Himmat Zoubi (EUME Fellow 2018-21) talk on “ “Columbus in Ha(y)ifa”—Destruction, Erasure, Re-placement and the Making of the Israeli Mixed City” was held in the framework of the virtual EUME Berliner Seminar on 8 July 2020. The talk was chaired by Diana Abbani (EUME Fellow 2018-20).

The 1948 Nakba and establishing the state of Israel did not mark neither the end of the erasure of Palestinian space, nor it marked the completion of the Zionist project. This talk will discuss spatial transformation in the city of Haifa during the first years following the Nakba. It will focus on the destruction of Haifa Al-Jadida (New Haifa) during the “Shikmona operation” and the erasure of street Arabic names in the city. It will argue that destruction, erasure and replacement were key elements in the making of the Israeli mixed cities.

Himmat Zoubi:  “Columbus in Ha(y)ifa”— the Making of the Israeli Mixed City

Zeynep Türkyilmaz (EUME Fellow 2017–21) and Yektan Türkyilmaz (EUME Fellow 2017–21)talk on “ Violent Times: How to Study the Armenian and Dersim Genocides” was held in the framework of the virtual EUME Berliner Seminar on 22 April 2020.

This panel discussion will address epistemological, ethical, and methodological predicaments and fallacies that arise in genocide studies under pressures of systematic denialism. It analyzes scholarly accounts of the Armenian (1915–1917) and Dersim (1937–1938) catastrophes—two cases the study of which has been tainted for decades by aggressive denialism in Turkey.  Building on disciplines of anthropology and history, and drawing on a variety of source ranging from archival documents to ethnographic engagements, this panel will demonstrate how eclipsing denialisms have trapped contemporary studies of the Armenian and Dersim Genocides into dichotomies (victim vs. perpetrator, heroism vs. betrayal, ethnic vs. religious, rebellion vs. compliance).

Zeynep Türkyilmaz & Yektan Türkyilmaz: Violent Times: How to Study the Armenian and Dersim Genocides

Chloé Kattar (EUME Fellow 2021/22)talk on “ Right-Wing Internationalism beyond the North-South Divide: The Political Thought of Charles Malik” was held in the framework of the virtual EUME Berliner Seminar on 24 Nov 2021. The talk was chaired by Jeffrey G. Karam (Lebanese American University / EUME Fellow of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung 2021-22).

The presentation will explore the career and thought of Lebanese diplomat, stateman and philosopher Charles Malik, while inscribing him in a broader constellation of conservative ideas and intellectuals between the 1970s-2000s.

Chloé Kattar:  Right-Wing Internationalism beyond the North-South Divide: Charles Malik

Eman Elnemr (EUME Fellow 2021/22) talk on “Modernism, Licentiousness, Rebellion: Egypt in the First Half of the Twentieth Century” was held in the framework of the virtual EUME Berliner Seminar on 19 January 2022. The talk was chaired by  Samuli Schielke (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient). 

The talk was held in Arabic. A translation into English was provided by Sara Mourad (AUB / EUME Fellow 2021/22).

In her talk, Eman Elnemr will discuss parts of her research on khala‘a, translated as licentiousness or obscenity practiced by women, as a central concept of modernization and rebellion in Egypt during the first half of the 20th century. She calls for a critical interrogation of a problematic concept that obscures violence and at the same time involves rebellion and desire. She argues that therefore it is necessary to understand the historical legacies that have shaped the concept in its strongly normative (pejorative) use in public discourse, daily conduct, and religious and political power today.
 The noun khala’a and the adjective khali‘ are derived from the Arabic verb khala‘ which means taking away, letting go, undressing, releasing. In modern use, khala‘a and khali‘ carry a variety of connotations, the foremost of which is the call to debauchery and sex trade. Eman Elnemr’s research project focuses on practices of licentiousness (khala‘a), starting from the assumption that it is a concept and a practice open to many interpretations, including defensive ploys and rebellion against patriarchal structures, whether social, religious, or political. It examines whether these practices can be understood as anti-bourgeois modernization, a space that enhances the possibilities for solidarity among people of different class, gender and religion.

