12 seniors will be graduating this year with a concentration in Middle East Studies. We’d like to thank them for being a part of the Middle East Studies community at Brown, and we wish them all the best for their future endeavors!

The 12 seniors are:

Bateman, Jonathan D.
Curlin, Laura E.
Dette, Rahel K.
Forman, Sarah L.
Koprulu, Sureya M.
Koushik, Meghana R.
Mauer, Ezra P.
Or, Yasmin
Saeed, Samier
Samuels, Harry B.
White, Andrew J.
Wilkofsky, Daniel L.

Click to view a larger image of the poster

Please click here to submit your proposal for the Undergraduate Paper Series

May 3, 2013
9:30am-1:00pm
NOTE: Location Change to Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute

Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street

Roundtable on Law, Art and Revolution in the Middle East Today

9:30 to 9:45 am
Welcome: Beshara Doumani
Opening Remarks: Amr Shalakany and Chantal Thomas

9:45 to 11:00 am
Keynote Lecture:
Bruce Ferguson, Dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, American University in Cairo: “Not in the Age of Pharaos”

11:15 am to 12:45 pm
Roundtable: Sherief Gaber, Founding Member, Mosireen Independent Media Collective; Hassan Jabareen, Senior Robina Visiting Human Rights Fellow, Yale University, Director of Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel; Moukhtar Kocache, Advisor in Philanthropy Culture and Development; and Nada Shabout, Associate Professor of Art Education and Art History, Director, Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Institute, University of North Texas.

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The Bruce D. Craig Prize for Mamluk Studies

The Prize Committee is pleased to announce that Elias Ibrahim Muhanna (Ph.D. 2012, Harvard University ) has been named the recipient of the 2012 Bruce D. Craig Prize for Mamluk Studies for his dissertation:

“ Encyclopaedism in the Mamluk Period: The Composition of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nuwayrī’s (d. 1333) Nihāyat al-Arab fī Funūn al-Adab”

In bestowing the award, the committee noted:

Elias Muhanna’s dissertation offers a detailed examination of one of the most important Mamluk encyclopaedias and addresses a crucial theme of the Mamluk period, the rise of encyclopaedism. The dissertation connects cultures of literacy to larger political processes, namely state formation. The author argues that al-Nuwayrī’s work must be understood within the trend of 14th-century administrative and institutional centralization and that it is the expression of a wider trend in blending adab and religious learning. Methodologically, this is a bold move and one that historians rarely attempt, the tendency rather being to examine literary production as related to narrower fields of influence. Furthermore, Muhanna’s codicological work is admirable and his grasp of languages strong.

This is a well written, superbly competent, and original study, which makes a major contribution to the study of Mamluk cultural production and the field of Mamluk history at large. The author is to be commended for his close reading of the text. This allows him to offer a much nuanced discussion of the text’s genesis, structure, and function. “Encyclopaedism of the Mamluk Period” is the work of an engaged and energetic scholar.

The Prize Committee for 2012 consisted of Li Guo (Notre Dame University), Chair; Konrad Hirschler (SOAS, University of London); and Kristina Richardson (Queens College, CUNY).

The Bruce D. Craig Prize is given annually by Mamlūk Studies Review for the best dissertation on a topic related to the Mamluk Sultanate submitted to an American or Canadian university during the preceding calendar year.

This course will introduce students to one of the major colloquial variants of contemporary Arabic.  The native language of Egyptian citizens, used predominantly in everyday communication, has long since become widely understood throughout the Arab world, since popularized by the media and pop culture.  The beginning oral proficiency that students will acquire in this course, by examining a range of sources, from textbooks to short stories, movies, social media posts and personal accounts by guest-speakers, and by practicing conversation in class, will facilitate their communication with native speakers of Arabic in a variety of informal situations.  Prerequisite:  ARAB 200.  Instructor: Alla Hassan.

ARAB0700-S01    Advanced Arabic:  Tales of the City

CRN:15184
Primary Meeting: M W 12:00 pm – 01:30 pm

The Arab city, current site of a major political upheaval, is the central theme of this integrated-skill language and culture course. Images of cities, as multifaceted as the people who inhabit them, animate cinema screens and daily news reports, inspire masters of writing, artists, and musicians, arouse political activism. By engaging the complex representation of the urban theme in contemporary discursive and art forms, this course will enhance students’ understanding of the dynamics of urban politics and culture in the Middle East, while building a content-specific lexicon and advanced communicative ability. Prerequisite: ARAB 0600, or an equivalent. Enrollment limited to 12.  Instructor: Mirena Christoff

