The 40th Annual Middle East History and Theory Conference (MEHAT) at The University of Chicago will take place on May 1-2, 2026.
About the Conference. Since its inception four 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 foster fruitful academic relationships. Participants come from North America, Europe, and the Middle East, and have traditionally included researchers at every stage of their careers.
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.
We particularly encourage (but do not limit!) submissions related to this year’s overarching theme: “Playing with the Scales: The Local, Regional, and Global in Middle Eastern Studies.” Drawing inspiration from economic historian Jan de Vries’s 2019 article “Playing with Scales: The Global and the Micro, the Nano and the Nano”, we invite you to problematize the scales of the phenomena, contexts, and developments our discipline and research shed light on. How do micro-scale engagements with Middle Eastern agents help us to understand global developments, like the transformation of law and statehood and the emergence of capitalism? What role do regional configurations, whether defined in terms of shared ecological, economic or political contexts, trade, religious or intellectual networks, play in shaping the interaction of individual, local, and global scales? How can our work account for these varied layers? The conference theme will also allow us to reflect this critical moment for our discipline amidst challenges that put humanistically informed area studies research at risk.
The range of topics we hope to examine with this theme include, but are not limited to:
● Theoretical and methodological engagements with scales in Middle Eastern Studies, i.e. with regard to micro and macrohistory approaches within the discipline, studies actively problematizing the bridging of broad-scale and granular data sets, whether qualitative or quantitative
● Critical approaches to studying the Middle East as a region, as well as work situating its actors and locales in alternative geographical realms or disciplinary contexts
● The role of individuals, communities, and states of the region in shaping global developments as well as the impact of global transformations on the region and its actors, examples for which may include but are not exhausted by colonialism and imperialism, capitalism and neoliberalism, climate change and other ecological alterations, technological and infrastructural developments, political movements and global ideologies, scientific, literary, and linguistic exchanges etc.
● Meditations on individual and collective agency in the face of local, regional, and global transformations
● Papers that interrogate the utility of terms and concepts often employed to circumscribe the geographical foci of our field of study, such as the Middle East, North Africa, the Islamicate world, or the Global South
● Explorations of archives, sources, and data aiding our understanding of multi-scale phenomena from below
Keynote Speaker. The keynote speaker of this year’s conference is Professor Chris Gratien. Chris Gratien is an associate professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at the University of Virginia, where he offers courses on global environmental history and the modern Middle East. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (Stanford University Press, 2022), was awarded the Nikki Keddie Book Award by the Middle East Studies Association. He is also co-creator of the Ottoman History Podcast, which has featured over 500 interviews with scholars of the Ottoman Empire and beyond since 2011.
Submissions. Please send submissions electronically to [email protected], no later than Saturday, January 31, 2026. 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 2026.
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]. Additional information will be published on our website. For reference, you can have a look at last year’s conference program here.
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