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Verschlagwortet: EUME

Staying With Uncertainty: Syrian Intellectual Life in Germany

By Anne-Marie McManus. In a recent essay published by Reset Dialogues on Civilizations, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab called on scholars to attend closely to the forms and concerns that shape contemporary Arab thought, locating its newness in the uprisings of 2011 and the ruptures that followed. In his response, included in the broader dossier, Samer Frangie cautioned that the category of “Arab thought” functions as a “historiographical device,” one that has brought together “dispersed, contradictory, and elusive acts of” intellectual production under a shared political horizon. He thus reorients the question towards periodization: is it still meaningful—and for whom—to reinvigorate this category as a way of making sense of the present?

“Revolution has become more conceivable today”

By Nahid Siamdoust. For four decades, the Islamic Republic has systematically repressed internal opposition: targeting civil, labour and women’s rights activists through imprisonment, exile and violence, leaving Iran without a structured political alternative. Nevertheless, Iranians have risen up several times in nationwide protests to demand more rights and freedom. Is Iran’s regime at a breaking point? The economic crisis is central to the recent protests, argues EUME-Fellow Nahid Siamdoust. She assesses the significance of the recent uprising, examines its potential leaders and outlines five possible scenarios for what comes next.

UnArchive: Sonic Materialities and Sound Media of Migration

By Nazan Maksudyan. The cultural history of labor migration is a well-established field with a rich body of scholarship. However, the production of everyday life by labor migrants through sonic means, and the sound cultures shaped by experiences of displacement, have received comparatively little attention. In this short intervention, I emphasize the audibility of migration and propose that it is possible both to listen to and listen with migration.

“There is no way to look a conspiracy theory in the eye” – 5in10 with Aya Labanieh

Aya Labanieh is a scholar of empire, conspiracy, media, and memory culture. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is presently a fellow at Columbia University’s Narrative Intelligence Lab and a research affiliate with the EUME research program’s project SYRASP at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Her work contends with the intertwinement of conspiracy, memory, and power in Anglophone and Arabophone literatures and mediaspheres—spanning genres of dystopian science fiction, radical Internet subcultures, and the memoirs of agents and spies.

Electric Istanbul

In her research project, EUME Fellow Nurçin İleri traces the electrification of Istanbul during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the modern Turkish nation state. She examines how, where and by whom electrical energy was generated and how it was distributed. In doing so, she shows how the electricity grid spread around the Bosphorus with street lights and electric trams, creating new social and political interdependencies and permanently changing the everyday lives of many Istanbulites.

“Maybe we should start by admitting the truth” – 5in10 with Eli Osheroff

Eli Osheroff is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a focus on Arab political and intellectual history and the Arab-Zionist conflict. He holds a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Truman Institute, at the Jacob Robinson Institute at the Hebrew University, and in the Dan David Society of Fellows at Tel Aviv University. His first book, based on his doctoral dissertation, is forthcoming from the Van Leer Institute and deals with Arab political imagination from the late Ottoman period to 1948. The book focuses on Arab visions for an independent Palestine and the place of Jewish settlers in the future Arab state. Eli’s articles have appeared in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the Israel-Palestine Review, and other venues.

“Gaining Access was a Major Challenge” – 5in10 with Dalia Halabi

Dalia Halabi is a sociologist of education who adopts a “study up” approach to critically examine educational and social disparities. She holds a PhD in Leadership and Policy in Education from the University of Haifa and an MA in Conflict Management and Mediation from Tel Aviv University. Her doctoral research explored the formation of elite identity among Palestinian students and alumni of private schools in Israel, analyzing how educational experiences shape distinction, belonging, and social trajectories within a context of national marginalization.

„Zwischen den Welten“. Diasporas, Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees from Europe in the Middle East and North Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Von Sary Halayqa. Vom 08.–10. Juli 2025 fand der internationalen Workshop „Zwischen den Welten“. Diasporas, Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees from Europe in the Middle East and North Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries2 am Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin statt. Er wurde von Alexandros Lamprou (Research Fellow, Philipps-Universität Marburg), Esther Möller (Centre March Bloch), Rim Naguib (EUME Fellow der Gerda Henkel Stiftung 2024/25) und Georges Khalil (Forum Transregionale Studien / EUME) geleitet und behandelte Themen wie Staatsbürgerschaft, Identität, Zwangsmigration, Netzwerke und interkulturelle Begegnungen.

Women, Visibility, and Politics of Night from Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey

By Nurçin Ileri. When Kamelya Hanım was found dead in her home on Taksim Street in 1896, the news made headlines with sensational details in the newspapers of the time. In January 2016, 19-year-old E.F.B. was raped and robbed while returning home at night on Istanbul’s Bağdat Avenue, causing a similar media coverage. What was it that made the attitudes toward the victims in these two separate incidents, a murder and a rape that took place in vastly different historical periods and social contexts, so strikingly similar? The discourses and policies that aim to exclude women from urban spaces and the public sphere continue to persist by relying on traditional moral codes and the belief that the city can never be safe for women.

