CBRL Sound: Recent Episodes
CBRL Sound
The CBRL inspires and supports the highest quality research in the humanities and social sciences in the countries of the Levant. Through its events and outreach activities, CBRL encourages the exchange and dissemination of knowledge and ideas for the benefit of all.
CBRL is a non-profit organisation. Comments and queries are welcome to: cbrldevelopment@thebritishacademy.ac.uk.
In recent years, the illicit amphetamine-like drug Captagon (Fenethylline) has become a major concern in the Middle East – both as a source of addiction and due to its connection with terrorism and the armed groups who produce and traffic it.This presentation will provide an overview on the findings of a qualitative study about the impact of Captagon on Jordan by focusing on its relationship to organised crime, and on its role as a source of addiction. This project uniquely combines knowledge from social pharmacy; criminology and international relations to gain a comprehensive understanding of the many ways in which Captagon impacts on Jordanian public health and law enforcement institutions. The research project was funded by GCRF/UK and aimed to describe and analyse Captagon addiction in Jordan from the perspective of users and workers, to ascertain the extent of Captagon trafficking into Jordan, its sources and links to regional conflicts.About the speakersProf. Mayyada WazaifyProf. Mayyada Wazaify is Professor of Pharmacy Practice at The School of Pharmacy at the University of Jordan and an Adjunct Professor in Social Pharmacy at The University of Helsinki, Finland. She obtained The Best Scientific Research Award by the Hamad Medical Corporation in Qatar in 2013, the Distinguished Researcher Award at University of Jordan in 2011 and 2012 and was an Advisor of the 41st Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD) of the World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva in 2018. She has consulted for Jordan Food and Drug Administration (JFDA) and Jordan Anti-Narcotics Department since 2004.Dr Christina SteenkampDr Christina Steenkamp is a Reader in Social and Political Change at Oxford Brookes University, where she teaches Peace and Conflict studies. She has published widely on topics related to conflict, peacebuilding and violence and has carried out extensive qualitative fieldwork in South Africa, Northern Ireland and the Middle East. She is currently writing her third book, this time on the relationship between organised crime and peacebuilding in the Middle East.
The fourth episode in the Kashmir Palestine Conversation Series addresses “Poetry and literature” and feature short presentations from Dalia Taha (poet and playwright) and Ather Zia (poet and writer, University of Colorado). The chair is Nadine El-Enany (Birkbeck, University of London) About the speakersDalia Taha is a Palestinian poet and playwright living in Ramallah. Her first play Keffiyeh/Made in China was produced by the Flemish Royal Theatre and A.M. Qattan Foundation and premiered in Brussels. Her play Al’ab Nariya/Fireworks was developed under the Royal Court’s International Playwriting residency and was produced there (London) in 2015. Dalia graduated from Brown University with an MFA in Playwriting and has published two collections of poetry and one novel. She recently completed her third play There Is No One Between You and Me.Ather Zia is a political anthropologist, poet and short-fiction writer. She is an assistant professor of anthropology and gender studies at the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley. Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (June 2019) and co-editor of Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (UPenn 2018) and A Desolation called Peace (Harper Collins, May 2019). She has published a poetry collection The Frame (1999) and another collection is forthcoming. Ather’s ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region. Ather is also the founder/editor of e-zine based on Kashmir titled Kashmir Lit at www.kashmirlit.org.Nadine El-Enany is a Reader in Law at Birkbeck School of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law (@CentreRaceLaw). Nadine teaches and researches in the fields of migration and refugee law, European Union law, protest and criminal justice. Her current research projects, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, focus on questions of race and justice in death in custody cases, and the role of law in addressing health inequalities arising from environmental harm. Nadine has written for the Guardian, the LRB Blog, Pluto Blog, Verso Blog, Open Democracy, Media Diversified, Left Foot Forward and Critical Legal Thinking. Her book, (B)ordering Britain: law, race and empire (2020) is published by Manchester University Press. The Kashmir-Palestine Conversations Series aims to create space for dialogue, networking and knowledge exchange between scholars of both Kashmir and Palestine. The series is organised by the Kashmir-Palestine Scholars Solidarity Network – an initiative conceived out of a British Academy Knowledge Frontiers Seed Grant awarded to scholars at the Council for British Research in the Levant (Dr Toufic Haddad) and the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) (Dr Emma Brännlund) in early 2020.
In this webinar, the project partners share insights from the 2021/22 FIELD SONGS project, an AHRC-funded collaboration of agricultural and social scientists at the University of Edinburgh and Douzan Art & Culture and Syrian Academic Expertise, two Syrian-run organisations based in Turkey. For this project, the partners documented refugees’ intangible agricultural heritage and present-day working conditions in Turkish farming and met with local governments and Syrian agricultural entrepreneurs to envision alternative futures for Syrian labour. In a region shaped by intersecting forms of displacement and dispossession, including through climate change, conflict, and globalisation, we argue for an integrated approach to strengthening refugees’ rights as workers and agricultural experts.In the webinar, the project partners share best practices, such as municipal cooperatives for long-term refugee employment, how refugee farmers build new supply chains around traditional Syrian products, and how to link decent working conditions to climate-smart agriculture. Together, the findings on the continuing relevance of Syrian agricultural heritage and expertise can inform sustainable and collaborative policy-making in Turkey and other forced migration contexts. About the project:The One Health FIELD Network was launched in 2019 by Professor Lisa Boden at the University of Edinburgh. Through projects in Syria and across the Middle East, it collaborates with researchers, practitioners, and decision-makers to ensure a successful transition away from humanitarian provision of short-term food supplies and agricultural inputs towards long-term contingency planning for food security in conflict affected states. Douzan Art and Culture is a Syrian cultural organization launched in Turkey in 2019, to enable Syrians to build their contemporary cultural identity, through: Preserving cultural memory, providing spaces for interaction, building capacities, and enhancing solidarity and cooperation to build our cultural future between the heritage and modernity. Syrian Academic Expertise is a network of Syrian academics and experts in Syria and the diaspora. It implements sustainable projects and studies in various sectors to provide innovative solutions appropriate to crises and post-crisis contexts and contributes to experiences exchange to raise self-resilience and promote peacebuilding in Syria.
This is the third in our Kashmir Palestine Conversation Series which features short presentations from Ala Al Azzeh (Birzeit University) and Inshah Malik, and was be moderated by Virinder Kalra (University of Warwick).
The first Kashmir-Palestine Conversation will feature a screening of the film “Bring Him Back” (dir. Fahad Shah, 2015), followed by a discussion with Palestinian academic Suhad Daher-Nashif and filmmaker Talat Bhat.
Bring him Back is a documentary film about the struggle of Maqbool Bhat’s mother to get her son’s mortal remains back from Tihar jail of India. It is directed by Kashmiri journalist and writer, Fahad Shah, and produced by Talat Bhat, under RåFILM Productions.
About the speakers
Suhad Daher-Nashif is a medical and cultural anthropologist, dedicated to study and analysis of the intersectionality between science, society, politics and bureaucracy throughout health and death practices in the MENA region. Originally trained as occupational therapist, she holds a Masters in Health Sciences, and PhD in sociology and anthropology. She worked in several academic and research institutions in the Middle East, most notably the College of Medicine at Qatar University-Qatar, and the School of Medicine at Keele University-UK, where she currently is a Lecturer in the Sociology of Health. Her most recent published works include In sickness and in health: The politics of public health and their implications during the COVID-19 pandemic (2022) and; Colonial management of death: To be or not to be dead in Palestine (2021).
Talat Bhat/Butt, producer and editor of Bring Him Back, is an activist, documentary filmmaker, Journalist and trade union campaigner based in Sweden. He has a Master’s degree in Media Production and researching on the impacts of new media technologies in conflict zones. He is also the project leader of RåFILM’s project Jammu Kashmir TV/JKTV Live Kashmir’s first WebTV to promote freedom of free speech and dialogue in all parts of the occupied areas under Pakistani and Indian occupation. Furthermore, Bhat’s trade union documentary project, Rocking the Birger Jarl, deals with his struggle for non-EU seamen workers in Sweden. www.birgferjarl.info
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the most longstanding unresolved geopolitical puzzles resulting from the end of the British Empire. They share an unenviable list of commonalities in their historical conditions: from the legacies and vestiges of British colonial partition, to the large refugee populations and extensive diasporas they produced. Their struggles for national self-determination are also repeatedly shaped by the prominent influence of regional actors. More recent history has witnessed even more linkages emerging as a product of the post-Cold war detente between India and Israel; their military, political and economic cooperation; ideological affinities between Hindutva and Zionism; aspirations to act as regional hegemons, and; influence from global institutions.
Despite the many commonalities between Kashmir and Palestine and the prolonged durations of their conditions, opportunities for dialogue, networking and knowledge exchange between scholars have been limited. This initiative aims to fill this gap by exploring possibilities for networking and cross-fertilisation between scholars working on Palestine and Kashmir respectively.
This network was initially conceived out of a British Academy Knowledge Frontiers Seed Grant awarded to scholars at the Council for British Research in the Levant (Dr Toufic Haddad) and the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) (Dr Emma Brännlund) in early 2020.
After encountering significant delays due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the initiative finally seeks to publicly launch, creating a space where scholarly conversations on Kashmir and Palestine can take place.
The keynote lecture on “Scholar-activist Solidarity: Building Alliances” was given by Dr Goldie Osuri, author and editor of multiple articles and special journal editions that have addressed Kashmir and Palestine in tandem. She spoke in-house at CBRL’s Jerusalem Kenyon Institute.
We are joined by Professor Hughes in the third event of our series of events to mark the centenary of the British Mandate in Palestine (1922-48).
Professor Hughes will use material from his recent book on Britain’s repression of the Arab revolt in the 1930s to detail Britain’s devastatingly effective methods against colonial rebellion. The British army had a long tradition of pacification that it drew upon to support operations against Palestinian rebels in 1936. An Emergency State of repressive colonial legislation underpinned and combined with military action to crush the Arab revolt. The British had established in the 1920s in Palestine a civil government that ruled by proclamation and it codified in law norms of collective punishment that British soldiers used in 1936. This was ‘lawfare’. It ground out the rebellion with legally bounded curfews, demolition, fining, detention, punitive searches, shootings, and reprisals. Such repressive legislation facilitated soldiers’ violent actions. Rebels were disorganised and unable to withstand such pacification measure, and so they lost.
About the speaker:
Matthew Hughes is Professor of History at Brunel University London. His 2019 Cambridge University Press book on Britain’s pacification of Palestine during the Arab revolt has been translated into Arabic by the Center for Arab Unity Studies. He is currently working on a book examining the British colonial state and British soldiers’ actions on Borneo in the 1960s during the Confrontation with Indonesia.
When an earthquake shook Palestine, Transjordan and the south of Lebanon and Syria in 1927, terms such as the Richter scale or plate tectonics which we now use to talk about seismic events were still a thing of the future. In global science, scholars were debating what caused earthquakes and were trying to work out how to measure their power and impacts. This lecture looks at how local scientists, journalists and government officials in the 1920s Levant thought about and reacted to earthquakes and how they fit into the broader cultural and political discourses of the day.
About the speaker:
Sarah Irving is Lecturer in International History at Staffordshire University in Britain and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow researching the social and cultural history of the 1927 earthquake. Her recent publications include an edited volume, The Social and Cultural History of Palestine: Essays in Honour of Salim Tamari, due in January 2023 from Edinburgh University Press, and ‘The House of the Priest’: A Palestinian Life (1885-1954), an edition of the memoirs of the Palestinian Orthodox priest and nationalist Niqula Khoury, edited and introduced with Charbel Nassif and Karène Sanchez Summerer, and available in open access from Brill. She is also editor-in-chief of the CBRL journal Contemporary Levant.
In this talk Dr Muna Dajani will look at how a unified watershed governance was devised by external powers, mainly the British and Americans, to construct the water resources of the Jordan River Basin as a unified, apolitical and ‘natural’ watershed. In their attempt to depoliticise the boundaries of the watershed, these forces reinforced a particular worldview that considered natural resources as sites of extractivism and exploitation in the quest for modernity and nation state-building. This resulted in a highly politicised, securitised and dehistoricised conceptualisation of water and its governance. The talk draws on examinations of technical and hydrogeological water availability and use, while also paying attention to ever-changing relations between humans and their environment. It examines how engineers and government representatives engage with water as a resource and sheds light on how ethnographic inquiry into watersheds could challenge the rigidity and banality of scientific conceptualizations and understandings about water and its flows.
About the speaker: Dr Muna Dajani holds a PhD from the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics (LSE). Her research focuses on documenting water struggles in agricultural communities under settler colonialism. She is a Senior Research Associate at the Lancaster Environment Centre (LEC) where she works on the project entitled “Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability” (T2GS) which explores promising grassroots initiatives of holistic groundwater governance, shedding light on traditional and intergenerational skills and knowledges. She has contributed to numerous studies on the hydropolitics of the Jordan and Yarmouk River Basins. She also co-led a collaboration project documenting the untold story of the occupation of the Syrian Golan through developing an online knowledge portal that includes local resources and personal reflections on the collective imaginary of historical events and the popular struggle taking place there.
This talk considers British involvement in and attitudes towards Palestine during the so-called “Peaceful Crusade” of the nineteenth century. Polly presents aspects of his book Palestine in the Victorian Age, arguing that Britain’s occupation, and the Zionist movement’s settler-colonisation, were significantly prefigured by Victorian Britons. Drawing on Evangelical Christian discourses around the Holy Land and the Jewish people and the geopolitical rivalries of the Eastern Question, these individuals created expectations for Palestine’s future which were then put into practice from 1917 to 1948 and beyond.
Polley also undertakes a historiographical consideration of nineteenth-century Palestine. Narratives beginning in 1917 not only elide the longer role of Western imperialism in the Palestinian tragedy, but also fail to convey the social, economic and environmental conditions existing before colonisation, giving an impression – inadvertently or purposefully – of a land without a history, or as some would have us believe, without a people.
This webinar is the first in a series of events organised by the CBRL Kenyon Institute marking the centenary of the British Mandate in Palestine (1922-1948).
