Shii News – Academic Items
1. The Textile Museum Journal Volume 51
Guest edited by Dr. Myriem Naji, with Dorothy Armstrong, Jonathan Cleaver, Ludovica Matarozzo, and Anna Portisch, The Textile Museum Journal’s 51st volume will go beyond the classical canon of “Oriental” carpets developed in the West from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. They will examine less-studied sites of carpet weaving, and will highlight diverse analytical methods including immersive fieldwork, the impact of technologies, the participation of carpets at inflection points in global history, and the practice of contemporary weavers.
Learn more at https://museum.gwu.edu/textile-museum-journal
Table of Contents
New Approaches to Thinking with Carpets
Myriem Naji with Dorothy Armstrong, Jonathan Cleaver, Ludovica Matarozzo, and Anna Portisch
Reading Networks of Coloniality and Capitalism through “Oriental” Carpets
Dorothy Armstrong
The Contestable Pleasures of Industrial Carpet-Making Archives
Jonathan Cleaver
Unraveling the Threads: An Exploration of Hidden Aspects in the Carpet Productions of Faig Ahmed and Alighiero Boetti
Ludovica Matarozzo
Between Ornament and Structure Carpets in Modern Art and Architecture
Farniyaz Zaker
Designing without Design? Embodied and Situated Carpet Designing in the Sirwa, Southern Morocco
Myriem Naji
Research Notes
Embroidered Treasures of the Stuart Dynasty: Recent Discoveries in the Cotsen Textile Traces Study Collection
Rachel Pollack
Informing Provenience and Dating of Anatolian Kilims: Ongoing Research Using Technical Analysis
Callista Jerman
2. Open rank tenure-track faculty job at the Master Program of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
The Master Program of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies at National Chengchi University invites applications for an open rank full-time position in the field of “Central Asian Studies”. Preference will be given to candidates specialized in Central Asian languages, literature, history, society, and culture.
Qualifications:
- Applicants must hold a doctoral degree in a field related to Central Asian Studies from an accredited university, either in Taiwan or abroad.
- Applicants must demonstrate the ability to teach in English.
Start Date: August 1, 2025
Required Documents:
- Curriculum Vitae, a research statement clarifying the candidate’s proposed program of research, a teaching statement, a list of publications, and a list of proposed courses.
- A photocopy of the Ph.D. diploma. (For overseas degrees, the diploma must be authenticated by a Taiwanese representative office abroad.)
- Transcripts from master’s and doctoral programs. (For transcripts in languages other than English, please attach a Chinese or English translation.)
- The doctoral dissertation and up to five sample publications that are published in the past five years.
- Syllabi; one for the program’s mandatory course “Seminar on Central Asia” (3 credits) and three for other courses related to Central Asian Studies the candidate plans to teach.
- Two letters of recommendation, written in English or Chinese, to be sent directly to the ‘Recruitment Committee’ at 62746@nccu.edu.twor mailing address: Recruitment Committee, Master Program of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, National Chengchi University, No. 64, Sec. 2, ZhiNan Rd., Wenshan District, Taipei 116, Taiwan.
Application Deadline: February 3, 2025 (Monday)
Additional Information: Shortlisted candidates will be invited to an in-person or virtual interview and perform teaching demonstration.
Application Submission:
- Both hard copies and electronic files are required.
- Hard copies should be sent to: Recruitment Committee, Master Program of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, National Chengchi University, No. 64, Sec. 2, ZhiNan Rd., Wenshan District, Taipei 116, Taiwan. (Please indicate “New Faculty Recruitment Your Name” on the envelope. Applications postmarked after the deadline will not be accepted.)
- Electronic files should be sent to: 62746@nccu.edu.tw, with the subject line: “New Faculty Recruitment_Your Name” (Please ensure submission by 11:59:59 PM Taiwan time on February 3, 2025).
Contact:
Phone: 886-2-2939-3091 ext. 62746, ext. 62736
Email: 62746@nccu.edu.tw
3. Call for Submissions
Contesting Boundaries in Islamicate Multilingualisms
31st Issue of Absinthe: World Literature in Translation
Submission Deadline: January 15, 2025
Absinthe: World Literature in Translation invites submissions of original English-language translations of Islamicate literatures for its 31st issue, to be published in Fall 2025.
Absinthe publishes fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Owned and operated by the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Absinthe is edited by graduate students. This issue will be edited by Razieh Araghi and Jaideep Pandey.
