Calls for Participation
Overview
MESA provides this opportunity for session organizers to find others to join them in preorganizing a session through an open call for participation. The session organizer and session participants must then submit their proposals in myMESA following the directions to MESA’s Call for Papers for the 60th MESA annual meeting, which will be held November 21-24, 2026, in Boston, MA.
Submitting an Open Call for other participants to join your session
Complete the form below.
- Please note that the form at the bottom of the page is not where to submit individual paper proposals, panels, and/or roundtables. Instead, all proposals are submitted via myMESA, our membership and submission system. Please find the directions for doing that here, in the full Call for Papers.
- The MESA 2026 Call for Papers closes at 11:59AM (Noon) Eastern Standard Time (4:59 PM UTC) on Tuesday, February 17, 2026. We recommend that your deadline for your call for participation is well in advance of this deadline to give you time to organize the session and to have all participants submit via myMESA prior to the February 17 deadline.
We welcome any questions about the submission process to [email protected].
Responding to an Open Call for Participation
MESA offers these listings as a service to members seeking to collaborate with other members. Read the list of calls and the desciptions below, then contact the organizer of the session directly to indicate your interest.
Ecologies of Modernity: Architecture and Environmental Politics in the Middle East
New Directions in Language and Culture Pedagogy: Critical and Innovative Approaches
Archiving queer and trans world-building in Turkey and its diasporas
Health, Data, and Governance in Protracted Conflict: The Politics of Evidence in the Middle East
From Word to Form: Material Poetics in Middle Eastern Art and Literature
Across Empires and Settler Frontiers: Middle East and Indigenous History in Dialogue
Exclusions, Boundaries, and Hierarchies in Late Ottoman Mobilities and Translations
Narrating and Performing Intertwined Memories
Teaching MES in Different Generations: Culture Wars and Geopolitics
Americans on the Ground in the Early Twentieth-Century Middle East
Reinventing the “Islamic Golden Age” in Mass Media
Cultural Survival and Political Struggle, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Assyrian Studies
Mentoring Undergraduate Research
Pedagogy under Pressure: Teaching the Middle East in the Contemporary University
Romanticism and Nationalism in Arabic
New “Normals”: Body Politics and Converging Crises
Translation, Ideology, and Representation in Middle East Studies
Political Ecology in MENA Studies: Where Are We Now?
Health, Care, and the Paternalistic Politics of Well-Being
The Global Right in MENA: Protests, Authoritarianism, and Shifting Political Subjectivities
Post-Ottoman Circulation and State Formation
Water as Object, Water as Method: Writing on/with Water in the SWANA Region
Arab American Family Dynamics: Migration, Memory, and Intergenerational Identity
Migration in an Intersectional Perspective: Echoes of Colonialism and Slavery in North Africa
Islamicate Epistemologies
New Formulations of Balkan Belonging
Member Calls for Participation
New Formulations of Balkan Belonging
Intellectuals, philosophers and community members imagined new forms of belonging and identity before they came into being. In the Balkan region, the "un-mixing" process ushered in nation-states, while also wreaking devastation and "othering" on a mass scale that persists to this day.
What if we had another chance now to imagine 'Balkan belonging"? From your own research and experience, what have you learned that can bear on this question? We will have a roundtable with papers that explore these themes, and go beyond our theoretical to practical imaginings of what's possible today.
My research is on how friendship played and could play a role in a new Balkan belongings, from learning about Christian Orthodox Muslim friendships in the southeastern Albanian region earlier in the twentieth century. I welcome others whose ethnographic, historical or political research illuminates new perspectives on belonging that could have practical implications today. I have led community-based efforts to reconnect those of us displaced from each other's lands, with projects including "Ottoman Healing House" and "Building an Inclusive Eastern Mediterranean."
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Mary Jane Moutsanas ([email protected]) by February 17th.
This panel will explore the epistemes and forms of knowledge that can be qualified as Islamic in the broadest sense, including from Jewish, Christian or non-Abrahamic perspectives, produced in both pre-modern and modern contexts. In the modernist episteme, religion is relegated to “faith” and what was previously considered as knowledge is disqualified and assimilated to communal affects, superstition or myth.
The panel will move beyond this religion/knowledge binary without dispensing with it, in order to give due attention to the constitution of epistemic spaces of agreement and disagreement in relation to procedures of reasoning and truth-seeking within disciplines such kalam, fiqh, usul al-fiqh, Sufism and philosophy, as well as across these disciplines.
The panel will explore the notion of knowledge (‘ilm), and what it means or meant to know in the Islamicate world, particularly in relation to the visible and the invisible worlds, to the organic link between knowledge and ethics and the entwinement and circulation between forms of knowledge.
The panel will be guided by the following questions: Is there a distinctive Islamic episteme? Did the distinct Islamic knowledges have distinct objects and methods of inquiry? What is the status of ethics in Islamic knowledges? To what extent did the different forms of knowledges produced in the pre-modern period share common epistemic traits? How did the epistemic shift from the pre-modern to the modern era and the emergence of modern science affect and transform Islamic knowledges?
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Youssef Belal ([email protected]) by February 17th.
Migration in an Intersectional Perspective: Echoes of Colonialism and Slavery in North Africa
This roundtable proposes an intersectional and interdisciplinary examination of contemporary migration through the enduring echoes of colonialism and slavery in North Africa. Rather than treating migration as a purely contemporary or technical issue of mobility management, the panel situates migratory processes within longer historical trajectories shaped by imperial domination, racial hierarchies, gendered and sexualized violence, colonial regimes, and the enduring after effects of enslavement.