“I’m fascinated by language in all its facets” – 5in10 with Wendy Doyon

Wendy Doyon is a historian of modern Egypt and Egyptology. She received her PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 and is currently revising her dissertation for a book entitled Empire of Dust: State, Labor, and Archaeology in Nineteenth-century Egypt. She was a CAORC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt 2022–2024, and she co-directs the Arabic Excavation Archive from Quft project at Harvard University. Her research focuses primarily on French, English, and Arabic sources in archaeological archives from Egypt and Sudan and she writes on the history of archaeology from both Egyptian and multicultural/global perspectives. In the academic year 2024/25, she is a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.

Whose Imaginary? Coptic Intellectuals and the Question of Subjectivity

By Ismail Fayed. The collapse of the Assad regime and HTS’s rise in Syria have revived debates in Egypt and the region, over the fragile status of religious minorities, particularly Copts, long caught between authoritarianism and Islamist extremism. But when freed from such choices, what kind of worlds do they imagine? In this paper, Ismail Fayed explores this question through the life histories and reflections of two prominent Coptic intellectuals, Salama Musa and Louis Awad.

‘Isn’t Everything an Afterlife?’

Yasmine Kherfi and Sigrid Corry in Conversation with Dr Atef Said on Ethnographic Methods, Temporality and History. What does it mean to write, witness, and take part in history in the making? Yasmine Kherfi and Sigrid Corry speak to Dr Atef Said, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, to explore questions of methodology, as well as its personal, scholarly and political implications. His book, Revolution Squared: Tahrir, Political Possibilities, and Counterrevolution in Egypt (Duke University Press, 2024), traces the story of the Egyptian revolution of 2011, documenting the spaces and histories through which it unfolded. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Tahrir Square, its surrounding streets and digital platforms, Said examines the dynamic character of revolution—one that is both indeterminate and shaped by historical contingencies.

Remembering an Artist Who Gave Life to the Children of Gaza

By Loaay Wattad. Born in 1997, Dorgham was a Palestinian artist known and beloved by many in Gaza. Through theater, cinema, painting, and song, he brought smiles to the faces of displaced Palestinians — especially children — throughout the genocide. But Dorgham was not just a painter, filmmaker, or theater director: with his humble presence and tender voice, he gave kids whose childhood had been stolen by war the chance to dream again, and the hope that their dreams would one day come to life. On March 18, Dorgham, his wife Aya, and 26 members of his family were killed in a brutal Israeli assault that targeted his home in the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood of Gaza City. But the hope and joy he planted did not die. They still resonate in the Palestinian children who crowded into refugee tents across Gaza, where Dorgham created art projects and staged cultural productions for them — acts of resistance in their own right.

“I learned that academia could be a shared path” – 5in10 with Ido Fuchs

Ido Fuchs is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. He is also an Associated EUME Doctoral Fellow for the academic year 2024/2025 at the Forum Transregionale Studien and a Visiting Scholar at the Utrecht University Network for Environmental Humanities for Spring 2025. His project, Writing Returns, studies the poetics of return in Palestinian literature, focusing on questions of gender, anti/post-colonialism, and world literature. His second project, tentatively titled The Atmosphere of Doomsday, brings together research on colonialism, violence, apocalyptic discourses, and contemporary cultural production in Palestine/Israel. His works, deriving from both projects, have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Interventions, Biography, Theoretical Practice, Mafte’akh, and Bezalel.

New Approaches to MENA Prison Literatures After 2011

By Anne-Marie McManus. In the past fifteen years, the mass relocation of prison survivors, families of the disappeared, activists, and cultural actors from MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) countries to Europe and North America has placed carceral experience at the heart of contemporary debates and cultural work. The hubs of the new MENA diasporas are in western Europe, but the numerous MENA writers, activists, artists, and former prisoners who are producing work on prison today are to be found globally, from the Gulf and Turkey to North America. This emerging body of work and activism on prison in the MENA is inextricably tied to ongoing struggles for justice for the detained, the tortured, and the disappeared.

Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt: A Paradigm Shift in Archaeological Knowledge Production

By Wendy Doyon. Histories of Egyptology and archaeology have focused almost exclusively on their disciplinary development in the West. But within the global archive of archaeology created by the past two centuries of excavation in the Middle East and North Africa, a significant portion of archival documents, notes, and photos form a shadow archive of Middle Eastern history. It documents the knowledge transfer, techniques, craftsmanship, apprenticeship, material studies, and linguistic community of Arabic-speaking co-practitioners and co-producers of archaeological knowledge throughout the region. Rayyis Sayyid Ahmad Sayyid Dirāz and his family are the “Ghost Writers” par excellence of Upper Egypt. Their first-hand narrative of excavation over thirty years of work in the field is the best documented example we have of the fundamentally multilingual process of archaeological knowledge production in Egypt and Sudan.

Decolonization of Migration in Divided Berlin: Berliner Künstlerprogramm and Artistic Representations of Migrant Subjectivities in the 1970s

By Nazan Maksudyan. This contribution forms a part of a broader research agenda on the aestheticization of migration in France and Germany during the 1970s. It focuses on aesthetic representations of migrant subjectivities and the critique of labor migration in the context of arts and cultural production. The overall project adopts a sound studies perspective, and in this brief exposition, I focus on the concept of artistic residency and the invitation of artists from the “European South” to intervene in migration debates with an aestheticized frame.