Shii News – Academic Items

1. Online: Cluster of Excellence Lecture Event: Imperial Infrastructures of Communication across Eurasia

Convened by

Tijana Krstic (Central European University) and
Nina Mirnig (University of Vienna)

Date and Time
Monday 8th June 2026, 5:00 PM CET // 8:00 AM PST

Venue
Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies,
University of Vienna, Seminar Room 1, Spitalgasse 2, Hof 2, Eingang 2.7, 1090 Vienna

For online participation, please register below:

https://univienna.zoom.us/meeting/register/je5EJPt-TrWu2f1AthAXVg#/registration

17:00

Welcome

Tijana Krstic (Central European University) and Nina Mirnig (University of Vienna)

17:05

Introduction

Sebastian Fink (University of Innsbruck)

17:10

Lecture

Assyrian Imperial Communication: Messengers, Animals, and Royal Roads

Sanae Ito, Associate Professor, Research Center for Cultural Heritage and Texts, Nagoya University

17:40

Panel Discussion

Transregional Perspectives on Imperial Communication

Ancient Iran

Respondent: M. Rahim Shayegan, Jahangir and Eleanor Amuzegar Professor of Iranian, Director of the Pourdavoud Institute & Yarshater Center, Chair of Global Antiquity, UCLA (online)

Ancient India

Respondent: Upinder Singh, Professor of History, Ashoka University (online

Ottoman Empire

Respondent: Tolga Esmer, Professor at the Department of Historical Studies, Central European University

Moderated by Tijana Krstic and Nina Mirnig

2. Stoning as Punishment in Early Islam

Syed Atif Rizwan

OUP, 2026

https://academic.oup.com/book/62316

3. The Cambridge Handbook of Islam and Environmental Law

We are pleased to share the publication of The Cambridge Handbook of Islam and Environmental Law (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

We have a post on Cambridge’s Fifteen Eighty Four blog, What Climate Law Has Been Missing for 1,400 Years, so you can learn more about the project.

TRT World covered the book ahead of COP 31 in Antalya on May 27: link.

On Friday, Mohamed Arafa presented at the Law and Society Association CRN 23 International Law and Politics Multibook Launch in San Francisco.

Please use code TCHIEL26 for 20% off through May 2027 on the publisher’s site. If you can request your library to order a copy, we would appreciate it.

We welcome thoughts and feedback on this project.

Kind regards,

Saba Kareemi, Nadia Ahmad, Erum Sattar, Oluwakemi Ayanleye

3. Elements Series: Life Forms in Premodern Philosophy

Six Lectures on Aristotle’s “De Anima”

organised by

Fabrizio Bigotti

01 July – 6 August

Few texts in history have enjoyed the centrality of Aristotle’s De Anima. The work presupposes and at the same time coordinates the entire structure of Aristotle’s inquiry on the living world and remained vital long after other parts of Aristotle’s natural philosophy ceased to command obedience in the academic world. This vitality was due also to the fact that Aristotle posed a question that few others in history have tried to address: what is life?

His answer stirs a middle ground between vitalism and materialism. Condensed into six lectures, these encounters will explore the nuances and complexities of Aristotle’s theory of the soul. Participants will read selected passages of Aristotle in English. Knowledge of Greek is not mandatory, but it would be an advantage as some technical terms are introduced and explained.

For further details and to register for this event, please click here.

Kindest regards,

Andreas Hylla

Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR) – Assistant Coordinator

Domus Comeliana, Via Cardinale Maffi 48, 56126 Pisa, Italy

Tel.: +39.02.006.20.51 – Mobile: +39.333.13.12.203

Email: ah@csmbr.fondazionecomel.org

4. Mathhee, R., ‘Bloody Hands: Shāh Ṣafī Ṣafavī’s Ascent to Power, 1038–44/1629–34’

2026, Journal of the American Society for Premodern Asia (JASPA, formerly JAOS), 146:2 , 339-63

https://lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/jaos/article/view/3119

5. Call for Workshop Abstracts

Iraq: The State of the Field since 2003

The Center for Arab and Islamic Studies (CAIS) at Villanova University invites you to submit abstracts for consideration in a workshop on “Iraq: The State of the Field since 2003” to be held virtually on 12 – 13 February, 2027 organized by Zainab Saleh (Haverford), Sara Farhan (University of Northern British Columbia), and Pelle Valentin Olsen (Lund University).

The American invasion of Iraq in March 2003 constitutes one of the most consequential ruptures in the history of the modern Middle East. Nearly twenty-five years later, the ramifications of the invasion continue to reverberate across the humanities and social sciences. Despite the voluminous literature generated in the wake of the invasion, critical and systematic reflection on intellectual trends, how these trends were formed, the archives and forms of retrieval and collection that enabled them, and who has been authorized to produce knowledge on Iraq remains fragmentary. The Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (JSAMES) invites scholars across the humanities and social sciences to interrogate these foundational questions under a unifying rubric of ‘Iraq: The State of the Field since 2003.’

