaara Perlman. Leiden and Boston: Brill, February 2022 (Bibliotheca Maqriziana, vol. 8), xii-381 pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-49986-7 (e-book); 978-90-04-49983-6 (hardback).

For more information on published and forthcoming volumes, see https://brill.com/view/serial/BIMA.

9. Translating Contemporary Iran

Panel with Mariam Rahmani and Nasrin Rahimieh (UCI)

Thursday, February 17
Remote via Zoom
1:00 pm (Pacific Time)

About the Panel

Since its first publication in 2008, Mahsa Mohebali’s edgy cult hit, Nigarān nabash, has been off and the shelves in Tehran. Following Shadi, a cynic and opium addict who cross-dresses to evade hijab law, throughout an apocalyptic day of earthquakes that are destroying the city, the novel offers a view of contemporary Iran too seldom seen in the US – but now available to in translation under the title, In Case of Emergency (Feminist Press, 2021). Please join us for a conversation between scholar Dr. Nasrin Rahimieh and translator Dr. Mariam Rahmani on issues of translation and mistranslation – both literal and cultural– from a Persian Iranian to Anglophone American context.

About the Panelists

Mariam Rahmani is a writer and translator. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Granta, Gulf Coast, BOMB Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Rumpus as well as in exhibition catalogs and her translation in n+1, Columbia Journal, and the collected volume, After Cinema: Fictions From A Collective Memory (Archive Book, 2019). Her 2021 translation of Mahsa Mohebali’s In Case of Emergency, the 2008 Iranian cult hit, was well reviewed in the New York Times and has garnered other positive press in the New York Times “Globetrotting,” Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, World Literature Today, and the Center for the Art of Translation. Rahmani holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA and an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. Among her honors and awards are the 2021 Henfield Prize, the Columbia MFA’s highest honor in fiction, a 2018 PEN/Heim translation grant, and a US Fulbright fellowship. Rahmani currently teaches at UCLA as a Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature.

Nasrin Rahimieh is Howard Baskerville Professor of Humanities and Professor Comparative Literature at the University of California. She is currently the Director of the Humanities Core program at UCI, former Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature (2016-19) and Maseeh Chair and Director of the Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture (2006-14). Her teaching and research are focused on modern Persian literature, the literature of Iranian exile and diaspora, contemporary Iranian women’s writing. Among her publications are Oriental Responses to the West: Comparative Essays in Select Writers from the Muslim World (1990), Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural History (2001), Forugh Farrokhzad, Poet of Modern Iran: Iconic Woman And Feminine Pioneer Of New Persian Poetry (2010) co-edited with Dominic Parviz Brookshaw and Iranian Culture: Representation and Identity (2015). She translated the late Taghi Modarressi’s last novel, The Virgin of Solitude (2008) from Persian into English.

For more information and to register:

https://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/event/15371

10. 2 PhD Positions in Digital Islamic History, University of Hamburg

I am advertising for two PhD positions in my project “The Evolution of Islamic Societies (c.600-1600 CE): Algorithmic Analysis into Social History” (EIS1600). Each position is 2+2 years. The deadline for applications is March 31, 2022. Successful applicants will work on one of the case studies of the project and will write and defend a PhD thesis on the topic of their choice, within a selected case study. Descriptions of both positions and detailed information on the application process can be found at the following links: https://tinyurl.com/PhD01; https://tinyurl.com/PhD02. Feel free to email me, if you have any questions (maxim.romanov@uni-hamburg.de). The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the framework of the Emmy Noether Program (https://tinyurl.com/EIS1600). It is hosted at the Institute of Asian and African Studies (Islamic Studies Division) of the University of Hamburg.

Best regards,
Maxim Romanov
Emmy Noether Junior Research Group Leader, “The Evolution of Islamic Societies (c.600-1600 CE): Algorithmic Analysis into Social History” (2021-2027), Universität Hamburg, Asien-Afrika-Institut, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, 20146 Hamburg, maxim.romanov@uni-hamburg.de

11. Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World,

ʿAbdīshōʿ of Nisibis and the Apologetic Tradition

S Rassi

Oxford, 2022

12. Regards sur les arts du monde iranien / Insights into the Art of the Persianate Societies

coorganisé par l’Institut Français de Recherche en Iran (IFRI) et le CeRMI,

aura lieu

le mardi 22 février 2022, de 15h à 17h (heure de Paris) / 17h30-19h30 (heure de Téhéran).

Cette deuxième séance s’articulera autour du thème « Regards sur la céramique, 1 / Insights into ceramic arts, 1 », avec les interventions suivantes :