ARAB0900-S01    Love, Revolution and Nostalgia in Modern Arabic Poetry

CRN:16112
Primary Meeting: T R 02:30 pm – 03:50 pm

This course aims to introduce students to the most prominent Arab poets of the 20th and 21st century. Students will strengthen their language skills while reading and discussing texts by major modern poets from the Middle East and North Africa. They will explore a range of themes from politics and oppression, to love, eroticism, personal freedom and women’s liberation. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with the themes, styles and development of modern Arabic poetry, in addition to gaining a deeper exposure to the culture of the Arab world. Conducted in Modern Standard Arabic for advanced students. Enrollment limited to 12. DVPS.  Instructor: Miled Faiza

May 16, 12:00 – 1:00 PM
McKinney Room, Watson Institute
Seating is limited. Please RSVP to cmes@brown.edu

Abstract

The popular uprisings which toppled several political regimes in North Africa in 2011, so called the Arab Spring, have always been portrayed as politically-motivated revolts against longstanding dictatorial regimes. However, less attention has so far been paid to the question why the Arab spring occurred precisely in 2011, and not any time earlier, given that the political systems had been in power already for decades. Furthermore, it has been pointed out that the Arab spring coincided with a period of soaring global food prices, which is potentially important given that many countries in this region are net importers of food. Indeed, many famous revolutions in history have often coincided with periods of food price inflation. However, little is known about the precise causality between food prices, poverty, the role of various socio-economic indicators, and the likelihood that political unrest occurs.

This paper empirically attempts to answer the question: to what extent have global food price inflation contributed to the Arab Spring in Egypt? It argues that a statistically significant correlation can be identified between rising food prices in Egypt, the corresponding coverage of this topic in major Egyptian newspapers, and related reports about rising political tensions, and then, the paper concludes that food price spikes have played a major role in the emergence of the political unrest in Egypt in 2011.

Speaker’s Biography

Assem Abu Hatab is a postdoctoral researcher and assistant lecturer in the Department of Economics at the Swedish University of Agricultural Science in Uppsala. He is also a lecturer of Economics and Rural Development at Suez Canal University in Egypt. His research interests revolve predominantly around international food and agricultural trade and trade policy, food consumption and production and their linkages to food security, and economic and rural development in developing countries. His work in recent years has focused on assessing the economic and welfare impacts the of Egypt-EU trade partnership with emphasis on the agricultural and food sectors, and also on the impacts of China’s involvement in the MENA countries. Capturing the role of global food price inflation in the political unrest of 2011 in North Africa has recently become a strong dimension in his research agenda.

Assem completed his undergraduate studies in 2003, received a master’s degree from Suez Canal University in Egypt in 2007, and completed a PhD in Economics at Northwest A&F University in China in 2011. He worked previously as an assistant lecturer in the College of Economics & Management at Northwest A&F University in China, an assistant researcher in the Chinese Center for Agricultural Policy CCAP at the China Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and a visiting scholar at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences UMB, and Corvinus University in Budapest.

Assem is also currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Watson Institute, Brown University.

Database development workshop
Historians and other scholars with large databases of historical person data are invited to workshops to test and populate Prosop, a project funded by the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The first of these workshops will be held at Brown University (Providence, RI) on May 17-18, 2013, with the generous support of Middle East Studies at Brown. The second will take place at Florida State University (Tallahassee, FL) in August 2013.

What is Prosop?
Prosop is a collaborative database of details about individuals in the past. Although it maps networks and discovers connections, it is not just Facebook for dead people. In particular, it aims to:

• manage diverse types of data from different historical settings,
• aggregate of large quantities of person data,
• accommodate uncertain and conflicting information, and
• facilitate data-driven study of historical systems of description and classification.

Summary below. For more detailed information, visit our website at prosop.org.

What kinds of data do we seek?
We’re looking for information about relatively large sets of relatively ordinary people from the past. Typically, this information is extracted from archival records used by microhistorians. For example, the database contains the name, age, address, and physical description of 700 criminal court defendants from 1880s Egypt. Prosop is meant to work for all kinds of historical person data, and we are especially interested in data in unusual formats (linguistic, topical, or otherwise) that will help us to develop the flexibility of the system. Also, we are looking for participants who are willing to share their data with the community of researchers using Prosop.

What will happen at the workshops?
Each participant will have time to present his or her data, describing its characteristics and the ways it might interact with other person data. All of the data will be uploaded to Prosop by the time of the workshop, and participants will discuss issues of categorization and comparison that arise. We will work to find ways to link data and to make the system more usable. The workshop will provide a chance for historians and developers to communicate.

What’s in it for participants?
Workshop participants will contribute to the design of a tool that will enable new research into global social history, and will have early access to its results. They should gain new perspectives on their own data and its place in the global history of person information. Their experience and input will help to refine the system towards its aim, which is to encompass all categories of historical person data.
Participant costs will be covered by the organizers.