About the speaker:
Gabriel Polley completed his PhD in Palestine studies in the European Centre for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter, in 2020. He previously studied the history of art and literature at the University of East Anglia, and Palestine and Arabic studies at Birzeit University, and taught in the West Bank, Palestine. He currently works in London in the translation and international development sector.
In Jerusalem, what you see and what is true are two different things. Maps divide the walled Old City into four quarters, yet that division doesn’t reflect the reality of mixed and diverse neighbourhoods. Beyond the crush and frenzy of its major religious sites, much of the Old City remains little known to visitors, its people overlooked and their stories untold.
This webinar highlights voices of the communities of the Old City by bringing into dialogue the writings of author/journalist Matthew Teller and artist/academic Bisan Abu Eisheh.
Teller’s latest book ‘Nine Quarters of Jerusalem’ is a highly original ‘biography’ of the Old City and its communities, evoking the city’s depth and cultural diversity, from its ancient past to its political present.
Abu Eisheh is a lifelong resident of the Old City, whose academic and artistic works investigate history, society and politics through the lost details of grand narratives.
This webinar takes place on the occasion of the US release of ‘Nine Quarters of Jerusalem’, and will feature a presentation on the book’s findings, followed by a discussion led by Abu Eisheh exploring insider/outsider dynamics that shape understandings, policies and communities of Jerusalem.
About the speakers:
Matthew Teller writes for the BBC, Guardian, Independent, Times, Financial Times and other global media. He has produced and presented documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and World Service, and has reported for ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ from around the Middle East and beyond. He is the author of several travel guides, including the Rough Guide to Jordan; his most recent book is Quite Alone: Journalism from the Middle East 2008–2019.
Bisan Abu Eisheh is an artist and academic born and raised in the Old City of Jerusalem. His creative practices feature video performances, installations and interventions within gallery spaces and the public sphere that aim to generate dialogue around national identity, mobility, migration and socio-political justice. He has also just submitted his PhD thesis to the University of Westminster, which looks at visual art practices as a form of Palestinian knowledge production and distribution in conjunction with the post-1993 realities. He is currently CBRL’s Jerusalem Research and Events Coordinator based at the Kenyon Institute.
Rebel populism tells the story of the Syrian uprising through the eyes of migrant workers in Beirut. Workers from Syria have maintained a presence in Lebanon for decades. There was a time when their wages stretched further back home. However, from the mid-2000s, liberalising reforms saw accelerating levels of poverty. Migration shifted from an ‘opportunity’ to a survivalist strategy.
But in 2011, revolution came to Syria. Rural towns and villages – the birthplaces of this book’s principal characters – exploded in revolt. Several men returned, some later joining armed militias, but even those who remained abroad found means to protest at a distance. This political moment, which Proudfoot conceptualises as an example of ‘rebellious populism,’ also represents an increasingly common global contentious political formation. It is a form of mass politics which emerges not via a charismatic orator or longstanding ideological convictions, but through the weaving together of grievances aimed at the ruling class. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Rebel populism offers fresh and vital insight into Syrian uprising, war and ultimate crisis.
About the speaker:
Philip Proudfoot is an anthropologist based in the Power and Popular Politics Cluster at the Institute of Development Studies. He is also the former Assistant Director of CBRL Amman. Philip’s work explores the political economy of de-development, forced migration, gender and sexuality, humanitarianism, protracted conflict, and populist mass movements.
Follow Philip on Twitter @PhilipProudfoot
CBRL & EAMENA webinar: Digital mapping, heritage management and archaeological research in the Levant: synergism and future directions
Archaeology has undergone a digital revolution that has transformed working practices across the globe and hugely increased the amount of data available for research. Many initiatives exist that try to organise and make sense of the influx of data, further contributing to creating more digital data in the process. The Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project, which was the subject of a recent Special Issue of Levant that explored the research potential of the EAMENA database, is one such initiative. During this meeting, the impact of the EAMENA methodology will be explored from the perspectives of two countries where versions of the EAMENA database will be implemented for heritage management on a national scale: Jordan and the State of Palestine.
About the speakers:
Pascal Flohr, Michael Fradley and Letty ten Harkel were guest editors of the Levant Special Issue, Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa: mapping, heritage management and research. Michael joined the EAMENA project in 2015 and specialises in remote-sensing applications in archaeology. Pascal and Letty both joined the project in 2016 and specialise in human-environment relations during later prehistory, and the archaeology and heritage of more recent time periods, respectively.
Jordan will be represented by Shatha Mubaideen (CBRL) with Dana Salameen (DoA) and Rudaina Al Momani (CBRL) from the Amman Heritage Houses Project, which used the EAMENA methodology to document Amman’s recent heritage. Shatha Mubaideen was also Jordan Project Manager for the Mapping Digital Heritage in Jordan (MaDiH) Project (2019-2021) towards the long-term sustainable development of Jordan’s digital cultural heritage. She is an architect who found her interest in archaeology growing since she attended graduate school at the University of Jordan, where she received an M.Sc in Architectural Engineering and Cultural Resource Management.
Mohammad Al-Jaradat, MoTA Palestine, graduated from Birzeit University with a degree in archaeology and history. He has been working in data gathering and digitisation using Geographic Information System (GIS) for over 20 years. Al-Jaradat is a key participant in Palestine’s EAMENA database and has uploaded more than 800 sites.
This is a joint lecture in partnership with the Palestine Exploration Fund held in honour of Andrea Zerbini.
Access to satellite imagery has enabled major advances in archaeology and other disciplines studying the Middle East and North Africa. A comparable impact had not been realised over Israel and Palestine, where U.S. restrictions known as the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment limited imagery resolution over this area. This paper will present the work of Michael Fradley and Andrea Zerbini (1984-2019) to remove these restrictions, culminating in the reduction on limits in June 2020, but also considering how structural barriers remain in place. As well as telling this slightly improbable tale, it will also reflect and celebrate the work of Andrea Zerbini who died in July 2019.
About the speaker:
Michael Fradley is a landscape archaeologist specialising in survey techniques, with a background of research across the UK, South America, North Africa and the Middle East. He joined the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project in 2015 where he has conducted research across Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Palestine. He has recently co-authored papers on the endangered maritime heritage of Gaza and the use of historic aerial imagery to investigate the Jericho Oasis.
More about Andrea Zerbini:
Andrea Zerbini (07.07.1984 – 12.07.2019) was a core member of the EAMENA team at Oxford University (2015-2019). He was appointed Assistant Director of CBRL’s Amman Institute in June 2018 and held a CBRL Visiting Fellowship 2013/14. He also previously served as PEF librarian and trustee. He was the original inspiration and driving force behind the Mapping Digital Heritage in Jordan (MaDiH) project (2019-2021).
The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) together with the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) are pleased to announce their second joint mentoring webinar for our members. Targeting postgraduate students and early career researchers, these on-line events offer practical advice and support from specialists, equipping the next generation of Middle East scholars with the insights needed to get ahead in their research and careers.
This event features a line-up of academic journal editors from diverse disciplinary backgrounds providing insight and feedback on the process of getting published in today’s competitive academic environment.
Article write-up and peer review are stressful enough! Learn from insiders on avoiding mistakes and how to increase your chances of article acceptance.
This event brings together editors from the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies [BJMES]; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East [CSSAAME]; Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies [JMEWS]; and Contemporary Levant [CL]. Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions specific to these journals and their respective processes.
It is commonplace to seek to enforce international law as a means of vindicating the rights of the Palestinian people, including, fundamentally, the right to liberation. Legal “tools” deployed to dismantle the “master’s house” of colonial oppression, to borrow from Audre Lorde. But the international legal system is embedded with the ideology and techniques of imperialism and colonialism. Is international law not, then, part of the “master’s house”? Would the implementation of international law necessarily bring about Palestinian liberation?
The lecture, based on a new article in the Palestine Yearbook of International Law, provides a critical evaluation of what is at stake when international law is invoked in the context of the Palestinian struggle. How and to what extent does it speak to the fundamental question of Palestinian liberation?
About the speaker: Dr Ralph Wilde is a member of the Faculty of Laws at UCL, University of London, where he teaches and researches on international law and convenes the “‘decolonizing’ law” public lecture series. He is currently at Residential Fellow at the CBRL Kenyon Institute in Al Quds. His current research focuses on the extraterritorial application of international human rights law and the international law aspects of the Israel-Palestine situation. His previous work on the concept of trusteeship over people and territorial administration by international organizations includes his book International Territorial Administration: How Trusteeship and the Civilizing Mission Never Went Away (OUP), awarded the Certificate of Merit of the American Society of International Law. He previously served on the Executive bodies of the American and European Societies of International Law, and the International Law Association. He is a past winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize by the UK Leverhulme Trust.
This talk summarises the main arguments in Awad Halabi’s forthcoming book, Palestinian Rituals of Identity: The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850-1948 (University of Texas Press, late 2022).
The work focuses on the festival (mawsim) that honours the 13th century shrine of the Prophet Moses (maqam al-Nabi Musa) located south of Jericho, Moses’s reputed tomb. In the mid-19th century, though, festival organisers in Jerusalem organised a ceremony based in Jerusalem. They transformed the festival from traditional worship centered at the shrine to a large, public, civic ceremony centered in Jerusalem.
Awad’s talk discusses how each social group involved in the ceremonies (Ottoman officials, British colonial officials, urban notables, religious officials, Palestinian nationalist leaders, Arab nationalist youth, villagers, women, Sufis, and anti-Zionist communist Jews) each attempted to control the symbols of the festival. These symbols included the ritual actors, rites, images, rhetoric, and processional routes. Awad examines how each group that attempted to control these ritual symbols promoted their unique understanding of politics, colonialism, modernity, identity, Islam, and gender in Palestine from 1850 to 1948.
(c) Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, Pass Up Gethseman
About the speaker:
Awad Halabi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Wright State University in Dayton, OH, teaching classes on Middle Eastern history. He is the coordinator of the minor in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. He has published articles in edited books and the Jerusalem Quarterly and the Journal of Palestine Studies. He conducted his doctoral work at the University of Toronto.
16 March 2022
The heritage agenda in the Levant, whether focused on tourism, local communities, or sustainability, has typically been set by external agents. This event addresses this issue through presentations and discussion from two previous winners and co-authors of CBRL’s Contemporary Levant best paper prize – Christina Luke, 2021 – and Shatha Abu-Khafajah, 2019. The discussion will be chaired by cultural heritage specialist, Paul Burtenshaw.
In the presentation based on her and Lynn Meskell’s paper, ‘Developing Petra: UNESCO, the World Bank, and America in the desert’, Christina Luke charts the nascent development agendas for archaeological heritage and tourism at Petra, Jordan. Findings reveal that saving Petra was underwritten by an increasing American vigilance in the Middle East and technocratic tourism-as-assistance agenda resulting in an overburden of international bureaucracy and consultancy culture.
Drawing on the co-authored paper with Riham Miqdadi ‘Prejudice, military intelligence, and neoliberalism: Examining the local within archaeology and heritage practices in Jordan’ Shatha Abu-Khafaja will examine the ‘local’ within archaeology and heritage practices in Jordan. Sustainable development on the basis of local communities’ participation dominates contemporary heritage practices in Jordan. Shatha will situate archaeology and heritage within colonialism and neoliberalism to examine how, in the Arab region, local communities have shifted from periphery to centre. Despite participatory paradigms, the shifts seem to have almost always come ‘from the outside’, operating on sites and peoples alike. Shatha argues that in order to make sustainable development in the field of archaeology and heritage change has to come from within. This implies questioning western approaches and introducing conceptual and practical alternatives and options based on cultural localities.
About the speakers:
Shatha Abu-Khafajah graduated as an architect from the University of Jordan in 1997. She specialized in documentation and conservation of archaeological heritage while doing her master degree in archaeology. Her PhD in cultural heritage management from Newcastle University enabled her to synthesise architecture and archaeology with special interest in establishing a sustainable approach to heritage management in the Arab region that is community-based and context-oriented. She is currently an associate professor at the Hashemite University in Zarqa, Jordan. Her research focuses on examining the relationship between people and place. Currently, she is exploring ‘the decolonial options’ in cultural and heritage studies
Christina Luke is Associate Professor of Archaeology and History of Art at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. She’s conducted archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork in Central America, Mexico, the Balkans, and Turkey. Her professional background includes the US Department of State as well as training programmes with the governments of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Serbia, Montenegro, and Turkey. Her research has been funded by the US National Endowment for the Humanities, US National Science Foundation, British Cultural Protection Fund, and the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council. Her current projects focus on food and society, Ottoman conservation policies, and the historiography of archaeology and preservation in the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey. This work grew from journal articles and her 2019 book, A Pearl in Peril: Heritage and Diplomacy in Turkey (Oxford University Press). She also serves as Editor for the Journal of Field Archaeology.
About the chair:
Paul Burtenshaw is an independent specialist in cultural heritage and sustainable development. He has worked on a number of community development and tourism projects in Jordan and globally. Burtenshaw holds a PhD from UCL in heritage and economic development and was the Director of Projects at Sustainable Preservation Initiative between 2014 and 2019.
23 February 2022
This webinar explores the history, archaeology and architecture of this historic city, located in central Israel. Ramla is significant because it was the only new city founded by the Muslim Arabs within Palestine and for a short period functioned as capital. From the eighth to the tenth century Ramla grew to be the most populous city in Palestine extending over a vast area with different quarters for Jews, Christians and Muslims. However, by the end of the eleventh century the city had fallen into decline and when the Crusaders arrived, much of the city was uninhabited. After the expulsion of the Crusaders, the city was rebuilt both as a staging post on the trade route between Cairo and Damascus and also the principal stop-over for Christian pilgrims travelling from Jaffa to Jerusalem. After the creation of Israel in 1948 the city once more fell into decline- a transition which has been captured in the best-selling book The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan.
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About the speaker:
Andrew Petersen is Director of Research in Islamic Archaeology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He studied medieval history and archaeology at St Andrews followed by an MPhil in Islamic Architecture at Oxford. His PhD at Cardiff University concentrated on the development of urban centres in medieval and Ottoman Palestine. He has worked in and carried out research in a number of countries of the Middle East and Africa including, Jordan, Iraq, Palestine, Turkmenistan, the UAE, Oman, Syria, Qatar, Kenya and Tanzania. He has also worked in British archaeology with a speciality in recording standing buildings. He is a member of the Institute for Archaeologists and a fellow of the Royal historical Society. He has published a number of books on different aspects of the architecture and archaeology of the Islamic world including most recently an edited volume on Ramla in collaboration with Denys Pringle.
