Conference: 40th Annual Middle East History and Theory Conference (MEHAT), University of Chicago, May 1–2, 2026
May 1 - May 2
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.
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.
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.
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.
