Shii News – Academic Items
1.Syrian-Kurdish Intersections in the Ottoman Period
Eds., Stéfan Winter and Zainab HajHasan
U Toronto Press, 2024
https://utppublishing.com/doi/10.3138/9781487554408
2. American University – Beirut – Post-Doctoral Position: “Americas and the MENA Region” (American Studies/History)
https://www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=68767
3. The World History Association (WHA) would like to extend its call for proposals for sessions and papers presenting original research and pedagogical techniques for its annual conference this year in Louisville, KY (June 26-28, 2025).
While the overarching themes of the conference this year are Protest, Prohibition, and Pugilism, the WHA welcomes any topic involving world-global dimensions, including transnational, transcultural, interreligious, international and the like (see https://pretalx.com/wha2025/cfp). The WHA provides a unique opportunity to share research and pedagogy beyond our own respective fields in a mutually supportive interdisciplinary setting.
Proposals are welcome from graduate and doctoral students, scholars, teachers, and other qualified experts around the world. Proposals may take the form of:
Organized Panels (three to four panelists, one chair, and optionally, one discussant) – each paper should be a maximum of 20 minutes in length for three panelists; papers should be a maximum of 15 minutes in length for four panelists
Individual Papers (not part of an Organized Panel) – each paper should be a maximum of 20 minutes in length
Roundtable Sessions (between four to six participants) – five-minute opening statements from each participant followed by conversational dialogue with the audience
Workshop Sessions (between one to four participants) – these are hands on sessions on specific teaching techniques or practices that often include handouts, breakout sessions and/or assignment creation/reflection
Meet the Author Sessions – an excellent opportunity for exchanges between authors and audiences, including explanations of methods and suggestions for use
Innovative Sessions – innovative teaching, research, or other formats not outlined above Proposals from the fields of anthropology, geography, political science, literature, art history and criticism, digital humanities, other humanities and social sciences, as well as natural or physical sciences that address global historical change are also encouraged.
Each organized session should include a 250-word panel proposal and a 250-word proposal for each paper along with a short biographical statement for introduction by the session Chair. Individual papers and all other sessions should include a 250- word abstract and a short biographical statement for introduction by the session Chair.
PLEASE NOTE: Prearranged (organized) panels/roundtables/workshops are given priority in the program and receive earlier notification of acceptance. Individual papers will also be considered and, if accepted, are arranged into suitable panels by the Program Committee. Individual papers may receive later notice of acceptance, pending appropriate placement on panels.
Contact Email: info@thewha.org
4. Call for Submissions to an Edited Volume: Deadline July 1, 2025
“My Blood is Cheaper than Oil”: Arabic Literature and the Encounter with Petropolitics
How have 20th-century oil discoveries in the MENA region shaped the emergence of what came to be known as ‘Arab modernity’? How has modern Arabic literature reimagined domestic and social relationships with and through oil? And how have the increasingly precarious conditions of oil production, consumption, and theft over the course of a century transformed the Arabic literary imagination?
More than a material resource, oil is deeply entangled with the cultural production of home, nation, identity, race, religion, family, and legal status. Its presence permeates allegories, metaphors, literary genres, and framing practices. The violent traces of war and the haunting fumes of traumatic memory linger in the words and lacunae of Arabic literature. In Arabic discourse, oil has been both an evocative and lucrative symbol (of prosperity, modernity, war, and hegemony) and a material force shaping everyday life—driving urban development, education, the rise of civil society, the formation of a modern intellectual class, and traumatic phenomena such as epidemics, bodily deformities, forced migration, dispossession, and mass murder. Oil has also seeped into the domestic domain of literature, such as familial gestures, relations, affects, languages, and silences.
This edited volume seeks to center the narratives, affects, temporalities, and life worlds of oil in Arabic literature. From early encounters with oil discoveries and the rise of multinational petroleum industries to contemporary engagements with the aftermaths of petropolitics, the collection brings together diverse literary perspectives on oil’s profound impact on Arab cultures.
We invite chapter submissions for a peer-edited anthology on Arabic literature’s encounter with oil. Contributions may engage with Arabic poetry, short stories, or novels that explore the poetics and practices of oil culture in Arab spaces and their transnational ramifications. This call is open to a broad range of thematic and theoretical approaches. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Oil and migration, land dispossession, and diaspora
- Oil and archaeology, indigeneity, and monumental history
- Oil and war, coloniality, and environmental devastation
- Oil and transnationalism, globalization, and neoliberalism
- Oil and urban utopias/dystopias
- Oil as an archive and index of identity, race, and place
- Multisensory experiences of oil
- Memoirs of oil and empire
- Genealogies of oil
- Oil and the ecological nomad
- Storytelling through oil
Submission Guidelines:
Please send 250-word abstracts and a short bio to yhanoosh@gmail.com and yasminekhayyat@gmail.com by July 1, 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be sent within two weeks after the deadline. Full manuscripts (6000-10,000 words) will be requested by February 20, 2026. For any inquiries, feel free to contact the editors at the email addresses above.
Editors:
Yasmeen Hanoosh is Professor of Arabic Literature at Portland State University, as well as a literary translator and fiction writer. Her recent projects explore the politics of survival in Arab Detroit and the complexities of literary translation as a colonized subject. She recently co-edited Beyond Refuge in Arab Detroit (Wayne State UP, 2025) and a special issue of the Journal of Arabic Literature titled Cultural Production in Modern Iraq (Brill, 2025)
Yasmine Khayyat is Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at Rutgers University. Her work examines the intersections of memory, narrative, and the environmental and political histories of the Middle East. She is the author of War Remains: Ruination and Resistance in Lebanon (Syracuse UP, 2023), which examines the figuration of the ruin as a site of protest and resistance in contemporary Lebanese cultural production.
5. UCLA: Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History
A lecture by Michelle Lynn Kahn (University of Richmond)
Thursday, May 22, 2025
4:00 PM – 6:00 PM PST
Bunche Hall 6275
Organized by the the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies and UCLA Department of History
Posted in: Academic items- May 20, 2025
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