About the discussants:
Richard Piran McClary is a Senior Lecturer in Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of York, and the Research Director of the British Institute of Persian Studies. has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses primarily on medieval Islamic architecture, from Anatolia to Central Asia, and on Iranian overglaze ceramics from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. His first two monographs examined Rum Seljuq Architecture and Qarakhanid Architecture respectively, and his third monograph, currently in press, with be the first comprehensive study of mina’i ware. He is currently working on a project to examine lajvardina ware, and editing what will be the first major book on the use of stucco in Islamic architecture. He has conducted field work across West and Central Asia and has lectured extensively on Islamic art and architecture around the world.
Maher Y. Abu-Munshar is Associate Professor of Islamic History at Qatar University. He completed his PhD in 2003 in Islamic History at the University of Dundee. His teaching and research expertise lies in the areas of Islamic history, with a special interest in the history of Jerusalem, history of Muslim – Christian Relations and the Crusaders. He is the author of Islamic Jerusalem and Its Christians: A History of Tolerance and Tensions (IB Tauris Publishers, 2007 & 2013) as well as many articles on different aspects of Jerusalem, Islamic history, Christian-Muslim Relations and the study of Islam and Muslims. He is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Historical Society.
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Watch the webinar on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3po6xau
February 2022
In this interview, CBRL’s Director Carol Palmer speaks to Andrew Arsan about his research on the twentieth century history of the Levant with a focus on the potential for Arab democracy.
About the speaker: Andrew Arsan is Professor of Arab and Mediterranean History in the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St John’s College. A political, cultural, and intellectual historian of the modern Middle East, he is the author of Lebanon: A Country in Fragments (2018) and Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial West Africa (2014), and the editor, with Cyrus Schayegh, of the Routledge Handbook of the History of the History of the Middle East Mandates (2015). He is currently working on a new history of political thought and action in the twentieth-century Arab world, for publication with Allen Lane and Basic Books.
19 January 2022 Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, reproduction, and death in modern Palestine. A book conversation with Frances S. Hasso.
Bringing together a vivid array of analog and non-traditional sources, including colonial archives, newspaper reports, literature, oral histories and interviews, Buried in the Red Dirt tells a story of life, death, and reproduction, and missing bodies and experiences, during and since the British colonial period in Palestine. Using transnational feminist reading practices of existing and new archives, Frances Hasso moves beyond authorized frames of collective pain and heroism. Looking at their day-to-day lives, where Palestinians suffered most from poverty, illness, and high rates of infant and child mortality, Hasso's book shows how ideologically and practically, racism and eugenics shaped British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine in different ways, especially informing health policies. She examines Palestinian anti-reproductive desires and practices, before and after 1948, critically engaging with demographic scholarship that has seen Zionist commitments to Jewish reproduction projected onto Palestinians.
This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core: https://bit.ly/3GTkiUE
01 December 2021
This lecture revisits the notion of “unfree labour” through the study of refugee workers in Middle Eastern agriculture. It presents findings from the Refugee Labour under Lockdown project, drawing on interviews with 80 Syrian agricultural workers, 20 intermediaries, and 20 employers in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. The International Labour Organisation’s definition of “forced labour” does not capture Syrians’ experience of “unfreedom” - born out of the interplay of neoliberal businesses, with their need for cheap, mobile labour, and restrictive asylum policies in Middle Eastern host countries - which produce these workers. Through an anthropological lens, we see that refugees are recruited into global supply chains through kinship networks.
This lecture will be given by Ann-Christin Zuntz (University of Edinburgh) followed by discussion with Neil Howard (University of Bath) who will contribute a comparative perspective on the role of refugee and migrant labour in increasingly globalised agricultural production.
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About the speakers:
Dr Ann-Christin Zuntz is a lecturer in Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. She is an economic anthropologist, with a focus on the intersections of labour and forced migrations, and gender, in the Mediterranean. Since 2015, Ann has conducted fieldwork with displaced Syrians in Jordan, Turkey, Tunisia, and Bulgaria, and, remotely, in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. She does collaborative research with Syrian academics within the One Health FIELD Network. Ann is currently a visiting fellow at the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) in Tunis, researching displacement trajectories and social networks of Syrian refugees in North Africa.
Dr Neil Howard is Lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath. His research focuses on the governance of exploitative and so-called 'unfree' labour and in particular the various forms of it targeted for eradication by the Sustainable Development Goals. He conducts ethnographic and participatory action research with people defined as victims of trafficking, slavery, child labour and forced labour, and political anthropological research on the institutions that seek to protect them. He currently leads an ERC Starting Grant that aims to trial both action research and unconditional cash transfers as potential policy responses to indecent or exploitative work in Hyderabad, India. Neil founded and is one of the editors of the Beyond Trafficking and Slavery section at openDemocracy (www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery), which aims to put radical and grassroots commentary on ‘unfree’ or exploitative work and movement into the public domain.
Syria’s conflict has metamorphised into a hybrid: a partially frozen proxy war over territory combined with a battle over sanctions and reconstruction. This lecture will explore three aspects of this contest. The lecture will look at the stalemated proxy war; the effort of the regime to use reconstruction to consolidate its power and marginalize opposition and the US effort to obstruct this. At stake is whether Syria’s sovereignty will survive and in what form or whether it’s statehood will further fail, with likely waves of spill-over to neighbours. But Syria is also a test case of the global order: whether the US can use its dominance of the world financial system to sustain its world hegemony or whether its reinvention as a “sanctions hegemon” is the last episode in the transition to a multipolar world.
This lecture was given by Professor Raymond Hinnebusch (University of St Andrews) as CBRL's AGM lecture on 17 November, 2021.
For 10 years, between 2005 and 2014, the ‘Great Arab Revolt Project’ (GARP) investigated the remains of the 1916-1918 Arab Revolt in southern Jordan, from Ma’an to Mudawwara.
Expecting initially to survey and excavate the mainly ruinous Hejaz Railway stations for perhaps three years, events soon changed this to a 10-year project. The stations were investigated, but it was the unexpected discovery of conflict landscapes in-between the stations and farther out in the desert that required more investigation and was added to by the discovery of over 100 pre-Revolt construction-era camps built by and for the labour gangs who constructed the railway. Discoveries included defensive earthwork ‘karakolls’, stone-built forts, machine-gun positions, Ottoman army campsites, overnight raiding camps for Rolls Royce armoured cars, and even ephemeral Royal Air Force landing grounds.
GARP research fleshed out the Revolt in this region, uncovered unsuspected landscapes, and added a new dimension to Jordanian heritage.
About the speaker:
Nicholas J Saunders is Emeritus Professor of Material Culture in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at Bristol University. His research focuses on the material culture, landscapes and cultural memories of twentieth and twenty-first century conflict in Europe and the Middle East. Fieldwork in France, Belgium, Bosnia, Slovenia and Jordan is supplemented by ongoing research into the material culture of the Chinese Labour Corps on the Western Front.
Between 2006 and 2014 he was co-director of the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP) in southern Jordan – investigating the 1916-1918 Arab Revolt along the Hejaz Railway from Ma’an to Mudawwara – in co-operation with Al Hussein bin Talal University.
His publications include: Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War (2003), Modern Conflict and the Senses (2017), Desert Insurgency: T.E. Lawrence, Archaeology and the Arab Revolt (2020), and Conflict Landscapes (2021). He is co-editor of the Routledge series ‘Material Culture and Modern Conflict’.
About the discussant:
Bakr Khazer Almajali is a distinguished Jordanian historian. Originally born in Al-Qasr in the Al Karak governorate, he is a graduate of the Royal Military College at Mutah University. He continued his service in the Jordanian Army in prominent roles until 1996, including as Director of the Martyrs’ Memorial and the Jordanian Military Museum. He has subsequently worked as a university researcher, consultant and advisor at the Royal Hashemite Court, including on projects to renovate the Historical Museum in Ma’an (‘The Founder’ King Abdullah I Palace) and the Martyr’s Memorial. He holds a PhD from the University of New Hampshire (USA) for his thesis The Renaissance and Independence Movements in the Arab Mashreq from 1850 AD to 1925 AD. He has published extensively on Islamic and Jordanian history, the Hashemite Royal Family, the Jordanian Arab Army, and the Great Arab Revolt. He has won many prizes and recognition for his scholarly work and achievements, notably for his documentary scripts for radio and television.
About the chair:
Robert Bewley is Chair of CBRL’s Board. He is the Co-founder and former Director of the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa project (from 2015-2020) at the University of Oxford. He is the Director of the Aerial Archaeology in Jordan project and in 2018 was able to set up the Aerial Archaeology in Oman project. Bob received his PhD in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge and was an undergraduate at Manchester University studying Ancient History and Archaeology. He is the author of six books, including Prehistoric Settlements (1994 and 2003), Aerial Archaeology – Developing Future Practice (2002 with W. Raçzkowski) and Ancient Jordan from the Air (2004 with David Kennedy).
03 May 2018 The Kenyon Institute & the Educational Bookshop
Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank Dr Yael Berda (Harvard) in conversation with Professor Rema Hammami (Birzeit University)
30 October 2019
Book launch in partnership with the Educational Bookshop, the American Colony Hotel and Stanford University Press presented by the author Tareq Baconi in conversation with Jose' Vericat.
28 November 2019
Authors in conversation with Toufic Haddad
From the River to the Sea: Palestine and Israel in the Shadow of ‘Peace’ provides original analyses of how different coping strategies were developed as well as new forms of political expression, interaction, and mobilization since the 1993 peace deal between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel. Its premise is that an historical realism is essential in order to develop a route out of the post-Oslo impasse that extended and solidified the power imbalance under the auspices of ‘peace’.
11 December 2017 By Dr Leena Dallasheh
In the wake of the Nakba, and the destruction of much of Palestinian society and its major cities, Nazareth remained almost intact. As the dust of the war settled, this heretofore small town turned into the only Palestinian city to survive the events of 1948, and became the cultural and political centre for the Palestinians that remained as a minority in the new self-identified Jewish state. In this lecture, Dr Leena Dallasheh (Humboldt State University, California), traces how the city survived and persevered, despite immense challenges.
7 December 2016 Toufic Haddad
'Palestine Ltd' by Toufic Haddad explores how neoliberal frameworks have shaped and informed the common understandings of international, Israeli and Palestinian interactions throughout the Oslo peace process. Drawing upon more than 20 years of policy literature, field-based interviews and recently declassified or leaked documents, he details how these frameworks have led to struggles over influencing Palestinian political and economic behaviour, and attempts to mould the class character of Palestinian society and its leadership. In this book launch event, Dr Haddad will show us how a dystopian vision of Palestine emerges as the by-product of this complex asymmetrical interaction, where nationalism, neo-colonialism and ‘disaster capitalism’ both intersect and diverge.
9 May 2019
Adnan Abdelrazak, in conversation with Raja Khalidi, discusses the new era of urban development in Jerusalem brought about by the replacement of the Ottoman Empire’s rule over Jerusalem by British forces in 1917 and by the imposition of a British Mandate on Palestine by the League of Nations in 1921.
28 August 2017
Book launch with Katharina Galor and Nazmi Jubeh.
A joint event between the Kenyon Institute, the Educational Bookshop and Dar al-Tifel al-Arab.
This event will bring author Dr Katharina Galor (Humboldt University, Berlin) into discussion with Dr Nazmi Jubeh (Birzeit University, Palestine) about the findings of her new book: Finding Jerusalem: Archaeology Between Science and Ideology. Bridging the gap between popular coverage and specialized literature, Finding Jerusalem provides a comprehensive tour of the politics of archaeology in the city.
15 August 2017
Book Launch with Hannes Baumann and Toufic Haddad. Joint event between the Kenyon Institute, the Educational Bookshop and Dar al-Tifel al-Arabi.
This book assesses the legacy of the man dubbed 'Mr Lebanon' and charts the social and economic transformations his rise represented. At this event, author Hannes Baumann (Liverpool University, UK) will be in discussion with Taufic Haddad (independent Palestinian-American researcher) who will draw out how similar social and economic transformations have taken place in the occupied Palestinian territory.
29 September 2021 | The politics of water scarcity in the Levant
The Middle East is the most water scarce region in the world. In this webinar we will consider the causes and consequences of this water scarcity. We will discuss how climate and management of water resources impacts this water crisis.
Three speakers will provide perspectives from the Levant: an exploration of the politics behind policies of water allocation in the case of Jordan, thoughts on food security in water scarce regions whilst protecting the livelihoods of farmers, and discussions on the implications of water scarcity on vulnerable communities in the Levant.
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About the speakers:
Hussam Hussein is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Oxford and Fellow at the Oxford Martin School in Transboundary Resources Management. His research focuses on the role of discourses in shaping water policies in the Middle East, on transboundary water governance, and on the political economy of water resources in arid and semi-arid regions. He obtained his PhD degree from the University of East Anglia, with a thesis focusing on the discourse of water scarcity in the case of Jordan.
Martin Keulertz is an adjunct assistant professor to the food security program at the American University of Beirut. He acted as director of the program until 2020 and continues to teach in the online delivery of program. Martin also works as a consultant to governments, the private sector, NGOs and to a wide range of organisations in the Middle East and North Africa on issues related to water, food and trade.
Majd al Naber is the team leader and senior researcher in the sustainable development pillar at West Asia-North Africa (WANA) Institute. She manages several projects addressing the environmental challenges facing the WANA region. She takes a multidisciplinary approach that encompasses the fields of climate change, gender, water, agriculture and energy from a transboundary dimension. She is a specialist in integrated water resources management and water policy for arid land. She received her Doctor of Philosophy Joint degree from the Wageningen University, The Netherlands and SupAgro, France. Her doctoral research investigated the dynamics and governance of groundwater use in the Middle East and North Africa; technical and institutional innovations in arid zones: groundwater-based agriculture in arid land; the case of the Azraq basin, Jordan. She has authored and co-authored numerous publications.
