Shii News – Academic Items
1.Iran Heritage Foundation:
Book Talk: ‘Rethinking The Contemporary Art of Iran’
Wednesday 24 April 2024
17:00 – 18:30
Room: Alumni Lecture Theatre (SALT),
Paul Webley Wing (PWW), Senate House, SOAS
Speakers
Professor Hamid Dabashi (contributor)
Dr Venetia Porter (discussant)
Ghazaleh Avarzamani (artist) and
Dr Hamid Keshmirshekan (editor/author)
Chaired by Dr Seyed Ali Alavi (co-director, SOAS Centre for Iranian Studies)
Register:
https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/event/book-talk-rethinking-contemporary-art-iran
2. ‘Arabic Poetry as a Weapon of Jihad’
Dr Elisabeth Kendall, the Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge
6.00pm, Thursday, 25th April, 2024
Auditorium, Pembroke College, Cambridge
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the foyer of the Auditorium
To register to attend the lecture:
https://forms.gle/7oNwLres4LiR8GQq7
3. Hybrid Book launch: Women, Households and the Hereafter in the Qur’an (1 May 2024)
You are warmly invited to join authors Dr Karen Bauer and Professor Feras Hamza as they introduce their latest publication, “Women, Households and the Hereafter in the Qur’an: A Patronage of Piety“, in conversation with Dr Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Dr Omar `Ali-de-Unzaga.The event will include a discussion followed by questions and answers with the audience. Light refreshments will be available in the atrium after the event.
The book offers a fresh perspective on the highly contested topic of women’s status in the Qur’an. Using a historical-critical approach, the authors argue that women were integral to the early community of believers, and that households were a major locus of Qur’anic morality, piety, and law. This compelling and original work proposes new paradigms for understanding the Qur’an’s social milieu and its salvific vision for that world.
Time: 5.00pm – 6.30pm BST
Date: 1 May 2024
Venue: The Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS), Aga Khan Centre, London and Online (Zoom)
Register to attend in-person or online via the IIS website.
Other upcoming events at The Institute of Ismaili Studies
26 April – Morality and Religion: Perspectives from Literature, Sociology and Philosophy (Ahmad Sadri, Lake Forest College)
2 May – Understanding Generative AI and Prompting (Mohammad Keyhani, University of Calgary)
9 May – Between Zulaykha and Joseph: Shi’i Allegoresis of Surat Yusuf (David Hollenberg, University of Oregon)
11 June – Spirituality: The Inner and Outer Landscape (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, George Washington University)
4. ‘Hadith as Oral Literature through Early Islamic Literary Criticism’
Hany Rashwan
Studia Islamica 119, 2024
https://brill.com/view/journals/si/119/1/article-p34_2.xml?ebody=abstract%2Fexcerpt
Kayvan Tahmasebian, Rebecca Ruth Gould
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Volume 56 / Issue 1, February 2024, pp 38 – 54
6. The Persian Gulf Award (short story) and The Damavand Award (poem)
The University of Texas at Austin is holding two literary contests for all college students outside Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan who can write in Persian (this includes non-heritage Persian learners too).
The Persian Gulf Award for the best short story written in Persian and The Damavand Award for the best poem written in Persian.
There will be $2,000 monetary awards in total for the top three submissions in each category, and an English translation of the winning submissions will be published in our literary journal Y’alla: A Texan Journal of Middle Eastern Literature.