The 31st issue of Absinthe, “Contesting Boundaries in Islamicate Multilingualisms” invites submissions exploring notions of boundaries across genres, geographies and temporalities, post the introduction of print technology in Muslim societies 19th century. This special issue aims to contribute to the growing body of scholarship that interrogates the politics of multilingualism and lingua franca (such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu among others) and its intersections with literary production. We intentionally shift the focus away from dominant languages of the Islamicate world, such as Persian, Arabic and Urdu, and center lesser-represented languages (Dari, Pashto, Azeri, Kurdish, Tamil, Malayalam, Bangla, Punjabi, among others) deemed “local”, in order to highlight the rich, diverse tapestry of linguistic and cultural expressions within the broader Islamicate sphere. Through a focus on short genres as a flexible, adaptable form, we invite contributors to explore how different narrative genres traverse, resist, or reinforce the boundaries of linguistic and cultural identity, or between the religious and the secular. This approach allows us to probe the dynamic interplay between language and genre, as well as the ways in which such interactions destabilize conventional notions of multilingualism and genre-specific boundaries within Islamicate contexts.
We seek translations of previously untranslated prose texts from genres such as the short story, sagas, edifying or popular tales, fables, anecdotes, extracts from serialized fiction and novellas, periodicals columns, pocket book translations, life narratives, siyar, pilgrim narratives, travelogs, marginalia writing, prefaces, among others. The translations should be between 1500-7000 words, including extracts from longer works. We welcome works published from the long-19th century onwards, engaging in the most broad and diverse ways with notions of modernity.
Your proposals should include:
- 250 word abstract discussing the content of the work as well as its significance to the greater canon (we use “canon” with great flexibility) of Islamicate geographies
- 150 word translator bio
- 150 word author bio
If you have a translation in progress, you may also submit a portion along with your proposal.
Please submit proposals to araghi@umich.edu and jpandey@umich.edu by January 15 for consideration.
4. The Latin America and Caribbean Islamic Studies Newsletter
Vol. 4, no. 4 | Fall 2024
Senior Editor Ken Chitwood
Associate EditorsRahma Maccarone and Lucas Vicente
See: https://mailchi.mp/1497f79ea948/latin-america-caribbean-islamic-studies-newsletter-vol4-no4
Home page: https://www.lacisa.org/
5. DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 8TH DECEMBER! Call for papers: Woolf Institute Annual Conference 2025
Tuesday 11th-Wednesday 12th February 2025, Cambridge, UK
The deadline to submit papers for the Woolf Institute’s academic conference has been extended to 8th December.
The theme for the conference is Faith in a world of ‘unprecedented’ challenges, and we are delighted to be joined by keynote speaker Professor Mathew Guest, who will talk about his recent book, Neoliberal Religion: Faith and Power in the 21st Century.
We invite proposals from individual presenters who may apply with an individual paper where you will have 15-minutes to present your work followed by a five-minute Q&A, or, alternatively, to be part of a discussion panel where you will be put into a panel with other presenters with five minutes to present your research followed by a group discussion. Both of these options will require a 300-word abstract and a 50-word biography. We will do our best to allocate you appropriately. We also welcome submissions from multiple presenters (up to four) who are interested in delivering a 60-minute panel/workshop/activity. For this option we will require a 500-word abstract and a 150-word biography to include all presenters. Please specify which format you would prefer in the link below.
To apply to present, please submit your details, abstract, and bio at: https://tinyurl.com/woolf-conference.
The submission deadline has been extended to 23:59 on Sunday 8th December 2024. Successful applicants will be informed of their paper’s acceptance on Monday 16th December 2024. The conference will be held on the 11th-12th February 2025 at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge.
Conference registration will open on 1st December 2024 and is free to present and/or attend. We will be offering a limited number of small grants for doctoral researchers, PGRs, and ECRs for expenses to attend the conference. For further particulars or any queries please contact Dr James Sunderland at js2964@cam.ac.uk.
6. We are currently seeking to fill two postdoctoral positionsin the ALiDiM project at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
The successful candidates will contribute to the work package on the specialized linguistic lexicon in early Arabic linguistic works. One fellow will examine its interactions with other Arabic-Islamic disciplines, while the other fellow will explore connections with the Greek tradition.
The application deadline is December 20, 2024, 12:00 CET. For full details on the application and selection process, please refer to the call for applications published on the university website. The positions are scheduled to start February 1, 2025.
