Shii News – Academic Items
1. Invisible East
Invisible East’s Digital Corpus 2.0 & 6th launch of documents
The 2.0 version of the Invisible East Digital Corpus (IEDC) which will be officially launched on 13 October! The digitisation team, with Ed, Mateen and Mike Allaway, have improved our user and search experience; added the ability to download the texts in Word and JSON (XML to be added soon); and, vitally, have produced a Persian language version of the website. Your feedback on this new and improved IEDC before the launch would be very welcome: please let us know what does and doesn’t work for you. The launch will be accompanied by a sixth release of documents, bringing us up to nearly 1,300 texts in the digital corpus
One of the central aims of our project has been to enable digital repatriation – ensuring that manuscripts and documents held in collections around the world can be studied and engaged with in the regions from which they came. With this new Persian language functionality we hope to open up new avenues for engagement and collaboration and to encourage more people to explore and work with these remarkable documents.
2. CfP: Research Seminar on Reproductive Ethics and Kindship (Doha, Jan 2027)
3. Bloomsbury: Lisa Nielson, author of Music and Musicians in the Medieval Islamicate World: A Social History, talks to Morteza Hajizadeh in this podcast from New Books Network.
4. IHF ACADEMIC COMMITTEE ANNOUNCEMENT
The second cycle of the Iran Heritage Foundation’s 2025 grant programme, with the deadline of 31 October 2025, is now open for receipt of application. With the overall aim of fostering knowledge and appreciation of Iran’s rich cultural heritage research grants in various academic disciplines are awarded.
Preference will be given to applications on (in alphabetical order) archaeology, architecture, art, history, linguistics and literature, as well as subjects of contemporary interest, such as cinema, music, sociology and so on; applications from other disciplines will also be considered.
Projects to be supported may include the most varied academic initiatives, from fieldwork to workshops, conferences, building databases and digitising images. The Committee privileges ground-breaking research, which may include editions and translations of key texts. In order to support multiple initiatives grants of up to a maximum of £3,000 will be considered. The application process and conditions for the grants can be viewed on our website.
To apply please click here
For Terms and Conditions please click here
5. Online Monday Majlises organised by the Centre for the Study of Islam, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter
- 6thof October (Monday) 17:00-18:30 (UK time).
John Esposito, Among the Believers: A Journey in Islam, the Muslim World and Global Politics
https://universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/uMZuYLICSDqMH2gQW3IwCA
13th of October (Monday) 17:00-18:30 (UK time).
Said Reza Huseini, The Arab Conquests in Bactria: Local Politics and Arab Domination (651–750 CE)
https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/4qcbR_CRQ2miDRV35B6zPw
20th of October (Monday) 17:00-18:30 (UK time).
Gabriel Said Reynolds, A Faithful Dog and a Clay Bird: The Qur’an in Its Christian World
https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/3uYLlGdRRcGlh0sgg2JnOw
27th of October (Monday) 17:00-18:30 (UK time).
Badr Tachouche, The Chanting Faqihs: Retuning Islamic Discourse through Muwashshahs and Zajals
https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/eApkGIWNRlm18Ff1SlXKEg
3rd of November (Monday) 17:00-18:30 (UK time).
Michael Shenkar, Sogdian Civilisation and the Arab Conquest.
https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/I4D-2AlYTDSPJ6hkQpmuLw
10th of November (Monday) 17:00-18:30 (UK time).
Godefroid de Callataÿ and Laura Tribuzio, A Ruby Which Is Not a Ruby: Symbol, Substance, and Political Imagination in Timurid and Mughal Thought.
https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/m2hq7EbfSBSoC1dFFG3X8g
17th of November (Monday) 17:00-18:30 (UK time).
Edith Szanto, Mourning and Performing: Twelver Shi‘ism in Ba‘ath Syria
https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/U4Yl0PCMRYS7s9x-wO4f2A
24th of November (Monday) 17:00-18:30 (UK time).
Safa Mahmoudian, Palace Gardens in Lower Mesopotamia: 8th–11th Centuries
https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/nvNXpR70Q_i_ZQ1-12kDdw
1st of December (Monday) 17:00-18:30 (UK time).
Pranav Prakash, Exploring the Raison d’Être of the Oldest Dated and Illustrated Manuscript of a Persian Translation of Śiva Purāṇa
https://universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/s6Vjx5M6RZ-cYqGJGOdkZw
8th of December (Monday) 17:00-18:30 (UK time).