About the chair:
Carol Palmer is the Director of CBRL, based in Amman. She is an anthropologist, environmental archaeologist and botanist. Her research interests concentrate on recording rural life in its many forms, the contemporary and recent use of plants on the broadest level, cultivated, gathered and grazed, and the effects of changes in food production practices on the landscape and in society. Please see here for more details.
In this speaker event, Lori Allen will present on her latest book, A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine, in conversation with Toufic Haddad.
Based on archival and ethnographic research, this book examines a history of international investigative commissions in Palestine as liberal performances and enactments of international law. A History of False Hope offers new perspectives on Palestinian political history, and a novel methodology bringing anthropology to the archives and the history of international law.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Lori Allen is Reader in Anthropology at SOAS University of London. Her work has focused on Palestinian society, politics, and history. She is the author of two books, A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine (2020) and The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine (2013), published by Stanford University Press.
Her articles have been published in academic and news journals, including American Ethnologist, Contemporary Studies in Society and History, MERIP, Al-Jazeera, and Sada. Lori's most recent contributions include "This Time May Be Different: on the UN commission of inquiry investigating violations in the occupied Palestinian territory" and "The ICC in Palestine: Reasons to Withhold Hope."
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Additional resources:
Watch the video: https://bit.ly/3qON0iF
This lecture, in partnership with CBRL and UCL Press, provides an opportunity to summarize, share insights, and discuss the recently published volume: “Olga Tufnell’s ‘Perfect Journey’: Letters and photographs of an archaeologist in the Levant and Mediterranean.”
Olga Tufnell (1905–85) was a British archaeologist working in Egypt, Cyprus and Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, a so-called golden age of archaeological discovery. Based largely on letters and photographs from the Olga Tufnell archive at the Palestine Exploration Fund, the book sheds light on personal experiences of travel and dig life at this extraordinary time.
The letters offer insights into the social and professional networks and history of archaeological research, particularly for Palestine under the British Mandate, including through excavations at Tell el Far’ah (South), Tell el-‘Ajjul and Tell ed-Duweir (ancient Lachish). They provide information about the role of foreign archaeologists, relationships with local workers and inhabitants, and the colonial frameworks they operated within during turbulent times.
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About the Speakers:
Jack Green, also known as John D.M. Green, is associate director of the American Center of Research, Amman, Jordan, where he is currently engaged in the Temple of the Winged Lions Publication project focused on this important Nabataean site in Petra. He is also focused on the Tell es-Sa'idiyeh Cemetery Publication Project at the British Museum, following his Ph.D thesis (UCL, 2006) on the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age cemetery at Tell es-Sa'idiyeh, Jordan. Jack was Deputy Director of Collections, Research, and Exhibitions at the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY (2016-17), Chief Curator of the Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago (2011-2015), and curator of Ancient Near East at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (2007 - 2011). His academic interests are in the archaeology, history, and art history of the ancient Middle East and East Mediterranean, museum studies, cultural heritage studies, histories of archaeology and museums.
Ros Henry assisted Olga Tufnell at the Institute of Archaeology with the publication of the Wellcome-Marston Expedition to Tell ed-Duweir (ancient Lachish) expedition and related material during the 1950s. After Olga Tufnell’s death in 1985, Ros co-authored her obituaries and became involved with the Olga Tufnell archive after the collection of letters and photographs was donated to the Palestine Exploration Fund. She then embarked upon the task of collating, ordering, transcribing, and initial editing of the letters, beginning the process towards the publication of “Olga Tufnell’s ‘Perfect Journey.’” Ros has a MA degree in History from Trinity College Dublin, and lives in Warwickshire, England.
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Additional resources:
Watch the video recording of the lecture: https://bit.ly/3qxlSEX
The footage mentioned in the lecture comes from Filming Antiquity. Links to the short movies can be found below: Conservation in the field: https://bit.ly/2UPSNc9 Introducing Gerald Lankester Harding: https://bit.ly/3x8tksI
EASTERN CHRISTIANITY IN SYRIA AND PALESTINE AND EUROPEAN CULTURAL DIPLOMACY (1860-1948): A CONNECTED HISTORY
A Christian ‘Oriental question’ or an ‘Orient belonging only to Easterners’?
In this webinar, the panellists will discuss European cultural diplomacy in Ottoman and Mandate Syria and Palestine, how it impacted the cultural identification of indigenous Christians, and the variety of Christian Arab agendas towards such policies, relying predominantly on unpublished sources.
They will present some of the conceptual and archival challenges, and link the study of the micro-scale level of everyday cultural and religious life to the macro-narratives of global change affecting Christian communities, in a connected perspective.
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With:
Karène Sanchez Summerer Konstantinos Papastathis Lora Gerd Dimitrios M. Kontogeorgis
For more information about the speakers visit https://cbrl.ac.uk/event/eastern-christianity-in-syria/
Are you interested in getting your research published in a leading peer-reviewed journal focused on the Middle East? Join us for a conversation with the editors of four prominent international journals who share their perspectives and advice on how to get your research published. Our panellists share their insights on the publishing process and provide tips for what they are looking for in their submissions.
We are joined by Joel Gordon, Editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies; Noha Mellor, Associate Editor of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies; and Salim Tamari, Editor of Jerusalem Quarterly. The event will be chaired by Sarah Irving, Editor of CBRL’s journal Contemporary Levant.
https://cbrl.ac.uk/event/how-to-get-published-in-a-middle-east-journal/
About the speakers:
Joel Gordon is Editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies and a Professor of History at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville. He is a political and cultural historian of modern Egypt and the Middle East/Islamic world. He teaches and writes about political change, the intersections of public and popular culture, historical memory and nostalgia, and religious and secular crosscurrents, with emphases on cinema, music and mass media. He is the author of three books on the era of Gamal Abdel Nasser and numerous articles, book and film reviews.
Noha Mellor is a Professor at the University of Bedfordshire and an Adjunct Professor at Stockholm University. She is the author of several books about Arab media including The Making of Arab News (2005), Modern Arab Journalism (2007), Arab Media (2011), Reporting the MENA Region (2015), and Voice of the Muslim Brotherhood (2017). She has recently co-edited the first comprehensive Handbook on Arab Media (2020). She is Associate Editor of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and a member of the editorial board of Arab Media & Society, International Journal of Press/Politics, Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research, and Journalism Studies.
Salim Tamari is Professor of Sociology (Emeritus) at Birzeit University; Research Associate at the Institute for Palestine Studies; and Editor of The Jerusalem Quarterly. He has previously been the Editor of the Heritage and Society Journal, the Birzeit Social Science Review and Afaq Falastiniyya. Salim is the author of a number of publications including: Mountain Against the Sea: A Conflicted Modernity; The Storyteller of Jerusalem: The Life and Times of Wasif Jawhariyyeh (with Issam Nassar); and Year of the Locust: Erasure of the Ottoman Era in Palestine. He was the winner of the 2018 Middle East Monitor prize for his book Great War and the Remaking of Palestine and won the 2017 State of Palestine Prize for Lifetime Achievements in the social sciences and humanities.
About the chair:
Sarah Irving is Editor of the CBRL journal Contemporary Levant and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, researching a social history of the 1927 earthquake in Mandate Palestine. She has worked in and on the Levant region, particularly Palestine, since 2001 and has written and edited a number of academic and trade books on its culture and history. Most recently these include Cultural Entanglement in the Pre-Independence Arab World, edited with Tony Gorman of Edinburgh University and published by IB Tauris, and articles in Jerusalem Quarterly, Contemporary Levant and Revue d’histoire culturelle on aspects of the intellectual and social history of Mandatory Palestine.
The Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL), in partnership with the Educational Bookshop, are pleased to share this discussion with Dr Mahmood Mamdani about his new book “Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities.”
The book offers original arguments regarding the co-constitutive relationship between the nation-state and the colonial state. According to the book’s description, “[i]n case after case around the globe – from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan – the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicisation of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. […]
“Neither Settler nor Native” offers a vision for arresting this historical process. It rejects “the ‘criminal’ solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors – victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries – based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native.”
The interview was conducted by CBRL’s Kenyon Institute Director Dr Toufic Haddad.
Current global climatic and ecological changes present a profound threat to the long-term wellbeing of humanity. Solutions to mitigate against or adapt to society’s grand sustainability challenge will come from many quarters – science and technology, humanities and the creative arts, health, business and education – but the historical sciences of archaeology and geology also offer important past perspectives.
This webinar will explore the role and responsibility of geo-archaeological science in addressing fundamental aspects of sustainable development, including water, mineral resources, energy, and disaster risk. Prof. Iain Stewart will begin with a keynote presentation, before bringing in the perspectives of our panellists Prof. Nizar Abu-Jaber and Dr Carol Palmer. The webinar will be chaired by Prof. Matthew Jones.
About the speakers:
Professor Iain Stewart is the newly appointed El Hassan Research Chair in Sustainability at the Royal Scientific Society. The former director of its Sustainable Earth Institute at the University of Plymouth, Iain’s long-standing research interests are in geological hazards, geology for sustainable development, and geoscience communication. His geo-communication work has built on a 15-year partnership with BBC television presenting Earth science programmes, including Earth: The Power of the Planet; How Earth Made Us; How to Grow a Planet; The Rise of the Continents; and Planet Oil. Awarded an MBE for his services to geography and geology education, he currently holds a UNESCO Chair in Geoscience and Society and leads the UNESCO’s International Geoscience and Geoparks Programme project 685 on Geology and Sustainable Development.
Professor Nizar Abu-Jaber is the Director of the Center for Natural and Cultural Heritage (CSNACH) at the German Jordanian University (GJU). Previously, he worked at Yarmouk University where he directed the UNESCO Chair for Desert Studies and Desertification Control. At GJU, he was the Dean of Research and Graduate Studies before moving on to establish CSNACH in 2011. A geologist by training, his diverse interests revolve around the use of Earth science in resolving pressing issues related to water resources and management, climate change, sustainable planning and cultural heritage. Most recently, he has led a number of CSNACH projects aimed at reviving the ancient Nabatean flood control system in Petra, a project which won the ICCROM-Athar award for Good Practices in Cultural Heritage Conservation and Management in the Arab Region (2020).
Dr Carol Palmer is Director of the Council for British Research in the Levant based in Amman. She is an anthropologist, environmental archaeologist, and botanist. She wrote her PhD on traditional farming in northern Jordan and subsequently studied Bedouin from southern Jordan as part of the Wadi Faynan Project. Her research interests concentrate on recording rural life in its many forms, the contemporary and recent use of plants on the broadest level, cultivated, gathered, and grazed, and the effects of changes in food production practices on the landscape and in society. She is an Honorary Fellow at Bournemouth University.
This webinar, co-hosted by the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) and the British Institute at Ankara, will showcase the latest debates and scholarship on modern and contemporary feminist art practices and histories from the Middle East and Turkey.
The panellists will share their perspectives on feminist art in Syria, Turkey and Palestine. Dr Charlotte Bank will discuss feminist approaches in works by Syrian women artists and how they have been a vehicle for social change; Dr Ceren Özpınar will examine how the history of feminist art in Turkey has been commonly told and why that should be challenged; and Dr Tina Sherwell will highlight the work of Palestinian women artists. The webinar will be chaired by Dr Toufic Haddad, Director of CBRL’s Kenyon Institute in Jerusalem.
About the speakers:
Dr Charlotte Bank is an art historian and curator with a PhD in Arabic from the University of Geneva. She has held academic positions and fellowships at the Universities of Bamberg and Geneva, the Orient Institute Beirut and the Museum of Islamic Art Berlin. As a curator, she has worked with art institutions in Europe and the Middle East.
Dr Ceren Özpınar is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton, History of Art and Design Programme. Previously. she was a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the University of Sussex (2015-17) and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds (2013-14). Dr Özpınar holds a PhD in History of Art from Istanbul Technical University (2015). Her research focuses on contemporary art, art historiography, and feminist art and art histories since 1960 with a special interest in Turkey and the Middle East. She co-edited Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today (OUP, 2020), and published her first monograph The Art Historiography in Turkey (1970-2010) (Tarih Vakfi, 2016). She is currently working on her next monograph Politics of Writing Art Histories: Narratives of Contemporary Art, Feminism and Women Artists from Turkey (forthcoming, OUP).
Dr Tina Sherwell is the Head of the Contemporary Visual Art Programme at the Faculty of Art, Music and Design, Birzeit University. Dr Sherwell was Director of the International Academy of Art, Palestine (2007-2012 and 2013-2017). Previously, she was Programme Leader of Fine Art at Winchester School of Art (2005-2007). She was also Executive Director of the Virtual Gallery at Birzeit University and has worked with the Tate Online on their digital archives (2004-2006). Dr Sherwell’s recent curated exhibitions include Intimate Terrains; Representations of a Disappearing Landscape, the Palestinian Museum (2019).
This webinar will investigate the development of complex societies in the Lebanese coastal zone during the Early Bronze Age (EBA). New evidence shows that coastal Lebanon, with its unique mountainous setting and ample water resources, developed a distinct pathway to complexity. Dr Kamal Badreshany will discuss ceramic and architectural evidence from recently excavated sites in the region to assess the economic underpinnings of EBA communities. He will examine the distribution of EBA settlement in coastal Lebanon with a view to understanding the underlying logic, and to contrast the distribution of EBA settlements with that documented for other parts of the Levant during this time. The webinar will be chaired by Professor Graham Philip.
About the speakers:
Dr Kamal Badreshany leads the Durham Archaeomaterials Research Centre, an analytical research facility based in the Department of Archaeology that offers advanced chemical and materials analysis for academia and industry. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2013. His research focuses on human adaptation to changing social, economic, and environmental conditions, especially as related to increasing settlement density and the formation of the earliest states in the Levant. He specialises in the analysis of archaeological materials using archaeometric techniques, including ceramic petrography, scanning electron microscopy, XRF, ICP and X-ray diffraction, and he has published extensively on the role of ceramics in the ancient Levant. He is currently a CBRL trustee.