To see the submissions guidelines and deadlines, please visit https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/mes/languages/persian/persian-literature-contests.html
Submission Deadline: October 15, 2024
7. CFP: “Urban history of mobility in the MENA region: migrations, ecologies, spaces, temporalities (XIX-XXI)” – XVI SeSaMO Conference – Deadline 7 May 2024
XVI Convegno SeSaMO – XVI SeSaMO Conference
Crossings and contaminations. Practices, languages and politics in transit in the Middle East and North Africa
Department of Political and Social Sciences, Department of Literature, Languages and Cultural Heritage, University of Cagliari, Italy, 3-5 October 2024
7 May 2024: deadline for the submission of papers
Gabriele Montalbano and Lucia Carminati have organized the open panel:
Urban history of mobility in the MENA region: migrations, ecologies, spaces, temporalities (XIX-XXI):
Despite the obvious importance of migration in the urban contexts of North Africa and the Middle East in the modern age, urban history and the history of mobility and migration have not always spoken to each other. An interest in the impact of colonial regimes in urban planning and social geography has often prevailed (Wright 1991; Piaton 2016; McLaren 2018; Dumasy 2022), in part neglecting the question of urban contexts as revealers and producers of both social and spatial mobility (Foucault 1984). Moreover, studies in the North African and Middle Eastern contexts have rarely been conceived within an unifying framework, in spite of pleas to do so (Clancy-Smith 2011; Arsan, Karam, and Khater 2013). A new historiographical interest, in which this panel fits, aims to propose a history of mobility by investigating the connection between migratory phenomena, urban spaces, ecologies, and regimes of historicity (Tabak 2008; Lafi 2023). From the 19th century onwards, urban areas in the MENA region have witnessed major changes related to mobility and also to the presence of economic, social, and colonial marginalities (Biancani 2018; Fuhrmann 2020; Paonessa 2021; Montalbano 2023; Carminati 2023). The chosen chronology encompasses the era of political reforms (like Tanzimat in Ottoman areas), the implementation of colonial hierarchies in most of the MENA region up to the decolonization processes and the postcolonial political regimes. Through a perspective on mobility within the urban scale it is possible to analyze the different regimes, passages and changes that do not coincide necessarily with the classical chronology of the political and diplomatic history.
The interest is to investigate cities as nodes of national as well as transnational and global networks. It is in city neighbourhoods that communities, minorities and economic and social divisions take concrete shape. At the same time, it is within urban spaces where national, class, gender and racial categories can be subverted, criticised, reconfigured. The methodological approach of this panel is to avoid considering the relation of these categories as a simple interaction of undiscussed blocks but, on the contrary, it focuses on the mutual hybridization of the concepts of time, space, and (social, racial, gender) identities. Urban spaces are not here understood as a mere setting of historical and social events but as an active part of a complexity in which all the different elements are related and built together (Rau, Roger 2020). The analysis of marginality and daily-life is intended as a privileged perspective to underline the spatialized social practices of urban MENA contexts. Even though our main academic interest concerns history, this panel aims to be an open space of discussions and exchanges among scholars from different social sciences such as (but not exclusively): historians, anthropologists, geographers, sociologists. We welcome papers (in Italian, English or French) that cover, study or deal with the following themes:
- Forms of urban marginality
- Relationship between urban neighbourhoods and the urban, national, global context
- (re)production of spatial and social boundaries and divisions
- impact of infrastructure and exploitation in urban social geography
- sites of hybridisation, conflict and subversion
- production of alternative urban geographies to institutional ones
- ecologies of urban spaces
- relationship between urban spaces and public health ideas or practices
- proposals or practices of urban modernisation
- regimes of historicity and temporality across urban contexts
Consider joining & spreading the word!
Reach out to Gabriele Montalbano gabriele.montalbano2@unibo.it and Lucia Carminati lucia.carminati@iakh.uio.no if interested.
8. Afghanistan, vol 7/1 is now out and available online.
9. ‘Plague and the Mongol conquest of Baghdad (1258)? A reevaluation of the sources’
Jonathan Brack, Michal Biran, Reuven Amitai
Medical History
doi: 10.1017/mdh.2023.38, 19 pages. Published Online on 8 April 2024
10. Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Medicine
60-80 %
The History of Medicine Group within the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities at the University of Zurich, led by Professor Flurin Condrau, seeks to appoint a postdoctoral fellow (60-80 % FTE, competitive salary based on experience). The appointment is for three years with potential for extension by another three years. Applicants must have defended their doctoral degree within the last ten years. Closing date for applications is 31 May 2024.
11. ONLINE Yemeni Studies Lecture Series: “Blessed Aristocracies: Charismatic Authority, Rural Elites, and Historiography in Medieval Yemen” by Dr. Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont and Prof. Dr. Vincent J. Cornell, Leiden University, 22 April 2024, 16:00 – 17:30 CET
In Yemen, the multiplication of pious visitations to tombs (ziyārāt) between the end of the 6th/12th century and the 9th/15th century, as elsewhere in the Muslim worlds, went along with the emergence of many blessed characters and lineages associated with sainthood (walāya). The contemporary Yemeni corpus gave them a major space in the historiographical production of the Rasūlid (r. 626-858/1229-1454) and Ṭāhirid (r. 858-923/1454-1517) sultanates.
Information and registration:
Posted in: Academic items- April 20, 2024
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