Simona Olivieri
Assistant professor of Arabic language
PI ERC project ALiDiM – Arabic Linguistic Discourse in the Making
Department of Asian and North African Studies
Ca’ Cappello
Calle del Magazen, San Polo 2035
30125 Venezia
- +39 041 234 8848
- simona.olivieri@unive.it
7. PhD Candidate or Postdoctoral Researcher in Ancient Central Asian (Tarim Basin) Contact Linguistics
Leiden University
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) is looking for a PhD candidate (1,0 FTE) or Postdoctoral researcher (1,0 FTE) in Ancient Central Asian (Tarim Basin) Contact Linguistics to work on “Sogdian and Bactrian wanderers: Linguistic contacts of Sogdian and Bactrian in the Tarim Basin” as part of the ERC-funded project The Silk Road Language Web.
Deadline | 3 December 2024
8. Call for Applications | Stein-Arnold Exploration Fund 2024-25
Fund | The British Academy
The fund was established for ‘the encouragement of research on the antiquities or historical geography or early history or arts of those parts of Asia which come within the sphere of the ancient civilizations of India, China, and Iran, including Central Asia, or of one or more of these’. Applicants should be of postdoctoral status or have comparable experience. Research should be “so far as possible by means of exploratory work”. Funds are limited and normally grants will not exceed around £2,500, but in exceptional circumstances grants may be considered up to £5,000.
Deadline | 8 January 2025
9. Bridging Identities: The Cultural Odyssey of Kurdistani Jews
Event | Zoom | 2 December 2024
This event, as part of the LSE Middle East Centre’s Kurdish Studies Series, will present research findings from the online exhibition and research project ‘Bridging Identities: The Cultural Odyssey of Kurdistani Jews’.
More information
10. From Revolution to Exile: Arab Diaspora Politics in a Post-2011 Context
Conference | Paris (Hybrid) | 30 January 2025
The evolving role of diasporas necessitates a reevaluation of their conceptualization and the transnational dynamics affecting them. The proposed one-day international conference focuses on empirical case studies from the MENA region post-2011 to explore innovative political roles and strategies developed by diasporas in navigating their multifaceted identities and engagements in a post-uprising world.
More information
Fahimeh Saravani, Zekrollah Mohammadi and Hossein Sarhaddi-Dadian
Afghanistan 7.2 (2024): 120-133.
12. CfP: Displaced Arts:
Creative Practices and Geographies of Asylum
Symposium
June 24th 2025
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh
Supported by the Leverhulme Trust
Keynote Speakers:
Professor Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, UCL
Dr Esa Aldegheri, University of Glasgow
How have creative practices been used to inhabit, expose, navigate or contest global geographies of asylum in the twenty-first century? This interdisciplinary symposium will explore the potential of arts – including literature, life-writing, storytelling, poetry, community theatre, photography, and film – to illuminate geographies of asylum which have been reshaped by increasingly securitised border regimes, narratives of a ‘refugee crisis’, and a rapidly growing asylum-industrial complex. These evolving geographies encompass precarious infrastructures of asylum with a proliferation of camps, detention centres, and ‘contingency’ accommodation in hotels, military barracks, ships, and islands. Meanwhile, new dispersal policies have led to refugees and asylum seekers increasingly being settled away from urban centres in depopulated or rural areas in many places, including Europe, the US and Australia, sometimes in marginalised and remote localities. In these shifting geographies of asylum, displaced arts – creative practices defined at once by the absence or loss of place and their located nature in a new environment – can offer strategies of resistance, tools of documentation and mapping, or means to cultivate new senses of belonging, community, and integration.
Building on a burgeoning body of scholarship in the arts and humanities, as well as the social sciences, which has emphasised the importance of creative practices and methodologies in migration studies, the symposium will focus on the situated nature of displaced arts as it asks: How have displaced arts and indigenous knowledges been used as creative placemaking practices to navigate unfamiliar environments? How might they render obscured or hidden geographies of asylum more visible? How can creative initiatives facilitate integration in new (and sometimes unlikely) sites of refugee resettlement? What cross-cultural artistic practices have emerged from these evolving geographies? And how might these practices form new socialities and solidarities which transcend or challenge the sovereignty of national borders asserted through asylum regimes?
This will also be an opportunity to consider methodological questions and tensions around how we engage with the arts in migration studies. How might creative methodologies facilitate collaborative research practices in migration studies which disrupt hegemonic power dynamics and forms of knowledge production? What burdens do we place on these arts when using them to navigate geographies of asylum? And what can be gained by focusing specifically on representations of place in these arts?