Professor Graham Philip obtained his PhD from Edinburgh University in 1988 and worked as Assistant Director of the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History (1989-1992). He was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, University College, London, before taking up a lectureship at Durham University in 1994. His research interests fall into three main areas: landscape archaeology, artefact studies, and the nature of early complex societies. Professor Philip is currently a co-investigator on the heritage protection project Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa, working with project partners in Lebanon, Iraq and the Caucasus, and co-directs with colleagues at Yarmouk University, a project to create an environmental isoscape map for Jordan, funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council-Newton award. Until recently, he was editor-in-chief of CBRL's journal Levant.
In this roundtable event, Islah Jad, Sara Ababneh and Nicola Pratt discuss women’s activism in the Levant, with a focus on Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon.
Based on their respective research in this area, they explore how women’s activism has emerged and changed over time, its relationship to nationalism and state-building, to feminism, international hegemonic discourses on women's rights and development, as well as to other socio-political forces, its goals and its achievements. The panel will consider similarities and differences between different country contexts as well as theoretical, conceptual and methodological issues involved in researching women’s activism in the region.
About the speakers:
Islah Jad is an Associate Professor at Birzeit University, one of the founders of the Institute of Women’s Studies, the PhD program in social sciences, and the Women’s Affairs National Coalition. Her research focuses on Palestinian women’s movements, gender and development in the Arab World and women’s political participation. Her book, Palestinian Women’s Activism (Syracuse University Press, 2018) was shortlisted for the 2019 Palestine Book Award.
Nicola Pratt is Reader of the International Politics of the Middle East, University of Warwick, UK. She teaches and researches on the international politics of the Middle East, with a particular interest in feminist and decolonial approaches as well as ‘politics from below.’ She is author of Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon (University of California Press, 2020).
Sara Ababneh is Assistant Professor and the head of the Social and Political Studies Unit at the Center for Strategic Studies, the University of Jordan. Her research focuses on gender, class and struggles for social and economic justice. Her most recent article is entitled, ‘The Time to Question, Rethink and Popularize the Notion of “Women’s Issues”: Lessons from Jordan’s Popular and Labor Movements from 2006 to Now’ (Journal of International Women’s Studies, issue 1, 2020).
A projecting western spur of Mount Lebanon adjacent to the Ibrahim or Adonis river, the Jabal Moussa Biosphere Reserve possesses a rich natural and cultural heritage. Given its relative inaccessibility and difficult terrain, what is perhaps most remarkable is the long continuity of human adaptation and occupation of this mountain landscape.
This talk presents the results of an ongoing collaborative project (2018-onwards) between the Association for the Protection of Jabal Moussa (APJM), a Lebanese non-governmental and non-profit organisation, and a team of landscape archaeologists, who have come together to explore the archaeology and heritage of this region, from prehistory to the present day.
The discussions will cover some of the main archaeological findings from the past few years of survey and highlight the ways in which these stories and narratives can be integrated with ongoing conservation, heritage protection and promotion efforts in Lebanon.
About the speakers:
Pierre Doumet is a founding member and currently the president of APJM. Although a volunteer position, Pierre dedicates more time and effort in managing APJM than he does on managing three other companies which he directs. Renowned for his pioneer work in the private sector, Pierre brought the professionalism and focus of the private sector to the not-for-profit domain of APJM. Under his management, Jabal Moussa, designated a Biosphere Reserve in 2009, became one of the most important ecotourism destinations in Lebanon, receiving an exponentially growing number of visitors every year.
Joelle Barakat is Conservation Manager at AJPM. Born and raised in Yahchouch, one of the villages of the Biosphere Reserve, Joelle has been working for APJM for 8 years, competently overseeing projects pertaining to the conservation of natural and cultural heritage as well as sustainable development and local outreach.
Jennie Bradbury is an Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr College, USA. A former CBRL committee member, her main research interests focus on social complexity; the role of ‘non-optimal’ zones; burial traditions and mortuary practices; landscape archaeology, GIS and archaeological survey techniques; and cultural heritage. An active field archaeologist, she has worked in Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Syria, and since 2018 has been working in collaboration with the APJM on an archaeological and heritage field survey.
Stephen McPhillips is a landscape archaeologist whose research interests focus on rural society and hydro-agricultural and ceramic technologies of medieval and Ottoman periods. He has worked on projects in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and the Arabian Gulf and was an Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen, a fellow at the University of Bonn, and an independent consultant. He has been working as a consultant in collaboration with the APJM on an archaeological and heritage field survey since 2018.
With Dr Gerasimos Tsourapas, University of Birmingham 15 November 2020
How do states’ foreign policy goals affect their policies towards refugees? What is the impact of forced displacement on host states’ political development? Gerasimos Tsourapas draws on elite interviews conducted across Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis to examine the particularities of migration diplomacy in the Levant.
He identifies how the three states sought to secure economic aid from the international community, relying on both bargains and threats, in exchange for hosting Syrian refugees within their borders. In fact, the absence of a functioning global refugee regime and the reluctance of Western countries to host refugees led to the commodification of forced migration and the emergence of a new type of state, in which forced migration constitutes an instrument of economic leverage – the refugee rentier state.
In this talk, Gerasimos discusses the effects of such processes on the international politics of the Levant, as well as on the future of refugee protection across the world.
About the speaker:
Dr Gerasimos Tsourapas is Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Birmingham and CBRL’s Acting Honorary Treasurer. His research focuses on the politics of migrants, refugees, and diasporas in the Middle East and the broader Global South. He has also written on the international dimension of authoritarianism. Gerasimos’ first book, The Politics of Migration in Modern Egypt – Strategies for Regime Survival in Autocracies (Cambridge University Press, 2019), was awarded the 2020 ENMISA Distinguished Book Award by the International Studies Association. His second book, Migration Diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa – Power, Mobility, and the State, is forthcoming with Manchester University Press.
A Commerce of Knowledge, authored by Simon Mills, tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Syria during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reconstructing the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Aleppo, the book investigates the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion, and English scholarly and missionary interests: the study of Middle-Eastern languages; the exploration of biblical and Greco-Roman antiquities; and the early dissemination of Protestant literature in Arabic.
Early modern Orientalism is usually conceived as an episode in the history of scholarship. By shifting the focus to Aleppo, A Commerce of Knowledge brings to light the connections between two seemingly separate worlds, tracing the emergence of new kinds of philological and archaeological enquiry in England back to a series of real-world encounters between the chaplains and the scribes, booksellers, priests, rabbis, and sheikhs they encountered in the Ottoman Empire.
This webinar is chaired by Marina Rustow, Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Professor of History at Princeton University.
A thought-provoking discussion, chaired by Venetia Porter, Curator of Islamic & Contemporary Middle East Art at the British Museum (currently on furlough), with Scott Redford, Professor of Islamic Art & Archaeology at SOAS, and Diana Darke, author of this new book.
Described by The Guardian as “exhilarating and meticulously researched”, the book has created something of a stir, roundly attacked on social media by alt-right groups for whom European architecture represents ‘the pinnacle of civilisation’.
The book uncovers the long yet often overlooked history of architectural ‘borrowing’, revealing the Arab and Islamic roots of Europe’s architectural heritage. Ideas and styles are traced as they passed from vibrant Middle Eastern centres like Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo, entering Europe via gateways like Muslim Spain, Sicily and Venice through the movement of pilgrims, bishops, merchants and medieval Crusaders. It is a rich tale of cultural exchange, shedding new light on the backstory of some of Europe’s iconic landmarks.
About the speakers: Diana Darke is a Middle East cultural expert and Syria specialist who has lived and worked in the Middle East and Turkey for over 30 years, with both government and commercial sectors. She graduated in Arabic from Oxford University, holds an MA in Islamic Art & Archaeology from SOAS and is the author of many books including My House in Damascus and The Merchant of Syria.
Venetia Porter is a curator (currently on furlough) of Islamic and Contemporary Middle East art at the British Museum where she has been since 1989. Among her exhibitions are Word into Art (2006) and Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam (2012) and she was lead curator for the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World which opened in October 2018. Recent publications include Thea Porter’s scrapbook (Unicorn Press 2019) and Reflections: contemporary art of the Middle East and North Africa with Natasha Morris and Charles Tripp, is published by British Museum Press in November 2020.
Scott Redford is Nasser D. Khalili Professor of Islamic Art & Archaeology at SOAS. He's a medievalist, working on the art, archaeology, and architecture of the eastern Mediterranean in the period of the Crusades. Current writing projects include edited volumes on the architecture and history of Rumkale/Hromkla/Qal'at al-Rum and the archaeology of Kinet Höyük, both sites in south east Turkey.
According to common perception, the Federal Republic of Germany supported the formation of the Israeli state for moral reasons—to atone for its Nazi past—but did not play a significant role in the Arab–Israeli conflict. However, the historical record does not sustain this narrative.
Daniel Marwecki’s pathbreaking analysis deconstructs the myths surrounding the odd alliance between Israel and post-war democratic Germany. Thorough archival research shows how German policymakers often had disingenuous, cynical or even partly antisemitic motivations, seeking to whitewash their Nazi past by supporting the new Israeli state. This is the true context of West Germany’s crucial backing of Israel in the 1950s and ’60s. German economic and military support greatly contributed to Israel’s early consolidation and eventual regional hegemony. This initial alliance has affected Germany’s role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to the present day.
About the speaker: Daniel Marwecki is a lecturer at Hong Kong University’s Department of Politics. He previously taught in Leeds, London and Leipzig and holds a PhD from SOAS. Before his PhD, he worked for a brief time with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in East Jerusalem.
People have complex relationships with the environments they live in and resources such as water and food are critical variables in societal landscapes, with resource scarcity potentially leading to instability or collapse. In the Levant, with its long history of human occupation and evolution, human-climate-environment interactions have been important for millennia, such that issues of resource availability and sustainability are far from new. This lecture uses case studies from eastern Jordan, from the work of the Epipalaeoloithic Foragers of Azraq Project and Eastern Badia Archaeological Project, to investigate human-climate-environment relationships through the last 20,000 years. It will also draw on examples from the wider Near East region. Working on or near archaeological sites, local environmental reconstructions, particularly of water availability, are informing regional models of human adaptation to climate change e.g. during the beginnings of agriculture, and allow the assessment of people’s impact on the environment over millennia.
Matthew D. Jones is Associate Professor in Quaternary Science in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham. Matt’s research focuses on the interaction of people and the environment, particularly the quantity and quality of the water within it, including projects in Jordan, Turkey and Iran. Matt’s other interests lie in developing methods to better quantify by how much water availability has changed through time, particularly through the use of oxygen isotope palaeohydrology.
Slides to accompany this event can be found here: https://cbrl.ac.uk/ckeditor/filemanager/userfiles/Events/Was_the_Black_desert_green_during_the_late_Neolithic/Collated_presentations.pdf
Today, Jordan’s Black Desert is an area of volcanic rocks that lie above the limestones of the Transjordan plateau stretching from Jebel Druze, south-east of Damascus, across eastern Jordan and into northern Saudi Arabia. Underexplored archaeologically, the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project (EBAP) aims to record and study the architecture, artefacts, and petroglyphs of this area, to integrate the findings with biological and palaeoclimatic data in order to understand the human occupation and use of the region.
After c. 6,500 BCE, the population in the Project study area appears to have mushroomed to unprecedented population density, with several sites that include Wisad Pools and Wadi al-Qattafi reaching enormous size, including hundreds of quasi-contemporaneously inhabited buildings.
In this talk, the EBAP team will discuss their research that suggests that the climate and vegetation of Jordan’s Black Desert was once very different to what is found there today.
This event is held in partnership with the Palestine Exploration Fund.
About the speakers:
Alexander Wasse is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, Yeditepe University, Istanbul. His work focuses on the Late Neolithic of the upper Mesopotamian and Levantine ‘desert line’ and Cyprus, with research interests in eastern Jordan specifically. He is co-director of the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project. Alexander is interested in late prehistoric ‘globalisation’, early pastoralism and zooarchaeology, the correlation of archaeological with climatic records, and cycles of economic intensification / deintensification in prehistory.
Gary Rollefson is Professor emeritus, Whitman College and Professor Emeritus, Anthropology at San Diego State University. Gary directed and co-directed the lower and middle Paleolithic projects at ‘Ayn al-Assad and ‘Ayn Sawda in Azraq; excavations at Neolithic ‘Ayn Ghazal; excavations at Pre Pottery Neolithic B and Late Neolithic at Bawwabat al-Ghazal (Azraq Wetlands); Chalcolithic/Early Bronze survey and excavations in Wadi Rum; Survey at Wadi Hudruj (Southeast Jordan); Survey at Jebel Tharwa (Black Desert); and Survey and excavations at Wadi al-Qattafi and Wisad Pools in the Black Desert.
Matthew Jones is Professor of Quaternary Science at the School of Geography and Future Food Beacon, University of Nottingham. Matt’s research focuses on understanding changing water availability and how changing environments have impacted human populations, and vice versa, over the last 20,000 years. Geographically he has research foci in Southwest Asia and Mexico. He specialises in the use of oxygen isotopes as tracers of the hydrological cycle, especially when preserved in lake sediments, and how these can be used to quantify past changes in water availability. His interests in changing hydrological conditions have led to him working on archaeological projects in Jordan and Iran to provide an environmental context for past human populations in these regions.
Yorke Rowan is a Research Associate Professor in the Archaeology of the Southern Levant at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and is currently co-director of the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project as well as the Galilee Prehistory Project, both Oriental Institute field programs. Yorke’s research focuses on late prehistory (Late Neolithic – Chalcolithic) in the southern Levant, with interests in ritual and economic intensification, craft specialization, and emergent social inequality.
Since the 1990s, Palestinian theatrical activities in the West Bank have expanded exponentially. In addition to local productions, Palestinian theatre-makers have presented their work to international audiences on a scale unprecedented in Palestinian history. Author Gabriel Varghese’s Palestinian Theatre in the West Bank explores the histories of the five major theatre companies currently working in the West Bank: Al-Kasaba Theatre, Ashtar Theatre, Al-Harah Theatre, The Freedom Theatre and Al-Rowwad. The book explores how theatre-makers contest Zionist discourse and Israeli state practices in this first major account of Palestinian theatre covering the last three decades. Varghese will discuss his book with theatre scholar Kristin Flade.