Drawing on migration studies, critical race theory, decolonial thought, feminist and queer scholarship, as well as socio-historical and psychological approaches, the roundtable explores how these historical formations continue to structure present-day regimes of mobility and immobility. These echoes are visible in racialized and sexualized border practices, differential access to asylum and protection, gendered vulnerabilities along migration routes, and the persistent devaluation of migrant lives shaped by race, gender, sexuality, class, and legal status across Global South and Global North contexts.
The discussion foregrounds migration as a deeply intersectional process, emphasizing how race, gender, sexuality, and colonial power relations intersect to produce unequal experiences of movement, containment, and exclusion. Particular attention is given to the ways in which colonial epistemologies and slavery’s legacies inform contemporary narratives of threat, deservingness, and belonging, as well as populist and nationalist discourses that legitimize exclusion, expulsion, and state violence against migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.
At the same time, the roundtable approaches migration as a site of agency, resistance, and survival. By engaging with concepts such as freedom, flight, constraint, immobility, and non-movement, participants will reflect on how migrants navigate, contest, and reconfigure violent border regimes rooted in colonial and slavery-based histories, while articulating alternative imaginaries of mobility and belonging.
By bringing together diverse empirical cases and theoretical perspectives, this roundtable aims to foster a transregional and cross-disciplinary conversation on migration that moves beyond compartmentalized or region-bound analyses.
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Houda Mzioudet ([email protected]) by February 16th.
This roundtable brings together scholars who have extensive experience studying the role of music in social and political struggles across the Global Muslim South, from Morocco to Indonesia, beginning with the latter's powerful revolution in 1998, through the Cedar Spring, Green Movement, Arab Spring, Gezi Uprising, and ongoing struggles, often life-or-death, across the Arab/Muslim world during the last decade. We explore the changes and continuities in the roles of music and art more broadly in social movements and the protests, sumud and solidarity they generate across the global Muslim South and its diasporas. With an eye towards elucidating the changing aesthetic embeddedness of art and politics during the last decade, we explore new dynamics in this relationship in the era of global polycrisis and authoritarian intensification, and how emerging artistic as well as political technologies interact and conflict to produce powerful new forms of music expression at the edge between authoritarianism and revolution, genocide and survival. From inchoate subcultures to revolutionary countercultures, “bedroom” studios to clubs, concert halls, midans and social media, the commonalities of experience we bring into conversation will help establish a rubric for future research on the role of art in long-term struggles for freedom, independence, and social change.
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Mark LeVine ([email protected]) by February 16th.
Arab American Family Dynamics: Migration, Memory, and Intergenerational Identity
At this critical moment of heightened surveillance, racialization, and political discrimination in the United States, examining Arab American family life feels more urgent than ever. This panel seeks to explore how migration, exile, and diaspora reshape family structures across generations and how Arab Americans negotiate inclusion, exclusion, belonging, and identity within both domestic and national spaces.
I warmly invite abstracts that address themes such as:
Migration and transnational belonging
Intergenerational conflict and memory transmission
Islamophobia and post-9/11 racialization
Gendered expectations within diasporic households
Hybrid identities and cultural translation
Family as refuge and/or site of constraint
Papers may engage literary texts, memoir, testimony, fiction, poetry, cultural studies, or interdisciplinary frameworks.
Please email a 250 to 400-word abstract to Doaa A Omran ([email protected]) by February 16th.
Water as Object, Water as Method: Writing on/with Water in the SWANA Region
Water, as the essence of life, plays a key role in structuring the everyday in Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA). Yet water’s meaning is neither singular nor discrete, taking a range of aesthetic, environmental, political, religious, scientific, and moral valences. Not simply reducible to its three-atom chemical properties of H2O, nor defined purely by its cultural or functional uses, water is an object, a cycle, a “theory machine” (Helmrich 2011) that seeps through fixed conceptual boundaries and ever-porous efforts of categorization. Put simply, water’s multivariant nature—its many forms and flows—contribute to its potential in advancing theory and method in anthropology and its related disciplines.
Rather than assume water as an isolated feature of daily life, we take water and its access as the central point of departure to understand political, social, and cultural formations in SWANA. Water becomes not simply an object of analysis by which the social and political become illuminated. But water becomes a method: a material and metaphorical avenue to address leaky, porous, and unruly aspects of life inherent in the (infra)structures that undergird daily life.
Yet as climate change, imperial violence, dispossession, extraction, and financial collapse constrains ecologies in the SWANA region, how is water and its social life affected? How are longstanding traditions and cultural formations affected by changes in water access, fears of water’s contamination, and the violence of water’s privatization? And as method, how are changes to water’s form impacting our research and writing? In exploring water in its (desired) presence and (feared) absence, this roundtable considers the challenges that structure daily life in SWANA, and the possible futures that water facilitates.
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Peter Habib ([email protected]) by February 16th.
The roundtable intends to discuss Islamic law in the political and legal systems of Muslim-majority states in the world today. The alleged contradiction between Islamic laws and Islamic jurisprudence, on the one hand, and modern concepts of legal and polital policy, such as the religious-ideological neutrality
of the state, constitutionalism, the idea of democratic codification under the rule of law, and, in particular, the international human rights standards that have emerged since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, are increasingly taking centre stage in discussions about Islamic law. This fact is not surprising in light of the significant role that Islamic laws play in shaping legislation and law enforcement, ethics, and the ethical discourse regarding fundamental issues such as human rights, dignity, and autonomy in Muslim countries. The increasingly vibrant, more substantive, and forward-looking debates address the fundamental question of whether Islamic values and norms, which have been adopted by Islamic states in different ways in their legal systems, can be reconciled with, or make their own distinct contributions to, the aforementioned concepts of normative modernity. The following six themes constitute the focus of the roundtablee:
1. Islamic legal pluralism in the modern nation-state
2. Challenges that public interest (maslaha) is facing in the development of legal reforms in Muslim countries
3. The jurisprudence and theological dynamism involved in reforming Islamic law
4. The potential conflicts between the rule of law and the rule of the judge
5. The conflict between divine law and human law during the establishment of the modern nation-state in Islamic countries
6. Theoretical and practical tensions between Islamic laws and human rights
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Bahman Khodadad ([email protected]) by February 15th.