Alireza Doostdar, Facing Satan: The Iranian Revolution and Its Demons
https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/n-wjuscLTkazo1TgWSQgsQ
In the spirit of the label ‘Majlis’ and also to make the talks even more interesting, our speakers present the topic discussed as embedded in their own journey. You can watch the previous Majlises, since October 2022, here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8YRkUahFj_81oJzCSDLTx4kVQQgeHLc-, but we don’t record the Q&A in order to keep the discussion free. Please come and enjoy the talks and the discussions : )
If you’d like to be included in the CSI (Centre for the Study of Islam, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter) mailing list, please write to I.T.Kristo-Nagy@ex.ac.uk
6. NEW PUBLICATION, available for pre-order now
Elegies of the Earth: Selected Poems by Ahmad Shamlou
Edited and Translated from Persian by Niloufar Talebi
(World Poetry Books, Fall 2025)
7. Exhibition – Mamluks: Legacy of an Empire
he second venue of the Mamluks exhibition presented at the Louvre Abu Dhabi: Mamluks. Legacy of an Empire.
This is a slightly reviewed version of the first venue presented at the Musée du Louvre from 30 April to 28 July 2025.
This second venue is accompanied with a shortened catalogue, edited by Carine Juvin, gathering five introductory essays by Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Carine Juvin, Souraya Noujaim, Nasser Rabbat and Élodie Vigouroux, as well as short entries by numerous specialists (available in English, Arabic and French).
Contact Information
Dr Carine Juvin
Curator of Medieval Near East Collections
Louvre Museum – Paris
Contact Email
8. CALL FOR PROPOSALS: ACLA Seminar “Rethinking Literature’s Persons”
Deadline: Proposals must be submitted by October 2nd, via the ACLA website
The ACLA conference is Feb 26 to March 1 in Montreal.
Co-organizers: Julie Orlemanski (julieorlemanski@uchicago.edu) or Samuel Fallon (fallon@geneseo.edu)
Character, person, speaker, voice: these English-language terms are at once ubiquitous elements of literary criticism and disputed ones. On the one hand, they have never seemed formal enough: caring about character has long been the sign of the sentimental reader; poetic speakers threaten to usurp, or to dissolve back into, the linguistic codes that summon them. On the other hand, such terms have never felt sufficiently historical: when we call Gilgamesh, Layla and Majnun, Hamlet, Anna Karenina, and Superman “characters,” are we really talking about the same thing at all? How responsive, or not, are literature’s anthropomorphic affordances to differing regimes of social identity? This seminar invites presentations on the formal, historical, or generic dimensions of literary persons or person-effects (including characters, narrators, lyric speakers, personifications, types, and other figures). We seek participants who will bring particular texts (or authors, or traditions) to bear on a shared comparative conversation. How might we teach one another to rethink literature’s persons?
A surge of recent scholarship suggests that these questions have gained fresh urgency. In an age of autofiction, the relation of literature to person may itself be changing: “I’m not interested in character,” Rachel Cusk said in 2018, “because I don’t think character exists anymore.” This seminar asks whether it ever did. Recent reevaluations spring as well from the still-unfolding aftermaths of New Criticism and poststructuralism. As those formalisms have aged, the interpretive habits they once instilled have grown strange. In their wake, some have celebrated the cognitive and affective realities of literary characters; others remain fascinated with the disfiguration, reification, and figural drift that a literary person can occasion. Comparative approaches, with their provincialization of received critical idioms, have further catalyzed scholarly interest. Scholars are renovating our common theoretical edifice in light of the heterogeneity of literature’s populace across time and space.
We invite proposals that link case study to concept, or otherwise suggest how a specific interpretation may yield methodological, theoretical, or historiographic transformation (“rethinking”). Organized by a medievalist and an early modernist, the seminar aspires to dialogue across subfields and language traditions and across the modern/nonmodern divide. We welcome papers on poetry and narrative alike, on topics including—how grammatical forms or literary tropes imply models of the person; literature’s relation to historically shifting socio-political regimes of personhood; what voice has to do with literary persons; the porous boundaries of the person, via the poetics of impersonality; extension of mind, feeling, and will beyond the individual or the human; and the responses, including but beyond identification, that literary persons elicit from readers.
Submit proposals via the ACLA submission site no later than October 2nd. Feel free to contact Julie Orlemanski at julieorlemanski@uchicago.edu with queries.