Eman Elnemr:  Modernism, Licentiousness, Rebellion: Egypt in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

Rim Naguib (EUME Fellow 2019-23) talk on “ Al-Misyu al-Mushaghib: The Life of Joseph Rosenthal Through Colonialism, Nationalism and Postcoloniality in Egypt ” was held in the framework of the virtual EUME Berliner Seminar on 4 May 2022. The talk was chaired by  Sana Tannoury-Karam (EUME Fellow 2020-22).
Joseph Rosenthal (1871-1964) is known to historians of early Egyptian communism as a central figure in the birth of the movement. However, his contribution to the formation and activities of the first Egyptian communist party lasted a mere 3 years—even less—in his 94-year long life! In the course of her research into the history of British colonial policing of socialism, communism and syndicalism, and how it shaped post-colonial policies, nationalist narratives, and Egyptian nationality legislation and practices, Rim Naguib kept finding threads leading back to Rosenthal in various archives and literatures. The more she traced his life story and intellectual and personal trajectory, the more she found his biography to be a powerful testimony of the conflicting forces that shaped the modern history of Egypt and the region: between nationalism and internationalism; sectarianism and universalism; statism and anti-authoritarianism…
In this seminar, Naguib will share her ongoing attempt to reconstitute Joseph Rosenthal’s intriguing trajectory, and to reflect on what it was like to be an Ashkenazi Jew born in Palestine in the 19th century; a Hasidic teenager son of an ostracized proponent of the Jewish enlightenment movement; a Jewish migrant artisan in Beirut, then Cairo and Alexandria, who came to be critical to all religions’ condoning of class hierarchies and exploitation; an Ottoman anarcho-syndicalist with a transnational agenda of solidarity and activism at the turn of the century; a communist and a syndicalist in the context of rising interwar Egyptian nationalism; a Jew struggling to have his Egyptian nationality recognized and his voting rights granted in post-war Egypt; and finally, an aging man who persisted in living through the loss of everything.

Rim Naguib: Al-Misyu al-Mushaghib: The Life of Joseph Rosenthal

Alia Mossallam (EUME Fellow 2017-2023), and Yassin al-Haj Saleh (Writer / 2019 EUME Fellow) held a bi-lingual reading of Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s most recent book “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated”. The event, titled “Have We Not Yet Been Defeated? — On Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s Writings from Egypt’s Revolution and Prison”, was held in the framework of the weekly EUME Berliner Seminar on 19 October 2022.

The writings of iconic Egyptian activist and writer Alaa Abd el-Fattah have raised crucial questions and introduced a new language to issues such as prison abolitionism in Egypt, the universality and interconnectedness of our struggles across borders, and our way forward after defeat. Today, and on his 9th year in prison and 201st day of hunger strike, we honour Alaa’s belief that ‘there is no chance in individual salvation’, and take it to the broader understanding of the individual, the local and the national. With the release of the Arabic version of Alaa’s book “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated” (2022), entitled “Shabah al-rabie” (Ghost of Spring), we will read extracts of his book and engage with his ideas on the space for struggle after defeat, and the language with which to document imprisonment and revolution. In Alaa’s own words:
“They can no longer successfully seclude and discipline bodies; we hear the lament of prisoners, albeit faintly. The outlawing of the bodies of prisoners and their loved ones and the expanded construction and filling of prisons are merely an attempt to subdue rebellious bodies, even if their rebellion involved no more than declaring their pain. Now we must ask ourselves in all seriousness: How do we protect our children’s bodies from this legacy of prisons? The solution does not stop with the release of detainees. It starts with release, but must end with an imaginative vision for the erasure of prisons, not prisoners.” (From: ‘A personal introduction to viciousness in enmity’, Mada Masr, 2019).

For more information, please have a look here: https://tinyurl.com/5cbmm6c9

Alia Mossallam & Yassin al-Haj Saleh: Have We Not Yet Been Defeated? On Alaa Abdel-Fattah's Writings

Diana Abbani's (EUME Fellow 2020-23) talk on “Unfortunately, it wasn't Paradise: On Mahmoud Darwish’s Sung Poems” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 19 April 2023. The talk was chaired by Rasha Chatta (Freie Universität Berlin / EUME Fellow 2017-21).