Post-Ottoman Circulation and State Formation
Our guiding question is: How did the monopolization of legitimate circulation—of goods, ideas, and people—become defined and enforced in the interwar Middle East? How did post-Ottoman states seek to regulate and discipline circulation as a means of asserting sovereignty in the wake of imperial collapse? Drawing on new pathbreaking research by Mustafa Aksakal on the viability of Ottoman systems well into the 1920s, the goal of our panel is to further current discussions about the fate of the post-Ottoman world, attempting to bridge economic, intellectual, and social histories that all attempt to address the contingencies of how and why post-WWI states emerged. We are particularly interested in exceptional narratives, including historical actors working in surprising ways and leaders cooperating with one another in spite of (or because of) emerging borders. Relevant topics include smuggling networks, trade routes, infrastructure (including oil), cities, materiality (including texts as material objects, such as books and manuscripts), and cross-border movement as strategies of economic survival.
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Michael Battalia ([email protected]) by February 16th.
The Global Right in MENA: Protests, Authoritarianism, and Shifting Political Subjectivities
This panel moves beyond framing revolutions as exceptional “awakenings” or “springs” to examine the ongoing waves of protest, shifting public opinion, and evolving demands that have shaped the Middle East and North Africa since 2010. Situated within the broader dynamics of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and a global context marked by the rise of the global right, it explores changing political subjectivities, debates, artistic practices, activism, and organizing across national, transnational, and diasporic spaces. Particular attention is given to Gaza and the broader question of Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and beyond, tracing how regional struggles intersect with global authoritarian currents and right-wing movements. The panel asks: How does the global right manifest across MENA? What movements, alliances, and intellectual debates have emerged across the region in response to authoritarianism, right-wing movements, and governance? What might cross-movement solidarities—grounded in anti-authoritarian, anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, or queer frameworks—look like from the United States to the MENA region? What methodological, ethical, political, or pedagogical challenges arise in studying and engaging in these dynamics? The panel welcomes papers that address these questions and beyond.
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Razan Ghazzawi ([email protected]) by February 14th.
Health, Care, and the Paternalistic Politics of Well-Being
The paternalistic promise of care has long served to justify projects of rule, reform, and expanded state reach. This panel invites scholars to reflect on how mental health, bodily well-being, and the relationship of the individual to the social whole have been understood by a multiplicity of actors. Rather than treat health as the purview of medical experts, this panel seeks to explore how engineers, epidemiologists, economists, farmers, and ordinary citizens intruded upon and influenced debates concerning individual and collective well-being. What counted as “health,” for whom, and according to whose metrics? And how did diverse practitioners and caregivers translated perceived pathologies into their fields of action?
Moving across fields of expertise and lived experience, this panel identifies multiple discourses related to well-being: psychiatric and biomedical paradigms; developmental logics that cast health as both an indicator of national progress and instrument of economic efficiency; welfare regimes that tied care to labor; and vernacular understandings of health and dignity. One paper will examine the relay between development and disease, focusing on agro-engineering interventions in Khuzestan. Meant to enhance national prosperity, sectoral productivity, and, eventually, the well-being of farming families, the introduction of perennial irrigation to a region traditionally dry farmed instead intensified the spread of schistosomiasis, complicating technocratic assumptions about health as a developmental outcome. Drawing on oral histories, another paper reconstructs perceptions of anger and abnormality in mid-twentieth-century Iran from the perspective of those caring for the sick.
Although the organizers' focus is on mid-twentieth-century Iran, papers related to any region and period of the late-19th- and 20th-century Middle East are welcome.
If you are interested in joining this session, please send a short abstract of 200-300 words to Bita Mousavi ([email protected]) and Saghar Bozorgi ([email protected]) by February 15, 2026.
Political Ecology in MENA Studies: Where Are We Now?
This roundtable examines the current state of political ecology in Middle East and North African studies. It welcomes scholars working across different regions, archives, and methodological traditions to reflect on how the field has analyzed the relationships between environment, power, and inequality in contexts shaped by colonialism, state formation, extraction, development, and conflict.
Conversation will focus on recent intellectual and methodological shifts such as attention to infrastructure, water, labor, extraction, and expertise, as well as ongoing tensions around interdisciplinarity, political commitment, and the place of political ecology within area studies and the environmental humanities. The aim is to foster an open, exploratory discussion about shared questions, emerging directions, and unresolved debates in the field
The format would be conversational rather than programmatic, with brief opening reflections from each participant followed by discussion.
If you are interested in joining this session, please reach out to Camilla Falanesca ([email protected]) by February 15th.
Translation, Ideology, and Representation in Middle East Studies
This panel focuses on translation as a central and constitutive practice in Middle East Studies, highlighting its role in shaping how the region is represented, interpreted, and understood in global academic, political, and cultural contexts. It moves beyond a purely linguistic view of translation and approaches it instead as an ideological and interpretive activity that actively mediates knowledge production about the Middle East.