About the speaker: Gabriel Varghese is a former CBRL postdoctoral fellow whose research engages with anti-/post-/de-colonial theatre, performance and literature, and the questions they raise about social movements, dramaturgies of urban life, and regimes of gender, sexuality and race. He is also a playwright, theatre director, and co-artistic director of Sandpit Arts, an award-winning platform for producing film, music and performance events. He holds a PhD from the University of Exeter.
About the discussant: Kristin Flade is a performance scholar and author. The focus of her ethnographic and artistic work lies in the representation of violence, political conflict and the potential of negotiating the struggle for human rights in performance, theatre and the arts. She is the author of The Good Pain?: Applied Theatre and Social Circus in Palestine (2018). Kristin holds a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin. She lives and works in Berlin.
Lebanon is facing its worst financial crisis since independence. The government has defaulted on its ballooning public debt, high inflation is the new norm, much needed US dollars are in shortage, and thousands of bank account holders are denied their right to withdraw money. The central bank is accused of hiding real losses and appeasing rather than holding politicians and bankers accountable. New US sanctions are adding fuel to the fire of instability. How did a country that prided itself for its financial stability and a highly performing banking sector find itself in such a quagmire? This webinar will look at the roots of the crisis that run deep in the country’s history, including the role of its banking lobby in the formation of its central bank and management of the currency crisis.
About the speaker: Hicham Safieddine is lecturer in the History of the Modern Middle East at King's College London. He is author of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon (Stanford University Press) and editor of Mahdi Amel: Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings (Leftword and Brill, forthcoming). His current research explores the history of financial colonization, including the creation of central banks, across the Global South with particular emphasis on Arab societies and states. He is also researching the history of Arab economic thought in the post-WWII period and its relationship to contemporaneous notions of modernization and development.
How do aspiring and established rising global powers respond to conflict?
Since the People’s Republic was established in 1949, China has long been involved in the Middle East and its conflicts, from exploiting or avoiding them, to their management, containment or resolution. This webinar will examine China’s engagement with the region’s conflicts including: Israel/Palestine; Iraq before and after 2003; Sudan and the Darfur crisis; the Iranian nuclear deal; the Gulf crisis; and the wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen.
This webinar will explore how a rising, global, non-Western power handles the challenges associated with both violent and non-violent conflict as well as the differences between limiting and reducing violence alongside other ways to eliminate the causes of conflict and grievance.
About the speaker Guy Burton is Adjunct Professor at Vesalius College, Brussels and Fellow on the 'Sectarianism, proxies and de-sectarianisation' project at Lancaster University. He has previously held research and teaching positions at the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government in Dubai, Nottingham University’s Malaysia campus, the University of Kurdistan-Hewler in Iraq and Birzeit University in the West Bank. His research interests include the role of rising powers and the politics and international relations of the Middle East. He is the author of 'China and Middle East conflicts' (Routledge, 2020) and 'Rising powers and the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1947' (Lexington Books 2018).
This webinar explores the roots and implications of Israel’s plans to annex up to a third of West Bank territory – a manoeuvre seen by many to represent a paradigmatic shift in the character of how the ‘Israel-Palestine’ conflict hereafter unfolds. Professor Shlaim - a leading scholar of Israel’s relations with the Arab world - will be interviewed by CBRL Kenyon Institute, Jerusalem Director Dr Toufic Haddad before opening up to questions from the audience.
About the speaker:
Professor Avi Shlaim is an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College, a former Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford, and an elected Fellow of the British Academy. Among his many books are “Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine” (1988); “The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World” (2000, second edition 2014); “Lion of Jordan: King Hussein’s Life in War and Peace (2007)”, and; “The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences” (2012). Professor Shlaim is a frequent contributor to the newspapers and commentator on radio and television on Middle Eastern affairs.
This talk will look at how Arabs established a democratic government at Damascus in 1919-20 by forging a compromise between secular liberals, conservative Muslims, and leaders of non-Muslim communities as described in How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs. However, the Paris Peace Conference refused to recognize Arab democracy because it threatened British and French colonial rule in other Muslim countries. By authorizing the French army to occupy Damascus, the Conference destroyed not only the Syrian government, but also future prospects for Arab democracy. The book challenges previous understandings of the impact of World War I on the Middle East that focus on nationalism as the primary outcome. Not only did Arabs seek to revive liberal constitutionalism, but they also demonstrated a political sophistication that has been erased by colonizers. The events of 1920 tainted the new regime of international law under the League of Nations with racism and sparked the rise of anti-liberal Islamism.
To view the accompanying presentation to this talk, please visit: https://cbrl.ac.uk/event/online-event-how-the-west-stole-democracy-from-the-arabs
About the speaker:
Elizabeth F. Thompson is Professor of history and the Mohamed Said Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace at the American University in Washington, DC. Her new book is titled How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Arab Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of its Historic Liberal-Islamic Alliance. The book offer a new argument for the importance of the Syrian Arab Kingdom in the history of democracy and the rise of anti-liberal Islamism in the Arab world. Dr Thompson is also author of Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East and the prize-winning Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon. She has received fellowships from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and is former co-director of the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on the World War I in the Middle East.
About the chair
Eugene Rogan is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University, where he has taught since 1991, a Fellow of St Antony’s College and Director of the Middle East Centre. He took his B.A. in economics from Columbia, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Middle Eastern history from Harvard. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He is author of The Arabs: A History (2009, 2017), named a best book of 2009 by The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. His new book, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (2015), was named a best book of 2015 by The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. His earlier works include Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1999), for which he received the Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the Fuad Köprülü Prize of the Turkish Studies Association; and The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2001, second edition 2007, with Avi Shlaim). His works are translated into 18 languages.
As the discourse of “Countering Violent Extremism” has become more prominent both within the Middle East and in talk about the Middle East, so too has the concept of moderation emerged as an apparent interpretive key to understanding the region and its most pressing political and theological debates. Yet if the definition of ‘extremism’ remains controversial, the concept of moderation is all too often taken to be self-evident—even as those with disparate political and religious convictions seek to lay claim to it. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Jordan, I trace the history and contemporary social lives of Arabic-language notions of moderation like ‘itidal and wasitiyya. I seek to map out how these terms have helped foster new forms of dispute and social control even as they have been taken up by secular and religious commentators drawing on a vibrant pre-existing textual tradition.
About the speaker: Geoffrey Hughes is a lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Exeter. His research explores how those living in the Middle East draw upon their own traditions as well as globally circulating technologies and discourses to remake the world around them. His first book, Affection and Mercy: Kinship, Islam and the Politics of Marriage in Jordan (2021) draws on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork to show how marriage has come to be a site of political struggle amidst a radically restructuring economic order, changing gender roles, and new technologies for large-scale population management. More recently, he has been studying how blood feuds are increasingly moving onto social media and how a ‘politics of accusation’ has become an increasingly prevalent dimension of global social imaginaries.
About the Chair: Philip Proudfoot is a British Academy Post-Doctoral fellow at Bath. Previously, he was Assistant Director of CBRL Amman. His background is in political anthropology, where he is a specialist in Syria & Lebanon. His work examines issues of forced migration, humanitarianism, civil war, gender and sexuality, and working-class culture. He is currently working on a book manuscript that describes the lives of Syrian migrant labourers in Beirut during the Syrian uprising and civil war while also working on a British Academy sponsored post-doctoral research that examines 'activist-humanitarians' responding to the European refugee 'crisis.'
In this seminar we invite discussion on the nature of partnership building in and around the museum and heritage sector in Jordan. We reflect on our own experiences of trying to develop successful partnerships, gained during the first year of our AHRC Newton-Khalidi funded research-and-development project on ‘Learning from Multicultural Amman: Engaging Jordan’s Youth’. Here, as well as thinking critically about the challenges surrounding partnership working, we have sought to identify and experiment with new forms of partnership working: between museums; between museums and education providers; between government agencies and museums; and between Jordanian museum professionals and international experts.
The accompanying presentation for this talk can be found here: https://cbrl.ac.uk/ckeditor/filemanager/userfiles/Events/Reinventing_Partnership_Reinvigorating_Museum_Education_in_Jordan_presentation.pdf
About the speakers:
Arwa Badran is a researcher at Durham University on an AHRC funded project on engaging the youth in museums in Jordan. After completing her BA in Archaeology at the University of Jordan, she worked as a field archaeologist for a few years before pursing higher education in museum studies at Newcastle University, where she read for an MA on building connections between museums and the public and later a PhD on the introduction of museums in school curricula. She worked as Lecturer in Museum Studies at the Hashemite University in Jordan, contributing to the establishment and development of the first BA degree in cultural heritage and museology in the Middle East. She has also worked as a consultant for UNESCO on heritage education projects in the Arab region and currently sits on the Executive Committee of the World Archaeological Congress.
Shatha Abu-Khafajah is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at the Hashemite University in Jordan. Shatha graduated as an architect from the University of Jordan in 1997. She specialized in documentation and conservation of archaeological heritage while doing her Masters degree in archaeology. Her PhD in cultural heritage management from Newcastle University, acquired in 2007, enabled her to synthesize architecture and archaeology with special interest in establishing a sustainable approach to heritage management in the Arab region that is community-based and context-oriented.
Robin Skeates is a Professor in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University in the UK. His research and publications explore a wide variety of themes within the overlapping fields of material, visual and sensual culture studies, and museum and heritage studies. His recent books include Museums and Archaeology (Routledge, 2017) and The Oxford Handbook of Public Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 2011).
This talk surveys the first two decades of British rule in Palestine through the eyes of its intelligence services. Who were Britain’s spymasters in Palestine? How did they try to reconcile Britain’s conflicting promises to Zionists and Palestinians? Did they understand the country and its people, or did they get it wrong? This talk shows the moments where intelligence officers influenced British policy in Palestine, but also, how the now-declassified records they left behind help us understand the early years of the conflict.
This event will explore the implications of the global Covid-19 crisis on the future of neoliberalism, and the ongoing struggles across the Middle East and North Africa, informally referred to as the 'Arab Spring'. This event will take the format of a conversation with Prof. Achcar, led by Dr. Toufic Haddad, Director of CBRL-Jerusalem's Kenyon Institute, and will include the chance for webinar audience members to pose questions.
About the speaker: Professor Gilbert Achcar is a Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at SOAS, University of London. His many books, published in a total of 15 languages, include: The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder (2002, 2006); The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (2010); The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (2013); and Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising (2016).
The twentieth century for Palestine and the Palestinians has been a century of denial: denial of statehood, denial of nationhood and denial of history. This book is Rashid Khalidi’s powerful response. Drawing on his family archives, he reclaims the fundamental right of any people: to narrate their history on their own terms.
In this book launch, Prof. Khalidi (Columbia University) discusses his book with Rana Barakat (Birzeit University). This was an online webinar held in partnership with the Educational Bookshop (Jerusalem) and the Khalidi Library (Jerusalem).
About the speaker: Prof. Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Chair of Arab Studies at Columbia University and editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. He is the author of seven books on the Middle East, including: Palestinian Identity, Resurrecting Empire and The Iron Cage. His writings on Middle Eastern history and politics have appeared worldwide in respected journals and newspapers.
About the chair: Dr Rana Barakat is Assistant Professor of History and Contemporary Arab Studies at Birzeit University, Palestine.
Slides to accompany this audio are available here: https://cbrl.ac.uk/ckeditor/filemanager/userfiles/Events/Salman_Abu_Sitta_SWP/Salman_Abu_Sitta_slides_SOAS_event_February_2020.pdf
The Survey of Western Palestine (SWP), conducted between 1871 and 1878 and first published in 1880, was considered the first scientifically based comprehensive survey of Palestine and it was unequalled for its time. It remained the most comprehensive survey until the end of the 19th century and even later for some purposes. However, its aims were not fully achieved. In survey terms there have been errors of accuracy, mis-spelt names and significant loss of data that was collected but not used. Its aim of describing the population of the country were particularly lacking. Military objectives became apparent towards the end of the survey and served the British army well until the First World War. Dr Salman Abu Sitta’s new revised atlas is compiled over 500 pages and corrects location errors, the spelling of names, it documents missing names and lists place names in both Arabic and English. In this lecture Dr Salman Abu Sitta will explore the significance of the SWP through the documentation of Palestine in the following 150 years.
About the speaker: Salman Abu Sitta, Founder and President of Palestine Land Society, London, dedicated to the documentation of Palestine’s land and People. Website www.plands.org. Author of six books on Palestine including the compendium Atlas of Palestine 1917- 1966, English and Arabic editions, the Atlas of the Return Journey and over 300 papers and articles on the Palestinian refugees, the Right of Return, history of al Nakba and human rights.
President Donald Trump’s proposal for peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples under the spotlight at an event hosted by King’s Decolonising Working Group at King’s College London.
Trump’s Peace Plan: A First Reading, a seminar led by Dr Toufic Haddad.
Dr Haddad is the director for the Council for British Research in the Levant’s Kenyon Institute, based in East Jerusalem. He is the author of Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territories, which explores extensively the role of international donors and the legacy of economic peace-making in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. He completed his PhD in development studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2015.
Sharing Passions: discovery, documentation and the destruction of cultural heritage in the Middle East and North Africa.
A tribute to Dr Andrea Zerbini (1984-2019)
Slides of this lecture to accompany the audio recording can be found here: https://cbrl.ac.uk/event/discovery-documentation-and-the-destruction-of-cultural-heritage-in-the-mena-region
Archaeologists thrive on discovering places, objects or stories about the past, especially when they give us a sense of identity and meaning in our modern lives. Archaeologists also love to travel but also want to understand their roots and where they came from too. This talk will explore these aspects in terms of what it means to be an archaeologist working in the twenty-first century as well the challenges of working in the Middle East and North Africa. These include harnessing the latest technology, to help preserve the ever-threatened cultural heritage. The talk will be a tribute to the life and work of Dr Andrea Zerbini.
About the speaker: Robert Bewley has been Director of the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa project, University of Oxford since 2015. He has been Co-Director of the Aerial Archaeology in Jordan project since 1998, and very recently was able to set up the Aerial Archaeology in Oman project. At English Heritage (now Historic England) he was Inspector of Ancient Monuments, Head of Aerial Survey, and Head of Survey; Regional Director for the South-West from 2004-2007, and Director of Operations for the Heritage Lottery Fund until 2014. Author of six books including Prehistoric Settlements (1994 and 2003), Aerial Archaeology – Developing Future Practice (2002 with W. Raçzkowski) and Ancient Jordan from the Air (2004 with David Kennedy). He studied at the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge, where he received his doctorate of Philosophy in Archaeology.