Searching for meanings of homeland, identity and history, many Lebanese and Palestinians living in Lebanon during the last century turned to committed political songs. Mahmoud Darwish’s poems were at the heart of this musical production, especially through Marcel Khalife’s songs. Together, they formed a musical and poetic duality that deeply marked the leftist discourse and its political commitments. But as time passed, those songs and their lyrics lost their meaning. They were no longer desired on the streets or in people’s imaginations. They became associated with a historical period that lost its aura, or with oppressive regimes that adopted these songs and the Palestinian cause while crushing its people. They were also linked to a world dominated by men and in which poetry and music enhanced masculinity and gender bias. The idealistic images depicted in Mahmoud Darwish's poems were shattered in many places, as poverty, loss, and oppression increased.

For more information, please have a look here: https://tinyurl.com/dyrbxf59

Diana Abbani: Unfortunately, it wasn't Paradise: On Mahmoud Darwish’s Sung Poems

Sana Tannoury-Karam (Lebanese American University / EUME Fellow 2020-23) talk on “The Soviet Union as ‘Future’: The Socialist Imaginary of Lebanese Leftists, 1920-1948” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 24 May 2023. The talk was chaired Oraib Toukan (EUME Fellow 2020-23).

Omar Fakhoury (1895-1946), a Lebanese intellectual and literary critic, published an article inal-Tariq in 1943 arguing for the Soviet Union as “the cornerstone for building a new world…for building a new humanity.” That entire March issue of al-Tariq, a journal established as the mouthpiece of the League Against Nazism and Fascism in Syria and Lebanon in 1941, was dedicated to the anniversary of the Red Army. Boasting a portrait of Joseph Stalin at the front page, the issue featured a range of articles from intellectuals within the League and the circles of the Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon praising the prowess of the Red Army and enumerating Soviet society’s advancements in medicine, social and economic development, literature, and military power.
For a generation of Arab leftist intellectuals active during the interwar years and particularly during World War Two, the Soviet Union represented a ‘miraculous’ case of modernization, a success story of a country that managed to rapidly modernize and even exceed the levels of development of western nations. Its trajectory since 1917 represented a model for progress achieved through socialism and internationalism. Standing firmly against western colonialism, and steadily against the Nazi war machine, the Soviet Union became the model for a modern Arab future. The Soviet Union as ‘future’ was not only a temporal construct as much as it was a spatial framework through which Arab intellectuals shifted modernization discourses of the Nahda from west-east dimensions to east-east imaginaries.

For more information, please have a look here: https://shorturl.at/dzJPX

Sana Tannoury-Karam: The Socialist Imaginary of Lebanese Leftists, 1920-1948

Himmat Zoubi (EUME Fellow 2018-23) talk on “Haifa 1948: The Unmaking of the Palestinian City and the Struggle for Democratic Urban Governance ” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 21 June 2023. The talk was chaired by Hashem Abushama (University of Oxford / EUME Fellow 2023-25)

What can a focus on Haifa reveal about Palestinian life and representative politics before, during, and in the wake of the Nakba? How can centering Palestinians in Haifa help us understand how everyday people shape urban life in opposition to and in contention with imperial, colonial, and settler colonial power?  This talk is based on a chapter in a book project entitle, “De-Urbanizing Palestine: Transforming Hayfa into Haifa (1948-1953)”, (the term Hayfa is used to distinguish between pre-1948 Hayfa and post-occupation Haifa) which answers these questions by exploring Palestinian political representations in the city of Hayfa-Haifa from late Ottoman rule until the first few years following the Nakba. By mapping the trajectories of Palestinian’s urban political representation in the city, it explores the dialectical relations between imperial and colonial powers on the one hand and local political traditions on the other. Illustrating the dialectical relation between external and domestic powers, this chapter offers a unique lens on governance, collectivity, and modernity. This talk will mainly focus on 1948 Haifa and will reveals settler colonialism as a rupture in envisioning, shaping, and practicing representational governance and self-rule in urban geographies in Palestine.