Drawing on case studies from religious, literary, and political texts, the panel explores how translators’ positionality, institutional settings, and theoretical frameworks influence meaning-making and representation. Engaging with key debates in translation studies—such as domestication and foreignization, ideology in translation, and contextualist approaches—the panel foregrounds translation as a site of power, negotiation, and epistemological authority. Collectively, the papers emphasize that translation is not a neutral act, but a critical process that shapes cultural, theological, and political narratives about the Middle East.
Possible Paper Topics:
Ideology and lexical choice in English translations of the Qur’ān
Orientalist versus contemporary translations of Islamic texts
Translating political discourse in the Arab world
Rewriting Middle Eastern literature for Western audiences
Translation and interfaith dialogue
Translation and the construction of religious authority
Gender and ideology in the translation of Middle Eastern texts
Translating colonial archives and postcolonial memory
Translation, censorship, and self-censorship in authoritarian contexts
The politics of re-translation and canon formation
Translation and the global circulation of Middle Eastern knowledge
Translating sacred versus secular texts: methodological challenges
Paratexts (footnotes, prefaces, commentaries) and ideological framing
Machine translation and the future of Middle East knowledge production
Ethics and responsibility in translating culturally sensitive material
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Najlaa Aldeeb ([email protected]) by February 13th.
New “Normals”: Body Politics and Converging Crises
This roundtable places bodies and their politics at the center of the conversation. From the ongoing crisis of genocide in Gaza to the more mundane grinding processes of labor and life in late-stage capitalism, how do ‘new normals’ of embodied being bring disability, debility, and impairment to the center of contemporary studies of social life in Southwest Asia and North Africa? Work across critical disability studies, medical anthropology, and gender and women’s studies has charted how claims about “normal,” sutured to biomedical, legal, and social mechanisms of control, work to discipline and authorize bodies, subjectivities, and selves. Communities in Southwest Asia and North Africa are currently facing a maelstrom of co-occurring and sometimes contradictory demographic and epidemiological trends: longer life spans – and/or shorter; the transition to chronic and noncommunicable diseases – and/or the reemergence of formerly eradicated infections; obesity and comorbidities – and/or malnutrition and starvation. How do new (and/or old) politics of normal operate in these contexts? How are claims about normal bodyminds adapting - or falling apart – in the present moment, and what comes next?
If your work deals with questions of bodies and normals, and you are interested in contributing to the conversation, please send an abstract to [email protected] by February 15th at 11:59PM.
Note: This roundtable will lean into the format’s possibilities! Contributors should be prepared for an interactive dialogue with each other and the audience rather than a panel-in-all-but-name.
Romanticism and Nationalism in Arabic
What was Arabic romanticism? Conventional literary histories hold that it was an aesthetic movement with specific thematic and formal concerns spanning a period from about 1910 to about 1950, sandwiched between a set of works and writers called “neoclassical” and a set of works and writers called “modernist.” Cultural and intellectual historians, meanwhile, avoid the term and its Eurocentric implications, focusing instead on specific national, political, and social contexts, or on specific people, publications, and archives. And whereas studies of British and European Romanticism continue to reckon with the creation and propagation of Orientalism in the works of their major writers and institutions—many of the primary sources for Said’s Orientalism are key texts from British, French, and German Romanticism—less study has been devoted to the variegated uptake of Romantic poets, philosophers, critics, and politicians in Arabic-language sources.
This panel reopens the archive of Arabic Romantic poetry, philosophy, translation, literary criticism, and politics to ask if Romanticism was indeed a historically delimited literary movement, or if it might be better understood as an aesthetic and political sensibility permeating cultural production across the twentieth century and stretching even into the twenty-first. Topics examined could include:
- how Arabic-language writers from the North and South American Mahjar shifted poetic and political conversations in Egypt and the Mashriq
- the influence of German Romantic racial, ethnic, linguistic, and aesthetic ideas on pan-Arab cultural nationalism
- conservative politics and romantic poetics in interwar Egypt
- the presence of “romantic” aesthetics in so-called neoclassical or modernist works
- critical histories of and approaches to the translation of British and French romantic works into Arabic across the twentieth century
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Emily Drumsta ([email protected]) by February 14th.
Pedagogy under Pressure: Teaching the Middle East in the Contemporary University
Teaching courses on the history, politics, culture, and everyday life of the Middle East across disciplines has become an increasingly fraught endeavor amid intensifying political polarization, institutional scrutiny, and external pressures on university classrooms. Faculty are navigating student surveillance and recording concerns, donor and administrative intervention, and the emotional toll of teaching amid ongoing violence, destruction, and war. These challenges are especially acute in courses engaging Palestine/Israel and Gaza, urban life under occupation, and both contemporary and historical contexts such as Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey.
This roundtable convenes scholars from across disciplines to reflect on the pedagogical, institutional, and ethical challenges of teaching the Middle East today. Moving beyond abstract debates about academic freedom, participants foreground the everyday realities of teaching under political pressure. They share concrete classroom strategies, syllabus design choices, and institutional navigation tactics developed in response to heightened risk, constraint, and uncertainty.
The roundtable approaches pedagogy as both a vulnerable and a politically consequential site. Teaching is examined not simply as knowledge transmission, but as a practice deeply entangled with broader struggles over power, visibility, and silencing within Middle East studies and the contemporary university. Participants reflect on how curricular decisions, framing choices, and classroom dynamics are shaped by—and respond to—conditions of surveillance, polarization, and institutional oversight.
