Shii News – Academic Items

1.OpenITI Teleconference on April 19

We welcome all to join the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (OpenITI AOCP) team for a public teleconference on Tuesday, April 19 from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. EST. Please register for this event here.

The conference, led by OpenITI AOCP co-PIs Matthew Thomas Miller and Sarah Bowen Savant, will present OpenITI’s latest work on optical character recognition (OCR) for Persian and Arabic and the user-friendly digital text production pipeline, eScriptorium.

We particularly encourage those individuals and projects teams who are interested in making use of our OCR system for their own research and project development to attend. We will discuss the formation of user testing groups at this event and discuss OpenITI’s planned next phase of development.

We will prepare a report of the conference proceedings as well as record the presentations and discussion for those unable to attend.

For more on OpenITI AOCP, a project generously funded by The Mellon Foundation, please visit this webpage. For more on eScriptorium and the eScripta team, please visit https://gitlab.com/scripta/escriptorium.

2. CfP: Invitation to Pacifism and Nonviolence in Contemporary Islam conference at the University of Manchester

We would like to cordially invite you to present at the upcoming international conference “Pacifism and Nonviolence in Contemporary Islam” at the University of Manchester.

The conference will take place on May 17, 2022. The format of the conference will be hybrid – with talks presented simultaneously at the University and online via Zoom. A plenary roundtable discussion will offer a further opportunity for these interventions to be discussed collectively, and contributions from online participants are very welcome.

This conference brings together academics, civil society members, and activists from around the world. It explores Muslim experiences of pacifism and nonviolence while exploring prospects for their theorization. It moves past popular tropes of Islam as (or other than) ‘a religion of peace’ to offer a space to constructively and critically examine neglected literature, differing perspectives, and substantive initiatives – from scriptural interpretation to practical peacebuilding. Its approach is inclusive, inter-disciplinary, and flexible. It seeks first and foremost to ground its discussions in their own contexts: theoretical and embodied, historical and political, theological and hermeneutic.

The conference provides a welcoming space for scholars and practitioners to engage with one another. Panellists from a wide range of professional, cultural, and geographic backgrounds are invited to apply to present their research and offer their reflections on pacifism and nonviolence in contemporary Islam. By bringing together leading scholars, civil society members, and activists from around the world, a more comprehensive understanding can be achieved. The results of this conversation will benefit both participants and the wider world.

For more information on the conference please see: https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/pacifism-in-islam/

Please send your abstract or an outline of your talk by May 1, 2022 to this email walaa.quisay@manchester.ac.uk

3. Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies welcomes the submission of papers for May Issue 2022.The deadline for the manuscript submissions has been extended until April 15, 2022. The issue publication date is May Issue 2022. For more information, visit the Submission page. The papers can address but are not limited to the following … Read More

It is our pleasure to send the full issue of AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies, Volume 6, Number1. February 2022
For individual papers, please click here
Regards,
Arab World English Journal
for Translation & Literary Studies
https://awej-tls.org/

4. Iranian Armenian Transnational Poetry:

We at Roshan Institute for Persian Studies are pleased to announce the Spring 2022 Mir-Djalali Speaker Series Lecture. Our guest speaker will be Dr. Claudia Yaghoobi, Roshan Institute Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Yaghoobi has also recently been named Director of the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at UNC. Join us here on Sunday, April 17 from 2 to 4 p.m. EST.

5. Decades of Fire: New Writing from the Middle East and North Africa

Special issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review, Decades of Fire: New Writing from the Middle East and North Africa.

https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/the-journal/current-issue-spring-2022/

6. Dust-Ali Khan, “Mo`ayyer al-Mamalek”, The Artist and the Shah: Memoirs of Life at the Persian Court