Shii News – Academic Items
1.ONLINE Webinar: “Manifestations of a Sufi Woman in Central Asia” by Dr Aziza Shanazarova (Columbia University), Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies Lecture Series, University of Manchester: “Empowering Muslim Women in History, Literature, and the Arts”, 8 March 2022, 15:30 GMT
The lecture series is organized by Prof Zahia Smail Salhi < zahia.smailsalhi@manchester.ac.uk > and Dr Ha-toon AL FASSI < hatoon.alfassi@manchester.ac.uk >, the University of Manchester, School of Arts, Languages and Culture.
Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/93450525800
2. HYBRID International Conference “Silk Roads by Land and Sea”, German University of Technology in Oman (GUtech), Muscat, 9-12 March 2022 – POSTPONED to later in 2022
The conference will be structured around five sections, namely Cultural Heritage, Natural Sciences, Human-ities and History of Religions, Social Anthropology, and finally, Historic Politics and Economics. Dealing with these five sections, the presentations will take place in two parallel strings: “Silk Roads by Land” and “Silk Roads by Sea”.
Information: http://silkroads.rio-heritage.org/
3. HYBRID Lecture: “The Rise and Fall of Postcolonial Charisma” by Prof. Mohammed Bamyeh (University of Pittsburg), Freie Universität Berlin, 7 April 2022, 16:15 pm – 8:00 pm CET
Anti-colonial movements in the global south were often personified by a savior leader or a visionary character. Bamyeh discusses the disappearance of this charismatic expectation in recent protest movements with spe-cial focus on the Arab uprisings of 2011 and 2019. He proposes similarities and contrasts between postcolo-nial charisma and phenomena such as contemporary populism and cults of personality.
Information: https://www.sfb-affective-societies.de/veranstaltungen/termine/2022-03-02_keynote_Bamyeh.html.
Registration: polvoro@zedat.fu-berlin.de
4. Workshop: “Travel, Mobility, and Cultural Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa”, South-east Regional Middle East and Islamic Studies Society, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, 9-10 April 2022
Papers will be presented from any discipline in the humanities or social sciences that address topics relating to travel and mobility in, to, and from the MENA region in any historical era.
Information: https://sites.google.com/su.edu/sermeiss/meetings_1/spring-meetings?authuser=0
5. 6th Doctoral Conference and Central European Symposium for the Academic Study of Religion (CESAR): “Transformations of Religions in Times of Crises: Spiritual Alienation and Rethink-ing of Ethics”, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic, 1-3 September 2022
Themes: How do different religions or spiritualities interact with each other in times of crisis?How spiritual alienation affects both social and religious systems around the world?How secular society views the role of religiosity in times of crises? What is a role of social media and how do they affect the double dynamic of spiritual alienation and unification?
Deadline for abstracts: 15 May 2022.
6. International Workshop: “Travelling Matters: Rereading, Reshaping, Reusing Objects Across the Mediterranean (1492-1923)”, Haifa Centre for Mediterranean History, 8 September 2022
The workshop intends to tackle objects as sources and subjects of the history of cross-cultural encounters in innovative ways. We intend to discuss objects flowing in all directions and we wish to concentrate on the “second-handedness” of displaced objects.
Deadline for abstracts: 10 April 2022.
7. Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of Arabic, University of Notre Dame, IN
Applicants should have at least an M.A. in linguistics, literature, Middle Eastern Studies, or relevant field, as well as preparation in communicative language pedagogy. Applicants should also have native or near-native fluency in Modern Standard Arabic, at least one dialect, and English, and some experience teaching Arabic at the university level.
Deadline for applications: 20 March 2022. Information: https://apply.interfolio.com/103344
8. Doctoral Scholarships of the Gibb Memorial Trust
Applications for scholarship of up to £2,000 are invited from students working on the pre-modern Middle East (7th century to 1918) registered for a PhD at a British university.
Deadline for applications: 15 April 2022.
Information: https://www.gibbtrust.org/scholarships/
9. Hamsa. Journal of Judaic and Islamic Studies, # 8 (2022) : Arabists and Hebraists (18th– 20th century)
It is intended to summon up Arabists and Hebraists whose activity was developed inside or outside the Academy. The chronological range extends from the 18th to the 20th century, allowing the inclusion of the begin-ning of modern Arabic and Hebraic studies, in Europe, Middle East and new American states, as also others less obvious regions of the world. ]
Deadline for abstracts: 30 April 2022. Information: https://journals.openedition.org/hamsa/2460
10. Articles for New Journal “Indonesian Journal of Religion, Spirituality and Humanity”, State Institute for Islamic Studies (IAIN) Salatiga, Indonesia
IJORESH is committed to the scholarly study of the dynamic interplays among religion, spirituality and humanity. It particularly focuses on the works which deal with anthropology of religion, sociology of religion, psychology of religion, philosophy of religion, history of religion, religious education, religious literature, the-ology, religious law, religious studies, Islamic studies, and religious tourism.