By centering lived teaching experiences, the roundtable highlights how pedagogy can also function as a form of resistance: challenging erasure, sustaining critical inquiry, and fostering solidarities within and beyond the classroom. In doing so, it affirms teaching as a critical arena in which alternative intellectual futures are not only imagined but deliberately sustained, even under conditions of pressure and constraint.
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Muna Guvenc ([email protected]) by February 12th.
Mentoring Undergraduate Research
I want to bring together people who can speak to their experiences in mentoring undergraduate research in the field of Middle East Studies. Some topics that we could explore is how do you encourage undergraduate research? How do you build students' confidence, especially if they are not proficient in a regional language? What standards do you/should we have for encouraging undergraduate research?
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Victoria Hightower ([email protected]) by February 12th.
This panel examines how imperial forms of rule were reassembled rather than abandoned across the transition from late Ottoman governance to mandate-era and early national projects. Moving beyond narratives of rupture, it foregrounds the mobility of people, violence, resources, and legal interpretations as central conditions through which power operated across imperial borderlands from the early nineteenth century through the interwar period.
Focusing on borderlands as key sites of imperial experimentation, the panel traces how technologies of violence––military funding, anti-colonial mobilization, auxiliary warfare, and illicit economies––circulated across regimes and were re-legitimated under new political orders. Rather than disappearing with the formal end of empire, these practices persisted through adaptable, mobile actors who mediated sovereignty, controlled movement, and authorized force at the margins of imperial rule.
One paper examines the early nineteenth-century Caucasus, focusing on the slave trade, borderland dynasties, and emerging environmental and mobility conflicts to show how illicit economies of violence were integral to both Ottoman and Russian imperial governance. A second paper traces late Ottoman refugee mobilization and auxiliary forces through pan-Islamic humanitarian and military discourse in the Balkan borderlands, demonstrating how care, protection, and solidarity functioned simultaneously as anti-imperial claims and as mechanisms of coercive governance. A third paper turns to the mandate period, analyzing how anti-colonial and Kemalist projects in Syria and Iraq reworked inherited imperial military, administrative, and ideological repertoires to assert legitimacy, sovereignty, and territorial claims beyond Anatolia.
Together, the panelists argue that empire persisted not through stable institutions, but through borderland practices of rule that shaped both anti-colonial struggle and early state formation
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Alika Zangieva ([email protected]) by February 12th.
Cultural Survival and Political Struggle, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Assyrian Studies
This panel brings together interdisciplinary research on the cultural survival and political struggles of Assyrians across the Middle East and global diasporas. Contributors examine how communities sustain language, heritage, and collective memory while navigating state power, displacement, and shifting regional orders. The panel highlights work from history, political science, anthropology, religious studies, literature, and related fields.
Papers explore how Assyrians negotiate identity, belonging, and representation under conditions shaped by war, migration, minority governance, and transnational activism. Presentations address themes such as cultural preservation, language revitalization, heritage destruction, memory practices, community institutions, legal status, and political mobilization. Scholars also analyze how local and diaspora networks influence advocacy, reconstruction, and claims to rights and recognition.
By placing cultural production alongside political structures, the panel bridges humanistic and social scientific approaches. Historical analysis appears alongside ethnography, archival research, policy analysis, and oral history. This combination offers a fuller account of how Assyrian communities respond to violence, marginalization, and demographic change while sustaining social continuity.
The panel contributes to broader debates on minority politics, indigeneity, forced migration, and post conflict reconstruction. It situates Assyrian experiences within regional and global frameworks while centering community perspectives, lived experience, and long term historical depth.
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Alexandra Lazar ([email protected]) by February 16th.
This panel invites scholarly contributions examining the intensification of political, diplomatic, and symbolic tensions between Algeria and France since 2019, with particular attention to national memory, postcolonial resentment, and psycho-nationalism as modes of governance. It situates these dynamics within the broader Mediterranean and North African geopolitical landscape, including Algeria’s regional rivalry with Morocco.
Since the election of Abdelmadjid Tebboune in the aftermath of the Hirak movement, Algerian–French relations have been marked by recurrent crises over colonial history, recognition, sovereignty, migration, and diaspora politics. Drawing on political theory and political psychology—especially Wendy Brown’s analysis of ressentiment as a governing logic (States of Injury) and Vamik Volkan’s work on large-group identity, trauma, and nationalist mobilization (Bloodlines)—as well as theoretical frameworks of ressentiment and political affect (Nietzsche; Max Scheler; Wendy Brown), memory and recognition (Paul Ricoeur; Axel Honneth; Ann Laura Stoler), and postcolonial state legitimacy (Achille Mbembe; Frantz Fanon), the panel interrogates the persistence—and limits—of resentment as a political framework.
The panel conceptualizes contemporary Algerian memory politics as a form of psycho-nationalism, understood as a mode of statecraft in which unresolved historical injury, victimhood, and suspicion toward internal and external enemies are continuously mobilized to sustain political legitimacy.
We particularly welcome papers examining the Algerian state’s treatment of political opponents based abroad, including writers, journalists, intellectuals, and activists, whose exile—often in France—has been reframed as a threat to national sovereignty. Contributions may also analyze the securitization of dissent through legal reforms, citizenship revisions, the criminalization of French colonialism, and the designation of the Mouvement pour l’Autodétermination de la Kabylie (MAK) as a terrorist organization.
The panel further invites research on migration and policing, including Franco-Algerian tensions over undocumented Algerian nationals, deportation disputes, visa regimes, and the postcolonial governance of mobility, as well as Algeria’s positioning within Mediterranean geopolitics.
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Youssef Yacoubi ([email protected]) by February 13th.