Structured by an insistence on interdisciplinarity, ‘Iraq: The State of the Field since 2003’ proceeds with the conviction that the Invasion of Iraq marked an epistemological watershed. The invasion and ensuing occupation fundamentally reshaped the conditions of scholarly inquiry: pillaged archives, hollowed out universities, murdered and exiled academics in Iraq and the simultaneous emergence of new repositories, institutions, and conferences in the West. To take stock of scholarship on Iraq since 2003 is therefore an exercise in gauging the barometers of the material and ideological conditions under which that scholarship has been produced. We invite scholars to engage rigorously with this double task while foregrounding the following:

Knowledge Production, Methodology, and Positionality

What is the location and positionality of knowledge about Iraq? Who gets to produce knowledge about Iraq, under what conditions, for what audiences and in what languages? What theoretical and methodological paradigms have dominated Iraq studies since 2003, and what intellectual possibilities have they foreclosed? The forum invites critical interrogation of the epistemological frameworks governing the field since 2003, meta-scholarly reflections on paradigmatic tendencies and their consequences, and substantive research presentations in areas that remain underrepresented or invisible.

Public, Collective Memory, and Commemorations

What does it mean to write the history of a society whose relationship to its own past has been consistently contested? What do acts of commemoration mean? And who gets to perform them, and what actors, past and present, do they exclude? The sedimentary layers of competing remembrance that continue to shape how Iraqi communities understand themselves and their obligations to their past are an important interdisciplinary concept. The erection and demolition of monuments, the establishment of museums and memorials, the designation of communal or national days of remembrance, the performance of communal rituals, and the official canonization of martyrs and heroes are acts of political will with a long and contentious history that cannot be reduced to the post-2003 moment.

Iraqi Archives

The history of Iraq’s archives enacts the colonial logic that Edward Said identified as the aggregation of the right to govern is, therefore, the right to narrate. The use of plundered records reproduces an asymmetry in which the imperial power that precipitated archival destruction simultaneously becomes the privileged custodian and the interpreter of the Iraqi past. The field cannot be adequately assessed without confronting the structural deficiency that has shaped it since at least 2003: the systematic underutilization of archives in Iraq and the corresponding marginalization of scholarship produced by Iraqi scholars working in Iraqi institutions. The forum presses upon contributors the importance of engaging seriously with these materials and the substantial body of scholarship produced by Iraqi academics, many of whom continue to work under severe institutional constraints.

The Case for Interdisciplinarity

History, anthropology, political science, sociology, literary and cultural studies, law, gender studies, geography, and the environmental humanities each illuminate different facets of a reality that resists disciplinary enclosure. The forum is explicitly interdisciplinary in its ambitions. We invite scholars to bring their distinctive disciplinary competencies into conversation with one another, to reflect on what is gained and what is lost in such crossings, and to model forms of collaborative inquiry that move beyond the additive inclusion of multiple methodologies as we work toward engaged intellectual synthesis.

Social History

The 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq profoundly reshaped and reconfigured everyday life. Iraqis not only endured the destruction of infrastructure and the erosion of access to basic needs, but also navigated new realities marked by checkpoints, militarization, displacement, crackdowns on protest movements, and increasing restrictions on women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. The institutionalization of a sectarian quota system further transformed social relations, political belonging, and access to resources and opportunities. How did the invasion and occupation reshape gender relations, senses of belonging, public spaces, and everyday life chances? How were class, sect, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality renegotiated in post-2003 Iraq? In what ways have Iraqis resisted, adapted to, or memorialized these transformations over the past twenty-five years?

Submission Guidelines and Key Dates:

All accepted papers will be considered for publication in a forum of the Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (JSAMES), a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal sponsored by the CAIS and published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The JSAMES is interested in interdisciplinary scholarship that explores that unique political, social, and economic formations and their historical antecedents that contribute to region-making in our contemporary age. The JSAMES is edited by Samer Abboud (Villanova University). Further journal information, including a list of editorial board members can be found here.

For submissions, please fill out this form.

If you have any inquiries, reach out to the managing editor of JSAMES, Dina Baslan at dina.baslan@villanova.edu with the following subject heading: “CFP Iraq: The State of the Field since 2003”.

The workshop timeline is as follows:

September 1, 2026 Submission of abstracts (~250 words)

Late September 2026 Notification of acceptance

Mid November 2026 Virtual participants’ meeting

January 8, 2027 Submission of paper drafts (~4000 words)

February 12 – 13, 2027 Workshop

May 11, 2027 Submission of final papers for review (4000 words)

Contact Information

Dina Baslan

Contact Email

dina.baslan@villanova.edu

URL