MEC Friday Webinar. This is a recording of a live webinar held on 15th October 2021 for the first episode of the MEC Friday Seminar Michaelmas Term 2021 series on the overall theme of The Environment and The Middle East.  Oxford academics Dr Michael Willis, Professor Walter Armbrust, Dr Laurent Mignon and Dr Usaama al-Azami reflect upon how issues of the Environment relate to their own research.

Dr Michael J. Willis is Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford and King Mohammed VI Fellow in Moroccan and Mediterranean Studies. His research interests focus on the politics, modern history and international relations of the central Maghreb states (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco). He is the author of Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Islamist Challenge in Algeria: A Political History (Ithaca and New York University Press, 1997) and co-editor of Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring: Triumphs and Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Professor Walter Armbrust is a Hourani Fellow and Professor in Modern Middle Eastern Studies. He is a cultural anthropologist, and author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (1996); Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution (2019); and various other works focusing on popular culture, politics and mass media in Egypt. He is editor of Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (2000).

Dr Laurent Mignon is Associate Professor of Turkish language and literature at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Antony’s College and Affiliate Professor at the Luxembourg School of Religion and Society. His research focuses on the minor literatures of Ottoman and Republican Turkey, in particular Jewish literatures, as well as the literary engagement with non-Abrahamic religions during the era straddling the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. In March and April 2019, he was invited as Visiting Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He is an Associate Member of the Centre de Recherche Europes-Eurasie at INALCO, Paris. His newest publications are:

Uncoupling Language and Religion: An Exploration into the Margins of Turkish Literature, Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021. https://www.academicstudiespress.com/ottomanandturkishstudies/uncoupling-language-and-religion
Alberto Ambrosio and Laurent Mignon (ed.), Penser l'islam en Europe: Perspectives du Luxembourg et d'ailleurs, Paris: Hermann, 2021.
https://www.editions-hermann.fr/livre/9791037005472

Dr Usaama al-Azami is Departmental Lecturer in Contemporary Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford. He read his BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford and his MA and PhD in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Alongside his university career, he also pursued Islamic studies in seminarial settings in which he has also subsequently taught. He has travelled extensively throughout the Middle East, living for five years in the region. Usaama al-Azami is primarily interested in the interaction between Islam and modernity with a special interest in modern developments in Islamic political thought. His latest book, Islam and the Arab Revolutions: Ulama Between Democracy and Autocracy (Hurst Publishers, October 2021; Oxford University Press, USA, forthcoming 2022) looks at the way in which influential Islamic scholars responded to the Arab uprisings of 2011 through 2013. His broader interests extend to a range of disciplines from the Islamic scholarly tradition from the earliest period of Islam down to the present.

Roundtable: The Environment and the Middle East

Speaker: Professor Robert Springborg (Italian Institute of International Affairs, Rome)
Recorded on: Friday, 3 November 2017
Edited by: Anne Kimunguyi
First published: 16 November 2017

About the speaker:
Robert Springborg is a non-resident Research Fellow of the Italian Institute of International Affairs, Rome. Until October 2013, he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, and Program Manager for the Middle East for the Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2002 until 2008, he held the MBI Al Jaber Chair in Middle East Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he also served as Director of the London Middle East Institute. Before taking up that Chair, he was Director of the American Research Center in Egypt, University Professor of Middle East Politics at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia; and assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also taught at King’s College, London; University of California, Berkeley; the College of Europe; the Paris School of International Affairs of Sciences Po; and the University of Sydney. In 2016, he was Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar, Middle East Initiative, Kennedy School, and Harvard University. 

His publications include Mubarak’s Egypt: Fragmentation of the Political Order; Family Power and Politics in Egypt; Legislative Politics in the Arab World (co-authored with Abdo Baaklini and Guilain Denoeux); Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East first and second editions, (co-authored with Clement M. Henry); Oil and Democracy in Iraq; Development Models in Muslim Contexts: Chinese, ‘Islamic’ and Neo-Liberal Alternatives and several editions of Politics in the Middle East (co-authored with James A. Bill). He co-edited a volume on popular culture and political identity in the Gulf that appeared in 2008. He has published in the leading Middle East journals and was the founder and regular editorialist for The Middle East in London, a monthly journal that commenced publication in 2003. His new book -‘Egypt’ has just been published in October 2017 by Polity Press.

MEC Seminar: Governing Divided Egypt

Speaker:Yael Zerubavel (Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and History, Rutgers University)
Chair: Professor Yaacov Yadgar (Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies, St Anne's)
Series: Middle East Centre Friday Seminar Series
Joint event with The Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA)

About the seminar:

At once an ecological phenomenon and a cultural construction, the desert has varied associations in Zionist and Israeli culture. Yael Zerubavel tells the story of the desert from the early twentieth century to the present, shedding light on romantic-mythical associations, settlement and security concerns, environmental sympathies, and the commodifying tourist gaze. Drawing on literary narratives, educational texts, newspaper articles, tourist materials, films, popular songs, posters, photographs, and cartoons, Zerubavel reveals the complexities and contradictions that mark Israeli society’s semiotics of space in relation to the Middle East, and the central role of the “besieged island” trope in Israeli culture and politics. The talk draws on the new book published by Stanford University Press (2019). 

About the speaker:

Dr. Zerubavel is Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and History and served as the Founding Director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Study at Rutgers University. She is a scholar of memory studies with an expertise in modern Israeli society and culture. Utilising an interdisciplinary approach that informs both her teaching and writing, her work explores collective memory and identity, national myths, the transformation of traditions, war and trauma, and cultural perceptions of space, drawing on historical sources, Hebrew literature, educational materials, popular and folkloric forms, as well as in-depth interviews. Her work addresses the impact of nationalism, secularisation, immigration and dislocation, the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the reshaping of Jewish memory in Israel and developments within Israeli culture.

Yael Zerubavel is the author of the award-winning book, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Desert in the Promised Land (Stanford University Press, 2019), and is currently working on another book manuscript entitled Biblical Reenactments: The Performance of Antiquity in Israeli Culture. She has served on the boards of the Association for Jewish Studies and the association for Israel Studies and on the editorial boards of key journals in the field of Israel Studies.

Recorded on: 10 May 2019
First Published: 3 June 2019
Edited by: Kaja Wawrzak(MEC)

Desert in the Promised Land: The Politics and Semiotics of Space in Israeli Culture

St Antony’s College, Oxford University, is a world-renowned centre for research and teaching in global and regional issues. The College provides an interdisciplinary environment to study a range of subjects from development to international relations. St Antony's houses seven research centres focused on Africa, Asia, Europe, Japan, Latin America, the Middle East, Russia and Eurasia as well as programmes on North America, Burma, Morocco, Sudan and Taiwan. In our regional centres and programmes we use insights and methods from both social sciences and the humanities to deepen our understanding of the key parts of the world. The work done here helps to inform public debate and public policy.

Our Fellows, students and visiting researchers include leading experts on the regions of the world and on issues of global and transnational importance. Each year we host visiting experts from the world’s leading universities and think tanks and from such fields as diplomacy, journalism, business, and politics. Our select group of more than 450 graduate students are among the best and the brightest, representing all the continents.

Roundtable: The Environment and the Middle East

St Antony's College, Oxford

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