Reinventing the “Islamic Golden Age” in Mass Media
The fictionalization and dramatization of the Islamic past have had a prominent place in the media industries of the Middle East and North Africa. While the “Islamic Golden Age” is largely a Western construct, thinkers and creators from the region adopted, adapted, and rethought the term and its limitations in different ways. Major events and personalities associated with Islamic civilization took on portrayals informed by the historical moment of their making, from Jurji Zaydan’s historical novels (1891–1914), to Youssef Chahine’s film Saladin The Victorious (1963), the Turkish television drama The Magnificent Century (2011–2014), and many other artistic works.
This panel invites scholars to reflect on the making of Islamic historical characters, narratives, imagery, speech, and more—in Middle Eastern print, film, TV serials, or other forms of late 19th, 20th, and 21st century media (ex: video games, song and music etc.). By foregrounding mass media as a prominent site of collective memory and intellectual production, the panel seeks to investigate how premodern Islamicate cultures became prominent objects of nostalgia, debate, and contestation in the modern Middle East and North Africa, through various forms of representation and discursive practices.
Rather than passively reproducing a Eurocentric historical framework, modern Middle Eastern cultural producers invested the Islamic past with new meanings shaped by local political, ideological, and aesthetic concerns. We welcome contributors to analyze how articulations of the premodern Islamic past corresponded with colonial encounters, nationalism, religious revivalism, authoritarian politics, the rise of different forms of media, and more. We welcome proposals centering any language or culture of the Middle East and North Africa.
If you would like to join the panel, please reach out to Alaa Murad ([email protected]) and Egor Korneev ([email protected]) by February 10, 2026.
Americans on the Ground in the Early Twentieth-Century Middle East
This proposed panel calls for original research on overlooked American individuals who lived in the Middle East and interacted with local populations in the early twentieth century.
American on-the-ground figures such as educators, intellectuals, aid workers, missionaries and medical personnel were present in many Middle Eastern countries during this period. They interacted with people from all walks of life, witnessed profound political, economic, social, and cultural developments, and navigated national and local authorities as well as expatriate communities of their own countrymen and other foreign nationals.Their experiences provide fresh insights into the histories of the countries in which they lived and worked, as well as into evolving American perceptions of the Middle Eastern peoples, governments and cultures.
I kindly invite papers on the experiences of Americans on the ground who have not received sufficient attention in the existing scholarship. Original works based on archival documents and other types of primary sources are especially welcome. I myself plan to contribute a paper on an American aid worker in Turkey in the early twentieth century.
Please send a paper title, 200–250 word abstract, and a brief bio to Ahmet Akturk ([email protected]) by February 10.
This round table explores how racial, religious, and ethnic differences have been materially produced, experienced, and negotiated in the Middle East and North Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While more common frameworks of difference are often discussed in terms of sectarianism or racialization, we are interested in considering how these frameworks overlap through the prism of materialities.
We accept the recent invitation of scholars such as Maya Mikdashi’s sextarianism (2022) intervention to consider how gender and sect are inseparable categories of difference to Lara Deeb’s observation that far from just designating religious difference, sectarianism “can be molded to any meaning…often referring to socioeconomic class, or village versus urban differences, or political disagreements, or some other issue (Love Across Difference, 2024). We seek to approach these dynamics by centering bodies, objects, infrastructures, spaces, technologies, and everyday practices through which hierarchies and distinctions were lived and contested throughout the modern period.
In addition to the proposed MESA round table, participants will also have the opportunity to submit their contributions to a special essays section on the same theme for the Arab Studies Journal.
We are particularly interested in cultivating conversations that foreground under-examined communities, identities, geographies, and relational spaces, including but not limited to:
Sudan and Sudanese histories across the MENA
Indian Ocean and Gulf connectivities (especially Yemen, Oman, and the Red Sea)
Indigeneity and the environment
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit a draft abstract (200-300 words) to Amy Fallas ([email protected]) and Alaa Murad ([email protected]) by February 10th.
Teaching MES in Different Generations: Culture Wars and Geopolitics
Middle East Studies' current feelings of being besieged harkens back to the early 21st century, post-Iraq/Afghanistan invasions period. However, we know that earlier generations of academics faced similar challenges: In the 1970s, with Said's Orientialism, in the late 1980s with the Palestinian Intifada, or in the early 1990s after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. As someone who came of age during 9/11, my teaching is strongly informed by that particular moment, but I recognize that the academic generations after me have different moments that impacted them. With MESA turning 60, this might be a good time to reflect on how the various iterations of the academic culture wars have intersected with geopolitics to produce academics with different sets of skills and perspectives.
I would like to put together a roundtable or a panel that considers these issues.
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Victoria Hightower ([email protected]) by February 5th.
This panel brings together scholars working on gender, law, crime, and narrative in the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey to examine criminality as a central site for negotiating agency, authority, and social transformation. Positioned at the intersection of legal history and literary and cultural studies, the panel proposes crime as a productive lens through which themes and periodization can be extended from the legal, social and women's history to the history of literature with a sustained focus on gender and agency in the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey.
The panel explores how crime and punishment shaped—and were shaped by—changing conceptions of gender, morality, citizenship, and modernity through legal cases, court records, criminal literature, newspapers, memoirs, and fiction, Panel contributions analyze how women and men appeared as legal subjects, defendants, victims, narrators, and authors, and how their voices were mediated, constrained, or reconfigured through juridical discourse and narrative form.
