Mediterranean  and Middle Eastern Network 2009-10

Convenors

Bruno De-Nicola (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies)
Phoebe Luckyn-Malone (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies)
Ignacio Sánchez (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies)

Alice Wilson (Social Anthropology)

Committee

Lejla Demiri (Divinity)
Heba Mostafa (Architecture)
Will Smiley (Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies)
Ronny Vollandt (Middle Eastern Studies)
Clare Vernon (History of Art)
James Weaver (Middle Eastern Studies)
Andreea Weisl-Shaw (Spanish and French)

This new research group provides a forum for scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds working on the Middle East and Mediterranean to discuss their research. This is a region that has known longstanding exchanges across borders and seas, languages and religions, in literature and music, politics and science and our activities reflect this diversity of exchange. Our activities enable staff and graduate students from different faculties to meet and share research interests which cover many different aspects of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern societies.

Seminar Series 2009-10

During Michaelmas and Lent Term, we are hosting a seminar series focusing on the theme The Text and Beyond.

In these seminars we wish to look beyond the philological approach to the study of the Middle East and the Mediterranean by considering the broader concept of literary space. We are hosting speakers whose research interests cover these general areas:

- Production of the ‘text’: codicology, printing, archives, inscriptions in architecture and the plastic arts
- Transmission: authorship, translation, cultural transmission, transformation of artistic idioms
- Reception: hermeneutics, textual and cultural appropriation
- Beyond the text: modern media, unusual cases of textual sources, non-textual evidence

We will also be holding workshops for graduate students on themes to be confirmed.

Subscribe to our mailing list for information about forthcoming events.

Administrative contact:
Esther Lamb (Grad/Fac Programme and Office Manager)


Programme 2009-10
Theme: The Text and Beyond

Easter Term 2010

* The Group did not  meet during this term.
Monday 24 May, 14:30 
Administrative meeting to plan next year events.

Lent Term 2010

*Thursday 17 December 2009, 4-6pm*
Film screening:  Men of Words
Venue: Room 2.3,  Social Anthropology, Free School Lane
Followed by a discussion with the Director, Johanne Ihle

Monday 18 January 2010, 2.30pm
Alex Metcalfe
(Lancaster University)
The Earliest Written Records After The Norman Conquest of Sicily. Which Came First: Latin, Greek or Arabic?

Monday 1st February, 2.30pm

Dr Alessandro Vanoli
, University of Bologna
The Philosopher and the Volcano: memory of the Ancient World in Muslim Sicily
Reading

Monday 15 February, 2.30pm
 Dr Vivian Ibrahim,  University College, Cork
'Ode to the Fezzed Shaykh': Coptic poetry and resistance against the Muslim Brotherhood in 1940s Egypt

Monday 1st March, 2.30pm
Barbara Worley,  University of Massachusetts
Beyond the Text:  The Internet as a Literary Space for Exploration of New Trends in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Cultures. Case Study, the Tuareg People of the Sahara

Monday 8 March, 2.30pm
Professor Sir Jack  R Goody, Emeritus William Wyse Prof of Social Anthropology, St John's College, University of  Cambridge
Renaissances. The One or the Many?

Michaelmas Term 2009

Monday 12 October, 2.30pm
Dr Christian Lange  (University of Edinburgh)
Rituals of punishment and the Muslim imaginaire: attitudes toward state violence in medieval Islam

Monday 26 October, 2.30pm
Dr Pedram Khosronejad (University of St Andrews)
To Whom It May Concern:  War Material Culture and Constructing the Past in Post-war Iran
Click this link to see the Readings

Friday 30 October 2.00-3.30pm   Invitation *

(Faculty of English, Room GR 06/07) 
Dr Saad Eskander, Director of Iraq National Library and Archive, Baghdad
Iraq National Library and Archives in Transition: Old Tasks and New Responsibilities

*  Event organised by the Postcolonial Empires: Institutions & Historiographies Group

Monday 9 November, 2.30pm
Dr Ashraf Abdelhay  (University of Cambridge)
A Critical Commentary on the Discourse of Language Rights in the Naivasha
Language Policy in Sudan Using Habitus as a Method

Wednesday 11 November 2009, 5.00pm    Additional session *

Yoni Mendel  (PhD, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge)
Museums in the Battlefield: Two Examples from Israel and Palestine
Reading TBC.

*  (Joint seminar with Postcolonial Empires: Institutions & Historiographies Group)

Monday 23 November, 2.30pm
Dr Cesar Merchan-Hamann (Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies)
Medieval Hebrew and Spanish Translations of Tale Collections from the Arabic

Preparatory readings for each seminar will be posted on this website the week before the meeting. Titles will be confirmed by the start of term.