Submission deadline: 15 April 2022.
Information: https://e-journal.iainsalatiga.ac.id/index.php/ijoresh/index
11. Articles for Journal of Language and Inscription: Studies on Old, Middle and New Iranian Languages and Inscriptions. We welcome original and as yet unpublished contributions in German, English, and French from all research areas of studies on old, Middle and new Iranian languages and inscriptions. Reviews can also be submitted at any time.
Deadline for articles: 15 September 2022.
Information: Mdehaghi@ut.ac.ir
12. The British Library
Arabic Manuscripts from Southeast Asia in the British Library
Today’s guest post is by Prof. Andrew Peacock of the University of St. Andrews.
13. CALL FOR PAPERS International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA)
Special Issue: Climate Change and the Built Environment in the Islamic World
Thematic volume planned for May 2024 (IJIA 13.2)
Proposal submission deadline: April 30, 2022
This special issue of IJIA focuses on the impact of the current climate crisis on the built environments of the Islamic world. Environmentalist scholar and eco-theologist Seyyed Hossein Nasr once said that the natural environment occupies a type of ‘sacred’ space in the world, an elevated position that exists only because nature is ‘always in danger of desecration’ (Chidester and Linenthal 1995). In fact, many scientists are now seeing our current global predicament as evidence of the emergence of a ‘fifth nature’ or ‘post nature’, referring to a world ‘after’ nature or potentially beyond or in addition to it, which expands the central definition of the ‘natural’ to include man-made waste, environmental pollution, and importantly climate change as part and parcel of a lived and living ecosystem (Apotsos and Venter 2020). To this end, this special issue takes up the challenge of unpacking this complex topic by utilizing architecture as a space of discourse for thinking about how one might craft a theory of ‘critical environmentalism’ across the Islamic world. Currently accounting for 40 per cent of the world’s total energy usage per year, the built environment provides a fitting platform for a consideration of climate change and attendant environmental themes such as sustainability – broadly defined as ‘the endurance of systems and processes’ – towards examining how such realities are made manifest through the lens of diverse spatial templates within Muslim societies around the globe.
To this point, many architectural approaches being explored in the contemporary period as potential solutions to building in an increasingly unstable climatic future are rooted in historical practices, many of which emerged in proto-Islamic lands. Archaeological evidence from North Africa and the Middle East, for example, not only suggest that early civilizations used thermodynamically efficient materials like earth to build in desert environments, but also developed an understanding of how to generate livable microclimates through infrastructural design and engineering. Some of these early approaches have also served as the basis for some of the first modern attempts at crafting climate-appropriate design, spearheaded by architects such as Hassan Fathy (Egypt) and his utilisation of AT (Appropriate Technology), and even certain contemporary structural counterparts like Dubai’s new eco-mosque in Hatta, which opened in 2021 and uses both solar panels to reduce its energy usage and water treatment units to reuse water for irrigation and cleaning due to the lack of potable water sources in the region. Importantly as well, such building projects and approaches also gesture towards shifting conditions and modes of being in the world, realities informed by numerous different perspectives ranging from social, cultural, economic, and even religious modes of existence. In 2021, the Saudi Arabian government issued a fatwa on the topic of water reuse, requiring mosques in both Mecca and Medina to recycle wastewater or ‘grey water’ due to the limited potable water resources in the region and the extreme drain on regional water resources that events like the annual Hajj provoke. Some see this as evidence of the emergence of a ‘Green Deen’, or an approach to sustainability that positions environmental stewardship as a faith-based ordinance.
Contemporary considerations of the effects of climate change on built environments throughout the Islamic world also compel a reconsideration of the continuing fallacy imposed by western Enlightenment thought that the relationship between architecture and the environment is one of mutual exclusion. Although advancements in green technology, the growth of design fields oriented around biomimetic applications, and the development of sustainable building materials such as ‘cradle to cradle’ products are shifting the relationship between built form and the environment in a more cooperative direction, the fact remains that architectural practice continues to position the natural environment as a separate, distinct realm to be studied and above all controlled, a largely non-collaborative system that rarely overlaps with the built environment unless forced and often actively opposes it.