The panel highlights how narratives of transgression articulated anxieties surrounding reform, family, sexuality, and state authority through tracing continuities and shifts across imperial and early republican contexts, while also opening spaces for the performance and negotiation of agency. Special attention is given to the movement between legal and literary domains: how courtroom practices informed narrative conventions, and how literary representations reimagined legal categories, moral regimes, and subject positions. This panel demonstrates how gender and agency provide a unifying framework for rethinking the relationship between law, literature, and social order in the transition from empire to nation-state by extending the study of crime beyond legal archives to literary and cultural texts. In doing so, it offers new perspectives on periodization, narrative, and the making of modern subjectivities in late Ottoman and early Republican Turkey.
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Gizem Sivri ([email protected]) by February 10th.
Narrating and Performing Intertwined Memories
The concept of historical memory occupies a central position in modern Arab cultural production. While often narrated or performed in relation to a personal experience or incident, the narrated/performed event or situation often involves recalling other histories and lived experiences that marked the lives of other communities and shaped their destinies in the past. Modern Arab writers and artists have explored the impact of shared and collective memory on individual experience and identity through diverse genres and forms. This exploration occurs through diverse formulations techniques that link present individual memory to past histories embedded in distinct social, political and cultural contexts. This panel invites proposals for papers that explore the diverse and complex intersections between personal and collective memory/identity as well as the various articulations of how intertwined memories/histories are narrated and performed in Arabic literature and arts.
Papers may address issues such as:
-construction and persistence of collective memory
-coexistence of different, sometimes conflicting, memories and histories
-transfer of cultural legacies through intergenerational storytelling and dialogue
- integrating past experiences into present-day fictional writing and performance
-overlapping and juxtaposed temporalities and experiences
-narrating and performing continuities and ruptures
-interconnected histories and intertwined memories across genres
Accepted abstracts will be included in a proposed panel for the 2026 Middle East Studies Association annual conference that will be held in Boston, MA (USA) from November 21-24, 2026.
For consideration, please send a 250-300-word abstract and a short bio to Ahmed Idrissi ([email protected]) by Saturday, February 14, 2026.
Exclusions, Boundaries, and Hierarchies in Late Ottoman Mobilities and Translations
The past few decades have witnessed a growing interest in mobilities, translations, and textual circulations in the late Ottoman world to draw attention to its multiple forms of connectivity, as testified by influential volumes such as Ottoman Translations and projects such as "Ottoman Mobilities." These works played a pivotal role in overcoming the nationalistic frameworks through which we have become accustomed to analyzing the late Ottoman Empire. While drawing upon this scholarship, the panel takes another direction and calls for papers that analyze how late Ottoman translations and mobilities could have also contributed to various forms of canonization and boundary formation that took shape even before the emergence of post-Ottoman nation-states.
We are interested in papers that pay attention to the formation and solidification of various identities in late Ottoman literatures, travel writings, translation networks. These papers will also contribute to the recent tendency to undermine the rupture narrative that claims that the demise of the Ottoman Empire created a complete epistemic, cultural, and political upheaval in the Middle East, the Balkans, and North Africa (Rappas and Wick 2025). Furthermore, we wish to complicate typical assessments of Orientalism, which often foreground the rising Western colonial hegemony as the main culprit behind the solidification of hierarchies in the late Ottoman world. Without overlooking the key role that this colonial hegemony played in shaping the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman realities, we seek papers on sources in diverse languages, such as Greek, Arabic, Turkish, and French, that study how late Ottoman translations and mobilities may have prepared the ground for post-Ottoman hierarchies and boundaries among different national, linguistic, gender, literary, and religious communities.
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to C. Ceyhun Arslan ([email protected]) and Esra Taşdelen ([email protected]) by February 10th.
Across Empires and Settler Frontiers: Middle East and Indigenous History in Dialogue
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- Arab/Middle Eastern migration and diaspora in relation to Indigenous presence and dispossession
- Comparative approaches to settler colonialism, racialization, and imperial formation
- US empire and militarization across Native America, the Middle East / Southwest Asia, and Southeast Asia
- Transnational solidarities and political movements
- Aesthetic inquiry into literature, film, art, or music engaging Middle Eastern-Indigenous intersections
- Resource extraction and critical ecology
- Methodological/theoretical interventions bridging the two fields
We welcome papers from diverse disciplinary perspectives including (but not limited to) history, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies.
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Rana Razek ([email protected]) and Phoebe Carter ([email protected]) by February 6th.
From Word to Form: Material Poetics in Middle Eastern Art and Literature
This panel explores how artistic and literary works from the Middle East transform language into material form, and objects into sites of meaning. Bringing together perspectives from literature, art history, and visual culture, the papers examine how words exceed the page, becoming texture, structure, and embodied experience through media such as poetry, calligraphy, sculpture, and mixed forms. Focusing on materiality as a poetic strategy, the panel highlights how artists and writers engage tradition, modernity, and cultural memory by making language visible, tangible, and spatial.
The session seeks papers that move beyond technical discussions of health systems to critically analyze data as a political and institutional practice. Particular attention is given to how parallel humanitarian systems interact with weakened state institutions, how data shapes governance and accountability, and how international actors influence what counts as credible evidence. While Yemen is a core reference point, comparative and regional perspectives are strongly encouraged, including work on Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Lebanon, or diasporic contexts.
We welcome interdisciplinary approaches from public health, political science, development studies, anthropology, sociology, and Middle East studies. Possible themes include (but are not limited to): fragmentation and coordination of health information systems; localization and data sovereignty; ethics and power in humanitarian evidence; digital health in crisis settings; and the long-term implications of crisis-driven data practices for post-conflict recovery and state reconstitution.