9. News from UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies
New Data Dashboard offers insights about Iranians living outside Iran
The Center has published a public online dashboard that pulls together data on Iranians living outside of Iran. The online tool provides demographic and socioeconomic profiles of Iranian diaspora communities worldwide and is now available through the CNES website.
The dashboard is the product of several years of research conducted by Kevan Harris, associate professor of sociology at UCLA and a president of the CNES Faculty Advisory Committee, and his graduate students. Read more here.
Sohaib Baig writes about manuscripts endowed by Muslim women at UCLA Library Special Collections
UCLA Library stewards the second-largest Islamicate and Arabic-script manuscript collection in North America. Through its ongoing Islamicate Manuscript Initiative, the Library and its partners are working to individually describe and conserve thousands of manuscripts within its collection to make them accessible to scholars and the broader public. This article, co-authored by Sohaib Baig, a MENA librarian and CNES Faculty Advisory Committee Member, highlights the practice of Muslim women endowing individual manuscripts, and introduces examples of these manuscripts held in UCLA Library Special Collections. Read more here.
Surveying the Nile: Scholarly Misaha Manuals in Late Ottoman Egypt
A lecture by Samaa Elimam (UCLA)
Thursday, October 23, 2025
3:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Bunche Hall 10383
Manuscripts in Arabic Script at UCLA: Where Did They Come From?
A workshop featuring Nir Shafir (UCSD), Garret Davidson (College of Charleston), Kathryn Babayan (University of Michigan), Khalil Afzali (UCLA) and Taha Tuna Kaya (UC Davis)
Faculty organizer and moderator: Luke Yarbrough (UCLA)
Organized by UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. Co-sponsored by UCLA Center for Early Global Studies, UCLA Dean of Humanities, UCLA Islamic Studies, and UCLA Library
Monday, November 17, 2025
9:30 AM
Charles Young Research Library Conference Room
The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life
Film screening followed by a panel with Persis Karim (San Francisco State University) and Kevan Harris (UCLA), and a reception.
Organized by the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Co-sponsored by UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
6:00 PM – 9:00 PM PST
Fowler Museum at UCLA
Female Religiosity in Central Asia: Sufi Leaders in the Persianate World
A book talk by Aziza Shanazarova (Columbia University)
Organized by UCLA Program on Central Asia. Co-sponsored by UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
3:30 PM – 5:00 PM PST
Bunche Hall 10383
Strange Synchronicities and Familiar Parallels in Asia, 1600–1800
Conference 1: Empires of Thought (Ottoman, Mughal, and Qing Empires)
Organized by Choon Hwee Koh (UCLA), Meng Zhang (UCLA), and Abhishek Kaicker (UC Berkeley). Co-sponsored by UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.
Friday, December 5, 2025
11:00 AM – 4:00 PM PST
Location TBD
Call for Papers: Fifth International Conference on
Heritage / Community Languages
UCLA National Heritage Language Resource Center is inviting applications for its Fifth International Conference on Heritage / Community Languages. The two-day conference will focus on heritage and community language studies as a multidisciplinary field impacting a variety of educational contexts. Submissions from disciplines including but not limited to anthropology, demographics, linguistics, sociology, applied linguistics, policy, psychology, bilingualism, education, and assessment, are welcome.
Submission deadline: September 30, 2025
10. Analytic Islamic Epistemology: Critical Debates
Edited by Safaruk Chowdhury, Ramon Harvey
EUP, 2025
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-analytic-islamic-epistemology.html
11. DeGruyterBrill
The recording of our webinar “AI and Research Integrity” is now available
12. 3rd Annual Islamic Art History Research Workshop, 5th–6th December 2025
Building on the success of the first two hybrid Islamic Art History Research Workshops, held both in-person at the University of York and online over the last two years, the third workshop, run jointly with the Persian Manuscripts Association, will take place on the 5th and 6th of December this year.
In honour of Sheila Canby, and in line with the aims of the Persian Manuscripts Association, the overarching theme will focus primarily on the material culture of the wider Iranian world in the late medieval and early modern period. However, there are no geographical, chronological or methodological restrictions for the proposals.
The event will include a keynote lecture on the 6th December (speaker TBC), and this announcement also serves as a call for paper proposals from scholars at all career stages. We welcome proposals from those who wish to attend in person in York, as well as those who prefer to present online.