Papers are welcome from scholars or creative practitioners working across disciplines relating to migration and the arts, including: migration studies, literary studies, the visual arts, film studies, cultural geography, and the environmental humanities. In addition to conventional academic papers, we welcome other presentation formats appropriate to the topic (such as practice-based outputs).
We especially welcome papers from PGRs, ECRs, and scholars working on Global South contexts or based at Global South institutions.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Creative encounters and exchanges between refugees and receiving communities in contexts of North-South and South-South migration.
- The relationship between artistic practices and infrastructures of the asylum-industrial complex.
- Representations of border crossings, border ‘spectacles’, and internal borders of exclusion.
- Creative initiatives emerging in the context of new dispersal policies extending across urban and rural/remote areas.
- Creative practices in response/relation to hostile environments.
- Arts and asylum advocacy.
- The spatial politics and aesthetics of displaced arts.
- Place-based creative initiatives for asylum seekers and refugees facilitated by local government, charities, and NGOs (e.g. community performances, exhibitions, art installations, festivals, and storytelling projects).
- Multilingualism, translation, and language acquisition in/through displaced arts.
- Evolving public policy on creative strategies of refugee integration.
- Collaborative and creative methodologies in migration studies.
- Connections between contemporary geographies of asylum and histories of colonialism, de-industrialisation, and austerity.
- Transnational creative solidarities across geographies of asylum.
- Technologies of asylum and forms of digital storytelling.
- Creative engagements with the temporalities of asylum.
- Future imaginaries of asylum.
Please submit abstracts (250 words) for fifteen-minute papers and a short bio (100 words) to displacedarts25@gmail.com by 15th January. Speakers will be notified by 31st January.
The symposium is being organised by Dr Annie Webster (University of Edinburgh) and will take place in-person at The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh.
Please send any queries to displacedarts25@gmail.com
13. Les études sur l’Asie centrale : pluridisciplinarité et connexions d’un champ (11-12 décembre 2024, Paris)
Nous vous prions de trouver ci-joint le programme de la journée d’étude consacrée à l’Asie centrale qui se tiendra les 11 et 12 décembre 2024, à Paris, à la Maison de la recherche de l’INALCO, 2 rue de Lille, Paris 7e, amphithéâtre G. Dumézil : https://www.inalco.fr/evenements/les-etudes-sur-lasie-centrale-pluridisciplinarite-et-connexions-dun-champ
Cet événement a pour ambition de promouvoir les études centrasiatiques en rendant compte de leur dynamisme et de leur diversité, de mettre en relation ses différentes disciplines et composantes, et de constituer un moment d’échanges entre les chercheuses et chercheurs impliqué-e-s dans les travaux sur la région. L’Asie centrale est entendue dans une acception géographique large, s’étendant de l’Iran à la Mongolie et de l’Afghanistan à la Russie.
La journée d’étude est organisée par le GIS Moyen-Orient et Mondes musulmans (MOMM) et le Centre de recherche sur le Monde iranien (CeRMI, UMR 8041), en collaboration avec l’Institut français d’études sur l’Asie centrale (IFEAC, UAR 3140), le Centre de recherche Europes-Eurasie (CREE, EA 4513) et ZooStan (ANR PaléoCALM).
Nous vous y attendons nombreuses et nombreux.
Le comité d’organisation :
Juliette Cleuziou, anthropologue, Université Lumière Lyon 2, LADEC ; Adrien Fauve, politiste, Université Paris-Saclay, IEDP ; Svetlana Gorshenina, historienne, CNRS, Eur’Orbem ; Isabelle Ohayon, historienne, CNRS, CERCEC ; Catherine Poujol, historienne, INALCO, CREE ; William Rendu, archéologie, CNRS, ZooStan ; Camille Rhoné-Quer, historienne, Aix-Marseille Université, IREMAM ; Julien Thorez, géographe, CNRS, CeRMI
14. Marc de Montalembert Prize for Research on the Arts of the Mediterranean World
The prize will be awarded to support a research project whose anticipated results will constitute an original contribution to the knowledge of the arts of the Mediterranean world from Antiquity to our day. The Foundation will also offer the prize holder the possibility of a residency at its headquarters in Rhodes, Greece. The candidate must be a citizen of a country bordering the Mediterranean, be under 36 years of age on November 30, 2024, and hold a PhD degree.
Deadline for applications: 15 December 2024. Information: https://www.ecoledulouvre.fr/sites/default/files/media/document/PrixMontalembert_callforapplicants_2024_2025%20%281%29.pdf
Posted in: Academic items
- November 30, 2024
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