'Hamas Contained' offers the first thirty-year history of the group on its own terms drawing interviews with organisation leaders, as well as publications from the group. The book maps Hamas's transition from fringe military resistance towards governance and shows how, under Israel's approach of managing rather than resolving the conflict, Hamas's demand for Palestinian sovereignty has effectively been neutralised by its containment in Gaza.
About the speakers: Tareq Baconi is the International Crisis Group's Analyst for Israel/Palestine and Economics of Conflict. His book, 'Hamas Contained: the Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance,' was published by Stanford University Press in 2018. Prior to joining Crisis Group, Tareq was a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University's Middle East Institute. His writing has appeared in Arabic in Al-Ghad and Al-Quds al-Arabi, and in English in The New York Review Daily, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, The Nation, The Daily Star (Lebanon), and al-Jazeera. He has provided analysis for print and broadcast media including The New York Times, The New Yorker, BBC, National Public Radio and Democracy Now!.
José Vericat is the Carter Center Representative for Israel-Palestine. He has a PhD in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford, where he was the Sheikh Zayed Contemporary Islamic Studies Scholar, and a MA in international affairs from Columbia University.
This event was hosted by CBRL Kenyon Institute in collaboration with the Educational Bookshop, the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, and Stanford University Press on 30 October 2019.
Book launch for 'From the River to the Sea: Palestine and Israel in the Shadow of “Peace”' and discussion chaired by Dr Toufic Haddad.
Can anything new really be written about the century-old conflict over Palestine and the Oslo ‘peace process’ since 1993? This book proves that it can. By focusing in on specific communities, each of the contributors provide original analyses of how the past 25 years extended and solidified the power imbalance between Israelis and Palestinians under the auspices of ‘peace.’ But these chapters also chart the new forms of political expression, interaction, and mobilisation, as well as different coping strategies, that also developed during this time. Four of the book contributors will discuss their chapters – on Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem and Israel (Mansour Nasasra), on the economy of Occupied Palestinian Territory (Raja Khalidi), and on Israeli politics and society (Yonatan Mendel). The editor will introduce the main themes and rationale for the book, and her won chapter on international aid (Mandy Turner).
About the speakers: Mandy Turner is the Director of CBRL Kenyon Institute.
Mansour Nasasra is a scholar of International Relations and Middle East Politics. His research has focused on the Negev/Naqab Bedouin, their experiences under British colonialism, as well as their place in the Palestinian struggle.
Yonatan Mendel is a Middle East history and politics scholar whose research focuses on the Arabic language and the place of Arabic in Israel over the last century. He also writes about Israeli politics.
This lecture was hosted by CBRL Kenyon Institute in collaboration with the Educational Bookshop and Dar Al-Tifel Al-Arabi on 28 November 2019.
'People like us? The Neolithic in Southwest Asia' given by Professor Bill Finlayson (University of Reading) at CBRL’s AGM and Crystal M-Bennett Memorial lecture with an introduction by Dr Andrew Garrard (UCL).
The CBRL and its predecessors have played an important role in developing our understanding of the Southwest Asian Neolithic, one of the key transitions in human history, with the emergence of new forms of society that changed our relationship with the world, allowing the introduction of farming and enabling people to live in large sedentary groups. From Kenyon’s pioneering work at Jericho, to Kirkbrides excavations at Beidha, Crystal-Bennett’s excavation of the first Pre-Pottery Neolithic A settlement found in Jordan, and exploration of the eastern deserts and oases by Betts and Garrard, British research has been central to the Neolithic. However, our research is undermined by a comprehension of the Neolithic as a vital all-encompassing stage in the path to modernity, creating people like us. Current debates include the timing of the Neolithic as a process, recently seen as a long, slow Neolithic transformation over many thousands of years. Critically, we appear to have lost sight of what the Neolithic was. In this talk, I will critically discuss the key changes that occurred early in the Neolithic, distinguishing these from more widely shared aspects of human development, while recognising the otherness of these 10,000 year old societies.
About the speaker: Bill Finlayson is Professor of Prehistoric Environment and Society in the Human Origins and Palaeoenvironments Research Group at Oxford Brookes University and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Reading. He served as the Director and CEO of the Council for British Research in the Levant between 1999 and 2018, having previously managed the University of Edinburgh’s applied archaeology research section.
His research currently focuses on the development of early farming societies. Major projects include post-excavation analysis of Neolithic Dhraʿ (previously excavated by Crystal Bennett) with Ian Kuijt, and WF16 with co-directors Steven Mithen and Mohammad Najjar. He directs a PPNA excavation at Sharara in the Wadi Hassa with Cheryl Makarewicz.
His work in heritage management includes an experimental, conservation and public archaeology programme at the Neolithic site of Beidha within the Petra World Heritage site and developing with colleagues a Neolithic Heritage Trail from Beidha to Wadi Faynan.
(Lecture begins at 3:50 minutes)
Stone Men: the story of Palestine's stonemasons and the building of Israel with author Andrew Ross in discussion with Fida Touma
Using some of the best-quality limestone deposits in the world and drawing on generations of artisanal knowledge, Palestinian stonemasons have built almost every state in the Middle East except one of their own. Today the business of quarrying, cutting, fabricating and dressing stone is the Occupied Territories' largest private employer, and supplies the construction industry in Israel, along with other countries in the region and overseas.
Ross's engrossing and gracefully written story of this fascinating ancient trade shows how the stones of historic Palestine, and Palestinian labour, have been used to build the state of Israel - in the process, constructing 'facts on the ground'-even while the industry is central to Palestinians' own efforts to erect bulwarks against the Occupation. For more than a century, the hands that built Israel's houses, schools, offices, bridges and even its separation barriers have been Palestinian. This book, largely based on interviews in the region, asks how this record of labour and achievement can and should be recognised.
About the speakers: Andrew Ross is a social activist and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. He has published more than twenty books, and is a regular contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation and Al Jazeera.
Fida Touma is an architect who trained in restoration at Riwaq Centre for Architecture Conservation, where she worked on numerous projects in the West Bank. She is currently Director General of the A.M. Qattan Foundation.
This event was held at CBRL Kenyon in partnership with the Education Bookshop and Dar Al-Tifel Al-Arabi.
Nomads, soldiers, musicians and hairdressers: Some thoughts on language and identity in the Roman Provinces of Syria and Arabia
While Latin was the official language of the army, Greek was the language of government in Roman Syria and Arabia and was used among some of the population, particularly in towns and cities. However, several other languages were spoken and written in different areas and among various communities, and it seems that language could be an important expression of identity under Roman rule, but was not always so. As might be expected, many inhabitants of the former Nabataean kingdom continued to use their traditional spoken and written languages and, according to at least one inscription, to call themselves "Nabataeans", more than twenty years after the Roman annexation. Nomads on the edges of the provinces continued to speak and (unexpectedly) write their own forms of Arabic, though they occasionally showed off by writing their names in basic Greek, etc. In this lecture, I shall look at the, often strange, intersections between language-use and identity in the Levant and northern Arabia at this period.
About the speaker: Michael C.A. Macdonald has been recording and studying the ancient inscriptions of Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia for the last 45 years. He worked with both Gerald Lankester Harding and Crystal-M. Bennet in Jordan, where he lived between 1976 and 1983. He has led, and continues to lead, numerous epigraphic surveys and he recently directed the AHRC-funded project to create the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (http://krc.orient.ox.ac.uk/ociana/index.php) based at the Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford. This provides readings, translations commentaries, provenance details and photographs for over 40,000 inscriptions from Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia, with more being added every day. He has published widely on ancient literacy, the ancient nomads of the Syro-Arabian desert, and the languages, scripts, inscriptions, and rock art of ancient Arabia. He is currently an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy.
Of all subjects of scholarly inquiry, few could be more contentious than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. How might we research and teach our way through it in an age of narrowing conversations? Two authors who have written extensively on the topic discuss their thoughts on engaging the history and contemporary politics of Palestine and Israel today. When seeking to reach a wider audience, what are the unwritten conventions (and expectations) that authors transgress at their peril? Exploring questions of identity, morality, authenticity, objectivity and the responsibility of those undertaking research to elucidate and inform, the panellists will draw on the challenges they have faced in seeking to make accessible, beyond academia, their most recent works. Seth Anziska will recount some of the reactions he encountered after publishing his book Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo last year, and Rosemary Hollis will talk about the responses she has encountered to the line of argument she develops in her new book Surviving the Story: The Narrative Trap in Israel and Palestine. (Speaker presentations for the first 55 minutes followed by a Q&A discussion).
About the speakers:
In her career Rosemary Hollis PhD has worked in academia and the ‘think tank’ community, focusing on the involvement of the EU, the US and the UK in conflicts in the Middle East. She was Director of the Olive Tree Scholarship Programme for Palestinians and Israelis (2008-16) and Professor of Middle East Policy Studies (2012-18) at City, University of London. Before that, Rosemary was Director of Research (2005-08) and Head of the Middle East Programme (1995-2005) at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs) in London.
Seth Anziska is the Mohamed S. Farsi-Polonsky Associate Professor of Jewish-Muslim Relations at University College London. His research and teaching focuses on Israeli and Palestinian society and culture, modern Middle Eastern history, and contemporary Arab and Jewish politics. He was a 2019 Fulbright Scholar at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, and has held visiting positions at Dartmouth College, New York University, the London School of Economics, and the American University of Beirut.
The discussion is chaired by Dr Zahera Harb, senior lecturer in International Journalism at City, University of London. Her recent publications include an edited collection titled Reporting the Middle East: the Practice of News in the 21st Century (IB Tauris 2017) and an edited collection with Dina Matar titled Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communication Practices in Palestine and Lebanon (IB Tauris 2013) and a monograph titled Channels of Resistance: Liberation Propaganda Hezbollah and the Media (IB Tauris, 2011).
She has published widely on Journalism and Politics in the Arab countries. She is Associate editor of the internationally renowned top ranking academic journal Journalism Practice.
CBRL has partnered on this event with the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London.
Drought is a major natural hazard in the Eastern Mediterranean, including the Levant and Middle East, with documented impacts on historical and contemporary societies. Further, this region is likely to experience increased drought risk and severity with climate change in the coming century. In this talk, Dr Benjamin Cook will review the main drivers of natural drought variability in the region over the last several thousand years, explain how climate change is already exacerbating drought risk in the region, and detail drought impacts on societies past, present, and future. While drought will likely remain a major challenge for people and ecosystems in the Eastern Mediterranean in coming decades, Benjamin will also discuss strategies and approaches for mitigation and adaptation that may help increase resiliency in the region.
About the speaker: Dr Benjamin Cook is a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University in New York City, specializing in the study of drought and climate change. His research is focused on improving the understanding of drought dynamics in the paleoclimate record, during the historical period, and in response to anthropogenic climate change. His textbook, "Drought: An Interdisciplinary Perspective" will be published by Columbia University Press in Spring of 2019.
This was a CBRL partner event with the University of East Anglia and UCL Geography.
American interventions in the Middle East over the past fifty years have been a popular subject for scholars, yet the first major American diplomatic foray into the region occurred a century ago. The King-Crane Commission of 1919, sent to the Middle East by Woodrow Wilson in order to ascertain the political desires of the (no longer) Ottoman people, generated a moment of intense political debate and deliberation in the region. After returning from the Ottoman lands, the Commission made recommendations that did not align with the desires of the British, French, or the people of the region, yet these discounted proposals embodied what a Wilsonian Middle East may have resembled. This lecture will evaluate the history of this oft-forgotten Commission, the political moment that it spawned, and the legacy of Woodrow Wilson’s stillborn global vision.
About the speaker: Dr Andrew Patrick is an Assistant Professor of History at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee (USA). His research focuses on American involvement in the Middle East, particularly during the World War I era. Patrick’s publications include America’s Forgotten Middle East Initiative: The King-Crane Commission of 1919 (London: IB Tauris, 2015) and “Woodrow Wilson, the Ottomans, and World War I” Diplomatic History (v. 42 no. 5, 2018). His articles have also appeared in Middle Eastern Studies, First World War Studies, and the Jerusalem Quarterly. Patrick’s current research involves the 19th and early 20th century entry of American oil companies into the region, as well as the American role in the post-war negotiations at Lausanne. He received his PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Manchester in 2011, and has also taught in Turkey and Abu Dhabi.
1919 was the year in which Woodrow Wilson commissioned an Inter-Allied investigation from the Paris Peace Conference into the desires of the populations in the former Ottoman Empire. Great Britain and France pulled out of that commission leaving two Americans, Henry King and Charles Crane to lead a quixotic mission to get the borders of Greater Syria right. Their investigation into the desires of the populations in the former Ottoman Empire and the response to that report by the 1st Pan-Syrian Congress in Damascus is the focus of this workshop. The report and its recommendations were embargoed until the 1930s.
Held in collaboration with the London Middle East Institute at SOAS, University of London the workshop was chaired by Prof. Dawn Chatty (Oxford University).
Dr Lori Allen (SOAS, University of London) Starts at 12 mins: Investigating Liberals: The King-Crane Commission as a first among many
Dr Lauren Banko (Yale University) Starts at 36 mins: The 1919 King Crane Commission in transnational context: between mission civilisatrice and revolution
Mr James Barr (historian and author) Starts at 1 hr 7 mins: Anglo-French rivalry over Greater Syria 1914-1919
Dr Andrew Patrick (Tennessee State University) Starts at 1 hr 38 mins: The Afterlife of the King-Crane Commission Report
T E Lawrence played a central role in the outcome of the First World War in the Middle East. His own testimony in his famous war memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom has now been ground-truthed by a ten-year archaeological field project. This provides a firmer base for examining his character, achievements, celebrity status, and endless cultural reconfiguration over the last century. These matters remain highly problematic, since Lawrence himself was both a Romantic and an Orientalist, and the many biographers, dramatists, and commentators who have contributed to his enduring fame have used his story to ‘imagine’ the Middle East in specifically Western ways. For a century, the evolving legend of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ has reflected a distorted Western perspective on the region, its people, and its conflicts. This lecture will attempt to critique both T E Lawrence the historical actor and ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ the cultural construct as products of Western imperialism.