The aim of combining in-person and online participation is to make the event accessible to the largest possible number of scholars and members of the public, regardless of location, and to encourage a diverse range of voices, topics, and approaches. We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations based on your current research on any aspect of Islamic art history.
The deadline for submissions is the 10th October 2025. Please indicate in your proposal whether you prefer to present online or in person. Kindly note that those attending in person on the 6th of December will be responsible for arranging their own travel and accommodation.
Please send your 150-200 word proposals to:
13. Online Talk – The Silent Margins in Ibn al-Bawwab’s Qur’an, 22.10.25
Dr Alya Karame, Cochrane Research Fellow 2025
A Qur’an manuscript copied at the turn of the eleventh century by the renowned Baghdadi calligrapher Ibn al-Bawwab has become one of the most celebrated Qur’ans in the world. With its elegant script and exceptional illumination, Ibn al-Bawwab’s Qur’an, as it is now known, has featured prominently in lectures on Islamic art and was even reproduced as a postcard by the Chester Beatty, where it is housed today. As the earliest dated Qur’an written in the newly adopted round script and on paper – a material that marked a shift away from the earlier use of parchment – its historical and aesthetic significance is undeniable. Yet, what does its elevation as a masterpiece obscure? What assumptions underlie its fame, and what conventions are reinforced in the process? By examining both the manuscript itself and its modern reception, this presentation explores what was gained, and equally, what was lost, on the road to its iconic status: from the construction of authenticity and artistic singularity to the overlooked networks of interconnectivity that shaped book culture in the medieval Islamic world.
💻 Online talk: Please register for online viewing via Zoom HERE.
https://chesterbeatty.ie/whats-on/the-silent-margins-in-ibn-al-bawwabs-quran/
14. Assistant, Associate or Full Professor in Anthropology (Focus MENA), American University in Cairo
Requirements: A PhD in Cultural Anthropology or Social-Anthropology and a demonstrable record of teaching that illustrates an ability to teach courses in the BA in Anthropology and the MA in Sociology and Anthropology programs at AUC, including those with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa, as well as courses in their area of sub-disciplinary expertise. A second regional expertise will be considered advantageous.
Deadline for applications: 15 October 2025. Information: https://tinyurl.com/yk63pj3z
15. Two Postdoctoral Associates (2 Years) in Middle Eastern History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
We seek outstanding junior scholars whose research engages Arab and/or Jewish History in the Middle East and North Africa, in any time period. We have particular interest in scholars working on Palestinian and/or Israeli history or the history of Jewish-Muslim relations. Applicants must have received a Ph.D. in History (or a related field) within the past five years.
Deadline for applications: 22 October 2025. Information: https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30660
16. Scholar/Visitor in Middle East History, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah
Applications are welcome from scholars with expertise in Middle East history, preferably with a specialization in the period 600-1800 CE. Those with exceptional teaching and a strong research agenda are encouraged to apply. Salary commensurate with experience and rank.
Deadline for applications: 30 September 2025. Information: https://tinyurl.com/yc5w44ns
17. Professor of Comparative Literature (Focus Persian Literature and Culture), Stanford University
Applicants must have demonstrated a commitment to effective teaching and mentoring and the ability to maintain a world-class research program. The successful candidate must have a Ph.D. in a related field. We seek a candidate with a deep understanding of the Persian literary tradition and its relevance within interdisciplinary and comparative frameworks.
Deadline for applications: 25 October 2025. Information: https://tinyurl.com/mrxxj7rp
18. Grants of the Iran Heritage Foundation UK
Preference will be given to applications on archaeology, architecture, art, history, linguistics and literature, as well as subjects of contemporary interest, such as cinema, music, sociology and so on; applications from other disciplines will also be considered. Projects to be supported may include the most varied academic initiatives, from fieldwork to workshops, conferences, building databases and digitising images.
Deadline for applications: 22 October 2025. Information: https://ihf.org.uk/grants-tsandcs2025/
19. 33rd Islamic Republic of Iran`s World Book Award in Islamic Studies and Iranian Studies in the Categories of Authorship, Translation, and Critical Edition
Books to be considered can be in any language, while need to be on either Islamic Studies or Iranian Studies. They also have to be published (in their first edition) outside of Iran in 2024. Scholars, writers, translators, and publishers are invited to nominate book(s) for consideration.
Deadline for submissions: 22 October 2025. Information: https://tinyurl.com/462anzth
Posted in: Academic items
- September 27, 2025
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