The MESA Global Academy is an interdisciplinary initiative sustaining essential research collaborations and knowledge production among MENA-focused scholars from the Middle East and North Africa and their counterparts outside the region. By awarding competitive scholarships to displaced scholars from the MENA region currently located in North America to attend meetings, workshops, and conferences, the project harnesses the strengths of MESA’s institutional and individual members to support the careers of individual researchers who study the Middle East and North Africa, but whose academic trajectory has been adversely affected by developments in their home countries.
Organized by Asli Bali, UCLA, Beth Baron, CUNY, Mimi Kirk, MESA, Greta Scharnweber, NYU, and Judith Tucker, Georgetown University.
In this special session, 2020-2021 Global Academy scholars present their research and serve as discussants on two panels:
Approaches to Governance Through an Islamist Lens
Chair: Brinkley Messick, Columbia University
Discussant: Issam Eido, Vanderbilt University
Utku Balaban, Amherst College Industrial Islamism in Turkey
Nihat Celik, San Diego State University Islamic Humanitarian NGOs in Turkey
Masoud Noori Islam and Human Rights: What Could/Should be Understood from the Qur’an?
Ottoman Legacies in the Post-Ottoman Era
Chair: Holly Shissler, University of Chicago
Discussant: Sumercan Bozkurt-Gungen, Simon Fraser University
Melissa Bilal, University of Chicago The "Other" Ottoman Feminists: Repatriating Armenian Women's Intellectual Legacy
Dilsa Deniz, UC San Diego Turkish Islamic Synthesis: A Frame for Post-Ottoman Identity Politics of the Turkish Republic
Evren Altinkas, University of Guelph Continuity Between the Committee of Union and Progress and the Kemalist Regime - The Role of Karakoll