Call for Papers: 39th Annual Middle East History and Theory Conference (MEHAT), University of Chicago, May 2-3, 2025 (Deadline: January 31, 2025)
May 2 - May 3
From the organizers:
We are excited to announce that the 39th Annual Middle East History and Theory Conference (MEHAT) will take place at The University of Chicago on May 2-3, 2025.
Call for Papers. We are now accepting proposals for papers and pre-arranged panels from graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and independent scholars. We invite historians, linguists, anthropologists, literary scholars, sociologists, musicologists, scholars of religion, and political scientists whose work engages with a broad geography, including but not limited to, the Mediterranean, North and West Africa, and South and Central Asia, from Late Antiquity and the advent of Islam to the present. Travel support may be available, please indicate in your application if you would like to be considered for travel support.
We particularly encourage submissions related to this year’s organizing theme: “Conceiving Time and Navigating Space: Spatiotemporal Engagements in the Middle East and North Africa ” The range of topics we hope to examine with this theme include, but are not limited to:
* Meditations on Middle Eastern concepts of time and space, whether connected to religious belief, cultural practice, national development, or other ways of relating to spatial and temporal dimensions
* Engagement with speculative fictions, alternative histories, or forms of storytelling which shape the relationship between subjects and their temporality or spatiality
* Anthropological studies of concepts of time, spatial organization, and the way these concepts structure lived experience
* Microhistories, oral history, or other forms of memory preservation, particularly marginalized histories, or alternative histories from any group
* Meditations on the development of national identities, relationships between citizens and geography, the alteration of geography through economic development, colonial intervention, war and conflict, and nation building
* Imagined geography, national belonging and the impact of diaspora and exile on such belonging
* Geographic surveys of the Middle East, investigations into the politics of mapmaking and other forms of establishing geographic or environmental connection
* Engagement with indigenous literary and intellectual geographies produced in the Middle East and North Africa. Studies of toponymies and their cultural or political legacies in the region.
About the Conference. Since its inception more than three decades ago, the annual Middle East History and Theory Conference at the University of Chicago has earned a reputation as one of the premier academic gatherings in the field. Capitalizing on its setting at a university with a strong tradition in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, MEHAT has established itself as a major forum for emerging scholars across disciplines to share their research with peers, receive constructive feedback, and establish fruitful academic relationships. Participants come from North America, Europe, and the Middle East, and they have traditionally included researchers at every stage of their careers.
Keynote: The keynote speaker of this year’s conference is Professor Brahim El Guabli, who will give a talk provisionally titled “Saharanism and its Afterlives: Historicizing a Universalizing Desert Imagination.” Brahim El Guabli<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/compthoughtlit.jhu.edu/directory/brahim-el-guabli/__;!!DZ3fjg!8qEfluDZ_Jd9ZYV_b7JbvjQLvDo5xuh1hiBv_IWjKV2fGzfsaWZ41rm0Ly4SHOtoF_nDuI4-L7vBqacahQnocD0Uvw$> is associate professor of Arabic studies and comparative literature at Williams College and currently associate professor of comparative thought and literature at Johns Hopkins University. El Guabli specializes in Amazigh, Arabic, and Francophone literatures, but his interdisciplinary scholarship encompasses a variety of fields including memory, indigeneity, and environmental studies. El Guabli is the author of Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence (Fordham University Press, 2023), which has received honorable mention by the Middle East Librarians Association and is a finalist for the African Studies Association’s best book award. His second book, entitled Saharan Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and its Radical Consequences, is forthcoming with the University of California Press. He is currently completing a third monograph entitled Literature and Indigeneity: Imazighen’s Construction of a Literary Field (University of Michigan Press). Using untapped primary sources in Tamazight, Darija, and Arabic, this book unsettles the current historicization of Tamazghan literature by rewriting the region’s literary history from an Indigenous Amazigh perspective. El Guabli is co-founder and co-editor of the Amazigh Studies series with Georgetown University Press and of the independent peer-reviewed Tamazgha Studies Journal.
Applications. Please send submissions electronically to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>, no later than Friday, January 31, 2025. Please include each presenter’s name, and a brief biographical note including institutional affiliation, program of study, or position and attach a 250-word abstract with a tentative title. For pre-arranged panels, please send a single email with an overall panel description plus individual paper abstracts. The best abstracts will summarize the paper’s topic, its relationship and contribution to existing scholarship and specific conclusions. If you are unsure about the suitability of your topic, feel free to email us at the above address. Submissions will be assessed, and invitations extended by late February 2025.
Selected papers will be grouped into panels of three or four. Participants should be prepared to deliver a maximum twenty-minute presentation and respond to questions from an assigned discussant as well as conference attendees. Written papers must be circulated to the respondent and fellow members of the panel at least two weeks before the conference.
A small amount of travel support may be available for a number of presenters without access to institutional funding. Please indicate if you are interested in being considered in your email.
Please circulate widely! For questions and accessibility concerns, please write to [email protected]. You can find additional information, including last year’s conference program for reference, on our website<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/theoknights.com/mehat/2024/03/30/MEHAT-conference-schedule.html__;!!DZ3fjg!8qEfluDZ_Jd9ZYV_b7JbvjQLvDo5xuh1hiBv_IWjKV2fGzfsaWZ41rm0Ly4SHOtoF_nDuI4-L7vBqacahQn87MjmxQ$>.
