CRASSH

The symposium was the result of a one year process that originated from the seminal graduate meetings of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at University of Cambridge. The generous financial contribution of the Department and the financial and logistical help provided by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) allowed the organising committee to convert an idea into an academic reality. A call for papers was released in January 2008, and by late March, more than 170 abstracts were received from all over the world.

The symposium was conceived as an event organised by graduate students to create a space in which established scholars and young researchers alike could meet together to share, discuss and exchange ideas in the fields of Language and Knowledge in the Middle East. The topic was kept broad especially to attract contributions from a variety of research fields (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkic, History, Politics, Social Sciences, etc.) in order to encourage interaction between its respective specialists, who do not often have the chance to exchange and compare approaches, themes and findings. In selecting the abstracts for each of the 6 panels, the committee strived to achieve a balance between the topics, languages, geographies, and historical periods explored. The speakers came from Cambridge, other parts of the United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas.  

The symposium lasted for three days. On Friday, 17th October, Prof. Geoffrey Khan opened the symposium with an Inaugural Lecture on “The historical importance of the modern spoken dialects of Semitic languages”, held at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Over the weekend, the participants presented their papers at CRASSH’s excellent conference facility. There were 5 papers in each panel, each of which lasted for 20 minutes. A 35 minute discussion period followed. The papers presented were of an extraordinarily high quality, and generated lively discussion. In the feedback received from the participants, the highlighted positives were the excellent standard of the lectures, the links and similarities that were identified between seemingly disparate fields during presentations and discussions, and the warm and friendly atmosphere. Some participants kindly expressed that this was the best symposium that they had ever attended.

We would like to express our gratitude to all the participants for their splendid contributions, as well as the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and CRASSH for supporting this event. Without all of them, the symposium could not have been the success it was. We also thank all those scholars and graduate students who responded to the call for papers. Finally, we look forward to establishing this as an annual Cambridge event.