Gendering 'Everyday Islam' was the theme of a recent special issue of the journal Contemporary Levant - an issue that set out to address the aspect of gender in the recent debate on 'everyday Islam' in scholarship, particularly anthropology, of Muslim societies. This special issue offers a valuable contribution to rethinking the gendered meanings of ‘everyday Islam,’ Islamic piety and normativity in contemporary Muslim-majority societies and their diasporas.
Dawn Chatty, author of ‘Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State’ and Diana Darke, author of ‘The Merchant of Syria: A History of Survival’ will each give a presentation on their recent books. Together, these talks will explore Syria’s historical embrace of refugees of all hues - Christian, Muslim and Jewish and its impact on its people. Using individual case studies, they will illustrate the complex web of social interactions that Syria’s people have developed over time to counter the fallout from colonial and regional wars and from political turbulence in their region. Both books begin with the late Ottoman Empire and Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham) as it has been known for centuries and trace the unique social resilience of Syrians right up to the present crisis.
Polly Withers is a CBRL Post-Doctoral Visiting Fellow(2017 - 2018)at CBRL's Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem. In this Podcast she describes her ethnographic research which uses a gender lens to explore the politics of popular youth music in post-Oslo Palestine.
Dr Jennie Bradbury and Dr Philip Proudfoot bring together two branches of CBRL’s traditional disciplines – archaeology and anthropology – into conversation to examine the origins of the 2011 uprising that started in the Syrian countryside and spread to urban centres. They discuss how those same transformations in the rural economy were fundamental in damaging Syria’s natural and cultural heritage as well as impacting stability and security.
Major-General Sir Edward Spears was British Minister to the Levant from 1941-44, and played a vital role in Lebanese Independence in 1943. Inspired by six months painting, researching and exhibiting in Spears’s former residence in Beirut, artist, archivist and Beirut resident Tom Young pieces together a complex story full of risk, vanity, courage and contentious issues surrounding the imperial rivalry between Britain and France.
Spears achieved what he claimed was his ‘mission’, but paid a high price in a geo-political struggle which was bigger than himself. As part of his presentation, Young will display images of his own painterly responses to the story, examine why it is still difficult for some people to discuss and present exclusive glimpses of a documentary film he is making about it. He will explore the little known connections between Britain and Lebanon, and explore the colourful cast of characters involved. These include Spears’s wife, the pioneering nurse, novelist and former Suffragette Mary Borden, the legendary Syrian singer Asmahan, and his tempestuous relationships with Churchill and Charles De Gaulle, both of whom fell out with Spears over Lebanon’s quest for independence.
Dr Mansour Nasasra presents the background to his new book - The Naqab Bedouin - A Century of Politics and Resistance. Here he presents the case for rewriting the narrative of the Arab Bedouin as passive communities and instead, by chronicling their history and politics over the last century, Dr Nasasra brings this question within the context of Palestinian scholarship.
Mansour Nasasra is lecturer in Middle East politics and international relations at the Department of Politics and Government, Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Dr Nasasra was a research fellow at the Council for British Research in the Levant. The Naqab Bedouins represents the first attempt to chronicle Bedouin history and politics across the last century, including the Ottoman era, the British Mandate, Israeli military rule, and the contemporary schema, and document its broader relevance to understanding state-minority relations in the region and beyond – it is out now – published by Columbia University Press.
Sarah Tobin is a social anthropologist who focuses on Islam, economic anthropology and displacement/migration in the Middle East and East Africa. In this Podcast, Dr. Tobin discusses her latest project which looks at everyday life and everyday Islam in the Syrian refugee camps of Za`atari and Azraq. Drawing on this research, she examines questions of sectarianism and identity among Syrian refugees in Jordan.
Devastated Lands: Lebanon at the End of the Great War, 1918 The First World War had brought an unprecedented degree of loss and suffering to the people of Lebanon. This lecture examines through works of literature and eyewitness accounts how the people of Lebanon looked back on the Ottoman experience and their different expectations of the post-Ottoman world.
Professor Eugene Rogan is Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He took his B.A. in economics from Columbia, and his M.A. and PhD in Middle Eastern history from Harvard. He taught at Boston College and Sarah Lawrence College before taking up his post in Oxford in 1991, where he teaches the modern history of the Middle East. He is author of The Arabs: A History (Penguin, 2009), which has been translated in ten languages and was named one of the best books of 2009 by The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Atlantic Monthly.
His earlier works include Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1999), for which he received the Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the Fuad Köprülü Prize of the Turkish Studies Association; The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2001, second edition 2007, with Avi Shlaim), which has been published in Arabic, French, Turkish and Italian editions; and Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2002). His latest book, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914 - 1920, was published in February 2015.
CBRL hosted this lecture in partnership with the London Middle East Institute at SOAS and the British Lebanese Association as their Sir David Robert’s memorial Lecture.
Based on personal narratives of women activists of different generations in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, this lecture explores the history of women’s activism in the Arab world from the 1950s onwards. It demonstrates the ways in which this activism has changed over time and what this tells us about the gendered dimensions of geopolitics in the region. The lecture highlights the significance of women’s activism and women’s rights within radical political projects that resisted Western influence from the 1950s until the 1970s and the gendered consequences of the defeat of radical popular movements by the West and its local allies. The lecture argues that the demise of radical, secular movements has led to a decoupling of secular women’s rights agendas from local popular projects, paving the way for their cooption and instrumentalization by authoritarian regimes and international actors and undermining the credibility of secular women’s rights agendas.
Nicola Pratt is Reader in the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of Warwick and is a CBRL committee member. Nicola teaches and researches on the international politics of the Middle East, with a particular interest in feminist approaches as well as ‘politics from below’. Amongst other works, she is co-author (with Nadje Al-Ali) of What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (University of California Press, 2009) and Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World (2015, with Maha El Said and Lena Meari). Between 2010 and 2013 Nicola was co-director of a British Academy-funded research partnership with Birzeit University’s Institute for Women’s Studies. In 2013-2014, she held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, researching the history of women’s activism in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, which she is currently writing up as a monograph to be published with University of California Press. Nicola is currently heading up a new research project, funded by the AHRC, on politics and popular culture in Egypt.
Nicola Pratt, Reader of the International Politics of the Middle East, University of Warwick.
On the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, Professor Rosemary Hollis - a leading academic expert on the subject - gave a lecture at the British Academy in London, co-hosted by the Council for British Research in the Levant. Professor Rosemary Hollis is Professor of Middle East Policy Studies at the City University, and Member of the Council for British Research in the Levant.
On the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, Dr. Victor Kattan - a leading academic expert on the subject - gave this lecture entitled, "The Rise and Fall of the Balfour Declaration" at the British Academy in London, co-hosted by the Council for British Research in the Levant. Dr Victor Kattan is a Senior Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute and Associate Fellow at the Faculty of Law at the National University of Singapore.
To mark the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, Professor Jonathan Schneer - a leading academic expert on the subject- gave a lecture at the British Academy in London hosted by the Council for British Research in the Levant and the British Academy. Jonathan Schneer is a Modern British Historian at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of History, Technology and Society and author of The Balfour Declaration: the origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. In this lecture Jonathan looks at the history of the Balfour Declaration.
The Council for British Research in the Levant
In partnership with the Jordan Museum
Presents:
Settlement in the Petra Region during the Crusader Period
Dr Micaela Sinibaldi
To launch the book:
Crusader Landscapes in the Medieval Levant: The Archaeology and History of the Latin East
First Recored on: Monday, April 17th at 6 p.m. at The Jordan Museum
About the lecture
It is well documented by historical sources that during the 12th century the Franks established several settlements in the Jabal al-Shara and the Petra region, in present-day southern Jordan, as part of the former lordship of Montréal within the territory of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. This paper summarizes the main conclusions reached on the subject of settlement of the Crusader period in the Petra. As a result of the synergic work on both documentary and archaeological sources, conclusions show the necessity of significantly revising the interpretation of settlement patterns and dynamics proposed by some scholars until now. What is revealed in the Petra region is a situation of continuous settlement through the whole Islamic period without significant gaps, where the Crusader period was not mainly characterised, as traditionally assumed, by patterns of disruption and change, but rather of continuity and adaptation to the local environment and population.
About the speaker:
Dr Micaela Sinibaldi is a Medieval Archaeologist specialising in the material culture of the Middle East. For her current CBRL fellowship, she is researching on the subject of Islamic-period pottery in Petra, its role in understanding settlement in the region and its chronologically significant aspects. This phase of research follows her work on comparative studies on several Islamic-period assemblages and on the development of a local chronology based on both typological and scientific analysis and stratigraphy. The project aims at contributing to bridge an important gap, both chronological (the one concerning the later historical periods in Petra), and territorial (the one concerning the significance of the connection of the Petra Valley with its hinterland and neighboring regions).
Micaela holds a PhD from Cardiff University, where she submitted a thesis entitled Settlement in Crusader Transjordan, 1100-1189 (2014); she has been a post-doctoral fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany (2014/2015). She currently directs the CBRL-affiliated Islamic Bayda Project in Petra and has recently co-edited the volume Crusader Landscapes in the Medieval Levant: the Archaeology and History of the Latin East (2016).
About the Book:
Crusader Landscapes in the Medieval Levant. The Archaeology and History of the Latin East.
Edited by Micaela Sinibaldi, Kevin J. Lewis, Balázs Major and Jennifer A. Thompson, University of Wales Press, 2016.
"This superb collection reflects the great variety and originality of contemporary crusades studies. The subjects range from military and ecclesiastic architecture to narrative sources and legal discussion, in geographical scope from Petra in south Jordan to Torpichen in Scotland. A great volume to honour a great scholar."
- Professor Hugh Kennedy, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Abstract:
Throughout Ottoman times, the Mandaeans, a small gnostic community with roots going back to ancient Babylon, had strived to live without attracting much attention, amongst the Shi’i tribes of southern Iraq. Yet, in 1895, their head priest was accused of playing an important role in a major tribal rebellion against Ottoman authority. Using archival sources along with Mandaean oral tradition, this study analyzes this case within the context of state centralization, Ottoman-British rivalry in the region, and the resultant internal struggles within the small Mandaean community. The case is significant in that it sheds light on the impact that large-scale transformations had on vulnerable minorities like the Mandaeans, and the way that these communities struggled to survive in turbulent times.
About the speaker:
Thabit A.J. Abdullah received his PhD in history in 1992 from Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He is currently a Professor of Middle East History at York University in Toronto, Canada. Prior to this he held positions of Assistant Professor and Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the American University in Cairo (1992-1996), Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University, and Associate Dean for External Affairs at York University. His chief academic interests are medieval and early modern social and economic history of Iraq. He has, nevertheless, also published on modern and contemporary Iraq. Among his publications are Merchants, Mamluks and Murder: the Political Economy of Trade in 18th Century Basra (SUNY Press, 2000); Dictatorship, Imperialism and Chaos: Iraq Since 1989 (Zed Books, 2006); A Short History of Iraq: From 636 to the Present, 2nd edition (Pearson-Longman Books, 2010); in addition to several articles.
The very first British Institute interview podcast with Dr Philip Proudfoot (CBRL) and Dr Ali Abdul Kadir Ali (Oxford).
Philip discusses with Ali his most recent project examining the different regional policy responses to the Syrian refugee crisis (Lebanon and Jordan). They compare and contrast the various economic, historical, political factors that act to determine policy responses and how these policies manifest themselves in the opportunities and restrictions that Syrian's encounter in neighbouring host countries.
Jerusalem was a focus of medical attention from the 19th century onwards. This was for reasons owing more to religious and touristic imagination - and later growing flows of immigration - than to epidemiological reasons. One feature of the knowledge of health and healthcare was that it largely followed communal patterns of social organization. Infectious diseases were viewed as hazards that straddled the city, known through communal data (for instance through the reports of denominational hospitals and dispensaries) that often created a hierarchization of communities according to criteria of hygiene. However, the second constitutional period, starting in 1908, marked a shift towards the development of inter-communal public health policy. Communal patterns of health policy-making potentially led to preferences a more intensified effort to fight diseases that weighed more severely on migrants or diseases whose etiology was linked with local poverty.
The end of the Ottoman period and especially the first few years of the British occupation of Jerusalem saw the development of inter-communal cooperation between Jews and Arabs. But did that mean that priorities were assigned first and foremost according to a consideration of infectious risks across the board? I will argue that health policy making followed a colonial pattern of decision-making, through a dialogue effectively confined to British authorities and the main Zionist medical organizations, especially Hadassah, resulting in public health policies prioritizing the concerns of immigrants. Jerusalem remained the major Palestinian healthcare centre, but the focus of public health shifted from its medical institutions to ports and rural sites of infection that were pivotal in Zionist colonization and ideology.
About the Speaker:
Philippe Bourmaud is a historian of the Ottoman and Mandatory Middle East, based at Istanbul. His researches focus on the history of the medical profession in the Ottoman Empire, the history of indicators and the history of public health and social problems. His current project focuses on the construction of public problems (especially tuberculosis and addictions) from the Second constitutional period of the Ottoman Empire into the Middle Eastern Mandates.
Lebanon has long maintained a significant population of Syrian migrant workers. Men undertook largely seasonal work with extended periods of wage labour abroad. However, there was little evidence of permanent settlement and few signs that a second-generation of Syrians were making homes across the border. In 2011, when the first rumbling of uprising began to break, a number of migrant workers returned home, hoping to participate through peaceful protest or, later, armed resistance. But now, against the realities of the present, most are just trying to survive.
About the speaker:
Dr Philip Proudfoot is an anthropologist of the Levant region. In late 2016 he joined the British Institute in Amman shortly after having completed his PhD at the London School of Economics. Currently, Philip is preparing his doctoral thesis — The Living Dead: Revolutionary Subjectivity and Syrian Rebel-Workers in Beirut — for publication. This work was based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork that he carried out amongst a network of Syrian labourers in Beirut. From a bottom-up perspective, Philip describes the personal and political transformations of men whose voices are frequently silenced in the face of today’s brutal proxy war.