To this end, this special issue encourages contributions that explore the role of architecture and the built environment in shaping the contours of current climate change and environmentalist discourse in the context of diverse socio-political, cultural, and economic spheres throughout the Islamic world. Contributions might consider past and present events, circumstances, and spaces that offer different or nonconventional interpretations of environmentalism and even the idea of ‘nature’ itself as a space of multiple perspectives, definitions, and concerns, as well as how communities individually encounter and define environmental concerns and incorporate natural design elements into structural responses and solutions specific to the context. Papers might additionally address how architecture as an analytical mechanism challenges established approaches and tendencies that position the built environment in opposition to environmentalist concerns by recognizing its capacity to act as a type of text composed of multiple narratives and registers of knowledge that reflects the value system and frameworks operating within a society at a particular moment with regards to the environment.
Papers should adhere to the IJIA’s remit, which is defined broadly as ‘the historic Islamic world, encompassing the Middle East and parts of Africa and Asia, but also the more recent geographies of Islam in its global dimensions’. Further, contributors should fully exploit the self-reflexive potential of this remit towards addressing a spectrum of critical approaches to the built environment in the Islamic world that not only position architecture as a theatre of environmental performance, but also a platform from which to consider additional conditions revolving around issues of race, gender, ethnicity, culture, and politics as they relate to environmental challenges and concerns. To this end, this special issue not only aims to be strongly interdisciplinary, drawing from fields ranging from urban design, history, architecture, archaeology, sociology, and anthropology, but also accommodate a diversity of discourses that focus on regions, communities, and built environments not widely addressed in scholarship on Islamic space. Such case studies are particularly important toward generating a comparative interrogative approach to effectively consider the ongoing encounter/relationship between humanity and the natural world over time and space.
Examples of themes contributors might wish to explore include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Imagining sustainable futures/architecture as an environmentalist frontier
- Global warming, climate change, and its social/cultural impacts
- Natural aesthetics as design inspiration
- Green architecture in desert environments
- Environmentalism, heritage, and its discontents
- Eco-Islam and the ‘Green Deen’
- Armed conflict and its environmental impacts/implications
- Petropolitics and sustainable space
- Architecture and ecological conservation/preservation
- Non-traditional/emerging designs, materials, and spaces
- Colonial/postcolonial frameworks in environmental discourse
- AT (appropriate technology)
Articles offering historical and theoretical analysis (DiT papers) should be between 6000 and 8000 words, and those on design and practice (DiP papers) between 3000 and 4000 words. Practitioners are welcome to contribute insofar as they address the critical framework of the journal. Please send a title and a 400-word abstract to the guest editor, Michelle Apotsos, Williams College (IJIAsustainability@gmail.com), by April 30, 2022. Authors of accepted proposals will be contacted soon thereafter and will be requested to submit full papers by January 30, 2023. All papers will be subject to blind peer review. For author instructions, please consult: www.intellectbooks.com/ijia.
14. CFP – Conference: Book Ornament and Luxury Critique – Zurich, 15-17 September 2022
The research group “Textures of Sacred Scripture. Materials and Semantics of Sacred Book Ornament” (https://textures-of-scripture.ch) invites paper proposals for a three-day international conference on “Book Ornament and Luxury Critique”. The conference, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, is scheduled to take place at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich from 15 to 17 September 2022.
In his famous preface to Job, Jerome severely criticizes sumptuous luxury in the ornamentation of books: “Let those who will keep the old books with their gold and silver letters on purple skins (…) if only they will leave for me and mine, our poor pages and copies which are less remarkable for beauty than for accuracy” (Praefatio in librum Hiob, ed. Schaff/Wace 1890, 492). While this source is often cited as proof of the availability of luxurious copies of sacred scriptures in Late Antiquity, and the continuation of such splendor – despite clerical opposition – throughout the Middle Ages, the tradition of luxury critique it documents, and its further development, has received far less attention. When, how, and under what circumstances might book ornament be understood as offensive, and which strategies were employed to avoid such critique or to create books that are ostentatiously ascetic?
Since antiquity, philological correctness was opposed to ornament in the rhetorical discourse, which associated an overtly rich language with overblown luxury and female adornment. Already in Roman literature, this gendered discourse was projected onto the material artifacts of writing, a tradition that influenced the varied discussions about the materiality of sacred books and their status in Christian, Islamic and Jewish book cultures from Late Antiquity until the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. In all three religious traditions, the discourse concerning the ornamentation of scripture established connections “between ornamenting bodies, buildings and language, in which fancy forms are rejected in favor of plain, and embellishment opposed to simplicity in a dialect of truth and falsity” (F. B. Flood, in: Clothing Sacred Scriptures, ed. D. Ganz/B. Schellewald, Berlin/Boston 2019, 52).