The session aims to foster dialogue between scholars and practitioners and to situate health data within broader debates on governance, humanitarianism, and statehood in the Middle East.
Potential topics:
National antiquities services and their relationships to legal structures around sales and export of heritage items
Conflict between private dealers and collectors and state heritage laws and/or organizations
National or international political ramifications of antiquities trade and exchange
Changes in laws regarding legal ownership and export of heritage objects, and the motivating factors instigating such changes
Time period and range: We encourage papers that focus on the period from the mid-19th century (~1850) through the end of WWII (~1950).
Send a 200-250 word abstract, including your affiliation, to Dr Ceren Abi at ([email protected]) to be a part of this panel with Dr Ellaine Sullivan and Dr Artemis Papatheodorou by January 30, 2026. All applicants will be informed of the committee decision by February 8, 2026.
At the intersection of ecologies and power, architecture in the modern Middle East has served as both blueprint and bulldozer for ecological transformation. This session investigates how the political projects of modernization, whether colonial, nationalist, or developmentalist, manifested through radical reconfigurations of land and water, with architecture operating as the primary medium through which abstract political ambitions took material form.
From the Nile's disciplining through the Aswan High Dam to the draining of Iraqi marshlands, architecture and infrastructure became instruments of political ecology, the assertion of state power through environmental mastery. Yet these projects were competing visions of progress and tradition, East and West, scarcity and abundance. They promised to settle nomads and modernize peasants, to transform subjects into citizens through the transformation of territory itself.
This session seeks papers that critically examine these hydropolitical modernities and their architectural expressions. We are particularly interested in work that: traces the circulation of ecological expertise and imaginaries across imperial and postcolonial networks; recovers suppressed or alternative environmental knowledges; analyzes the spatial logics through which ecological interventions were represented and legitimized; explores the unintended consequences and enduring legacies of modernist environmental schemes; or examines contemporary practices that reckon with the ruins and residues of twentieth-century ecological modernization.
We welcome historically grounded work that spans from the late Ottoman period through the present, with emphasis on the eastern Mediterranean and adjacent inland territories. Methodologically, we encourage approaches that draw on architecture and environmental history, political ecology, postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies to illuminate how architecture has mediated between political aspiration and ecological reality in one of the world's most environmentally contested regions.
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Joelle Deeb ([email protected]) by February 14th.
New Directions in Language and Culture Pedagogy: Critical and Innovative Approaches
This panel brings together scholars and educators to examine emerging approaches to language and culture pedagogy in mixed and foreign language classrooms. In response to shifting student demographics, rapid technological change, and increasing calls to critically reevaluate curricular models, the panel explores how innovative teaching practices are transforming language and culture instruction. The panel highlights approaches that move beyond traditional grammar-driven and textbook-centered instruction to foreground communicative competence, intercultural awareness, and critical engagement. Panelists emphasize the integration of culture as a lived, dynamic, and contested process, encouraging students to critically reflect on issues of power, identity, representation, and social context. As a result, language classrooms are framed as sites where linguistic development intersects with questions of power, identity, representation, and social context, encouraging students to engage critically with cultural and historical narratives.
Drawing on a range of institutional settings and instructional modalities, including face-to-face, hybrid, and virtual learning environments, the panel showcases innovative curriculum design and classroom practices. Topics include the use of authentic and multimodal materials, project-based and experiential learning, virtual exchange and transnational collaboration, and community-engaged pedagogies. Panelists also discuss assessment strategies that align with these approaches and reflect on the opportunities and constraints educators face when implementing pedagogical innovation within existing institutional structures. In addition to sharing classroom-based practices, the panel engages with key theoretical frameworks such as critical language pedagogy, inclusive teaching, and decolonial approaches to curriculum design. By connecting theory with pedagogical practice, the panel offers adaptable models for diverse languages, proficiency levels, and educational contexts.
Overall, this panel contributes to ongoing conversations within MESA on the role of pedagogy in shaping knowledge production and student engagement, inviting participants to consider how critical and innovative approaches can better prepare students to navigate complex cultural realities in an interconnected world.
Archiving queer and trans world-building in Turkey and its diasporas
This panel invites consideration of the recent surge in various archival practices that inform queer cultural production in Turkey and its diasporas. It also seeks to initiate a discussion around the growing relevance and consequent vicissitudes of turning archival in queer and trans studies of the Middle East against the backdrop of various contesting discourses, most significantly the one of tightening cisheteropatriarchal authoritarianism, which has been squarely framing queer and trans issues as inauthentic imports that otherwise have no footing within non-Western settings. We invite participants whose work focuses on queer and trans issues and includes an archival dimension, either as objects or as subjects of analysis. Ethnographic methodologies have largely informed the major studies of queer and trans issues in Turkey over the last decades. One of our aims is to broaden this methodological toolkit by incorporating literary tools such as aesthetic inquiry, performance analysis, close reading, archival excavation, and textual analysis. In connection with this methodological expansion, our panel invites consideration of dimensions such as aesthetics, creativity, imagination, desire, and affect as fundamental components of queer and trans experience and of its political significance in Turkey and its diasporas. By turning our attention to queer and trans archives and archivists, our aim is not to establish fixed, identitarian notions of queer/trans archives. To the contrary, we aim to explore how and in what ways the peculiarities of queer and trans experiences in Turkey push for a reconsideration of the limits of archives. To that end, we adopt a flexible notion of the archive and the archival, which is constantly being done and undone, and figures as an ever-changing and shifting repository informed not by taxonomies and hegemonic orders of knowledge, but rather by the affects and desires of their minoritarian subjects.
If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Enis Demirer ([email protected]) by February 10th.