How to apply?
Send a letter of application to prosopworkshop@gmail. com. The letter should include a general description of the data which you wish to contribute to the project. Where possible, please specify:

• the number of persons in the database
• the categories of information recorded about each person (e.g. name, age, birthplace, occupation)
• the geographical and chronological range of the persons represented
• the type of sources from which the information is drawn (language, archives, genres).

Please also include a C.V.

What is the deadline for applications?
The deadline for applications for the first workshop is April 8, 2013. All applications will also be considered for the second workshop, for which a second call for participants will be circulated.

Are there other ways to participate?
Prosop is an ongoing project. In addition to future workshops already in the works, we are looking for beta testers. If you are not able to join this workshop, but might want to be involved in the future, please get in touch via our website and join our mailing list.

First workshop at Brown University (Providence, RI) 

May 17-18, 2013

This workshop’s aim is to test and populate Prosop, a project funded by the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The workshop is hosted with the generous support of Middle East Studies at Brown.

Friday, May 17

8:30 Breakfast at Watson Institute

9:00 Welcome (Beshara Doumani and Elias Muhanna) and introductions 

9:30 Prosop: technical description

10:15 Break

10:30 Data description I: New Englanders 

• 26,789 Massachusetts Catholic Order of Foresters life insurance policies, 1879-1935 – Joanne Riley (UMass Boston)
• 1,500 signatories from 18th and 19th century Massachusetts anti-slavery petitions – Nicole Topich (Harvard)
• 6,000 colonial collegians, to 1774 – Ondine LeBlanc (Massachusetts Historical Society)

12:30 Lunch
2:00   Data description II: Political and Administrative Networks 

• 100,000 Spanish political actors, 17th to 19th centuries – Jean-Pierre Dedieu (Lyon)
• Names from 700 Neo-Babylonian legal and administrative tablets, 747-626 BC – John Nielson (Benedictine)
• 10,400 names from Lord Byron’s correspondence, early 19th century – David Radcliffe (Virginia Tech)

4:00 Break
4:15  Data description III: the Middle East 

• 10,000 names from Egyptian legal records, 1880-1914 – Will Hanley (Florida State)
• Encyclopedia Iranica and manuscript cataloging – Dagmar Riedel (Columbia)

5:30 Linking data I 

Saturday, May 18 

9:00 Breakfast at Watson Institute
9:30 Data description IV: American Networks 

• 950 Chinese-American draft cards, World Wars One and Two – Heather Lee (Brown)
• 5,705 names from Union County, South Carolina criminal indictments, 1852-1878 – Elaine Parsons (Duquesne)
• 2,201 members of California Jewish networks, c1850-1900 – Karen Wilson (UCLA)

11:30 Break
11:45 Linking data II 
1:15   Conclusions and future plans (over lunch)

Those who wish to attend the workshop may register at prosopworkshops@gmail.com.

Palmira Brummett
Visiting Professor of History

April 24, 12:00-1:00 PM
Watson Institute, McKinney Room.
RSVP cmes@brown.edu required. Seating limited.

The Adriatic in the early modernperiod has long been considered a Venetian lake into which the Ottomansmade “incursions.” But the Ottomans controlled the bulk of the territory of the eastern Adriatic; and that sea was an important extension of the Ottoman province of the archipelago. The Adriatic is best envisioned as a trans-imperial Ottoman zone composed of both land and seascapes, one that provided a crucial conduit for the transmission of information, culture, goods, and personnel.That zone was counted in the narratives and in the physical and mental maps of the time in terms of interior, coastal, and island/sea spaces. It provided the setting for the interactions of large, middling and small “renegades” whoroutinely served the interests of Muslim and Christian lords (as well as their own interests).

By way of introduction to this study in which she is currently immersed, Brummett will share some narrative and visual images(Ottoman and Venetian) that suggest how the Adriatic zone was imagined and depicted.

Bio, Palmira Brummett, Brown, 2013

Palmira Brummett is Visiting Professor of History at Brown and Professor Emerita at the University of Tennessee. She is an Ottomanist historian whose work focuses on the rhetorics of cross-cultural encounter in the Afro-Eurasian oikumene. Brummett is the author of Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery, Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908-1911, The ‘Book’ of Travels: Genre, Ethnology and Pilgrimage, 1250-1700, ed., and multiple articles in the fields of Ottoman, Mediterranean, and world history. Her current work includes a monograph on early modern mapping of Ottoman sovereignty, territory, and identity and a study of the hybrid cultural milieu of the Ottoman Adriatic. She is a die-hard Cubs fan and a dedicated birder.