The conference welcomes proposals that consider the entire range of such critique of book ornament in Christian, Islamic and Jewish book cultures, and that analyze their specific contexts and semantics, as well as “the spaces of negotiation, in which artists, commissioners and users could react to critical allegations without simply obeying them” (D. Ganz, as above, 34). The time range for proposed papers is from antiquity through the Middle Ages and beyond; early modern and Reformation studies as well as broader theoretical approaches are also welcome. Discussions across disciplinary boundaries are encouraged. Topics of particular interest are:
- material semantics of luxury and its opposites (especially the role of color, layout and format)
- critique of gilded script and the clothing of scriptures in gold, jewelry and textiles
- self-commenting books (e. g. Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon) and self-legitimation of ornament
- the ornament critique of the monastic orders
- the economics of luxury and its critique
- the rhetoric of luxury critique
- luxury critique and gender discourses
- luxury critique in an interreligious perspective
Speaking time for each paper should not exceed 30 minutes and will be followed by a discussion. The conference languages are English, German, French and Italian. Submissions should include the title and an abstract (max. 300 words) as well as the name, contact information and a short CV of the speaker. Proposals should be submitted to thomas.rainer@uzh.ch by 15 April 2022. Acceptance of papers will be confirmed at the beginning of May 2022. The conference is currently planned as an in-person meeting. Travel expenses and on-site accommodation of all speakers will be covered.
15. Available Publication – Book on Ottoman Inscriptions In Northern Black Sea
The board of SOTA Foundation is making the next book on Ottoman traces in Ukraine and its neighbours freely available on the Academia.edu page of its author. We hope to do a service to the honour and struggle of Ukrainian people.
https://www.academia.edu/73262023/
This book is designed as a catalog of Ottoman inscriptions found in the north of the Black Sea. Said region today consists of the territories of Ukraine, Moldova, Russia and Georgia. Although the Crimean peninsula is very important for Ottoman and Islamic history, it is not the subject of this book. The material found there is so great that another book can be made out of this one. Crimea has been the subject of some monographs and inventory studies in Turkey in recent years. Romania and Bulgaria, located in the West of the Black Sea, are not included here as they will be the subject of another book. Bender Castle, located on the territory of Moldova, is included in this book because it is a part of the Ottoman Bucak province. This book is dedicated to the Honorable People of Ukraine, who resisted the brutal invasion and occupation of Ukraine in 2022, and its digital copy was made free available on this occasion in February 2022. The book is in Turkish with an extensive Russian part about Bender.
16. The Mediterranean Review issued by the Institute for Mediterranean Studies at Busan University of Foreign Studies, Republic of Korea, is calling for papers.
The journal addresses Mediterranean regional affairs and discusses crucial
developments in culture and politics. It addresses global issues such as the
Mediterranean influence on international affairs and its multi-cultural
dimensions. We welcome the submission of manuscripts dealing with the fields
of History & Humanities as well as Social Sciences.
Subjects for paper: politics, economics, history, archaeology, literature,
languages, arts, society etc. regarding the Mediterranean
* Date of Submission : April, 18th. 2022. (Mon)
* Address to submit : imsmr@bufs.ac.kr / imsmr@ims.or.kr
* Date of publication:
No.1) 30th of June
No.2) 31st of December
Before submitting your paper, please refer to our code of research ethics as
well as to the text formatting and citation rules on our website:
http://www.imsmr.or.kr.
– Published Articles :
http://imsmr.cafe24.com/go/bbs/board.php?bo_table=Articles (click to move)
– Submission Guide : http://imsmr.or.kr/go/bbs/content.php?co_id=Guidelines
(click to move)
– Code of Ethics :
http://imsmr.cafe24.com/go/bbs/content.php?co_id=Code_of_Ethics (click to
move)
Please notice that we only accept manuscripts in the English language.
All submitted papers will be evaluated under a strict and fair peer review
process. Please notice that there is no guarantee for a submitted article to
be published.
The Editorial Board, Mediterranean Review
Institute for Mediterranean Studies,
Busan University of Foreign Studies65, Geumsaemro 485 beon-gil, Geumjeong-gu, Busan, Republic of Korea. (46234)
Tel) +82-51-509-6695 / +82-51-509-6670
E-mail) imsmr@ims.or.kr / imsmr@bufs.ac.kr
Website) www.imsmr.or.kr
17. Conversations with Emperor Jahangir
Richard Foltz
18. University of California – Los Angeles – Persian Language Lecturer
https://www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=63106
Closing date: 29.5.22.
Posted in: Academic items- March 08, 2022
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