For more information, please have a look here: https://shorturl.at/dgqU5

Himmat Zoubi: Haifa 1948 The Unmaking of the Palestinian City

Alia Mossallam (EUME Fellow 2017-23) in conversation with Adam Benkato (UC Berkeley) on “Can the Colonial Archive be a Source of Anti-Colonial Struggle? Listening to Recorded Voices of North African Prisoners of War in the Berliner Lautarchiv” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 14 June 2023.

Sometimes our only access to a source of revolutionary struggle is through voices incarcerated in an archive. Our sense of their politics is informed through conversations under surveillance, and our understanding of their whereabouts through police reports, court records, or even voice recordings in which they appear to us in a flash, framed and limited. Sometimes their absence in the archive of surveillance and incarceration is a sign of their escape, or their release; their final triumph. The history of anti-colonial struggle is thus often the art of building stories out of the contours of absence, or forging struggles out of the silhouettes of information gleaned from official records – such as reading reports of criminality or violence against the police as insurgency.
In this conversation, Alia and Adam will reflect on the importance and challenges of using colonial archives, particularly acoustic sources, in tracing revolutionary struggle in early twentieth century Egypt and North Africa. Ranging from Egypt to the Maghreb in the early 20th century, we will delve into the Berliner Lautarchiv, where we encountered Maghrebi prisoners doubly incarcerated: prisoners of war whose voices were recorded under duress and preserved on shellac records over 100 years ago. How much of their actual experiences of war could they have actually related under these conditions? How possible is it to infer or assign agency to stories or songs that prisoners of war were forced to record, while surrounded by their captors? On the one hand is the possibility that these stories are structures for what Britta Lange calls “messages in a bottle”, encoded stories told through fables and folk-songs in the hope that a hundred years later someone could decipher them. On the other, is the danger of romanticizing resistance in a situation where none could have been possible. In both instances the question remains, of what they leave us with, as their traces vanish with the trailing off of their voices.

For more information, please have a look here: https://shorturl.at/bCOV1

Alia Mossallam & Adam Benkato: Can the Colonial Archive be a Source of Anti-Colonial Struggle?

Yvonne Albers (Freie Universität Berlin/ EUME Fellow 2021-24) talk on “On Endings: Temporalities of Exiled Arab Magazines in the 1980s/90s” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 15 November 2023. The talk was chaired by Hanan Toukan (Bard College Berlin / EUME Fellow 2019-23).

As much as beginnings have been a popular topic in modern intellectual and art history, so little have we theorized how things end and what an ending actually is when it comes to intellectual projects and practices of print. In response to this neglect, this talk is about ‘how things end’ in periodical culture. The historical focus is on the 1980/90s in the Arab Middle East, a period characterized by socio-political change and unrest triggering new and unprecedented waves of exile, but also a moment in which the first signs of a profound media change become apparent. The talk addresses contemporary debates on the role of the Arab periodical at the assumed end of its own era, paying particular attention to exile magazines, which were largely rejected as insignificant by editors in the Arab homeland. Building on Edward Said’s notion of lateness as a form of exile, it will then take an exemplary look at the late phase of one of the leading cultural magazines in the post-1967 period, the Beirut- and later Paris-based cultural magazine Mawaqif (1968-1994). The talk will conclude with a look into the last issue of another once-exiled literary Lebanese magazine, Al-Naqid (1988-1995), to discuss the politics of ending as an integral part of the modern intellectual’s most important practice, namely: doing magazines.

For more information, please have a look here: https://shorturl.at/eouQW

Yvonne Albers: On Endings: Temporalities of Exiled Arab Magazines in the 1980s/90s

Pascale Ghazaleh (American University Cairo / EUME Fellow 2017-19) talk on “Archives, Heritage and Discontent: Who Owns Egypt’s Past?” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 18 October 2023 and  was part of the conversation series Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm of the BEYONDREST Research Group. The talk was chaired by Banu Karaca (PI ERC BEYONDREST)

Since 2011, Egypt has undergone such profound changes that parts of the physical landscape are unrecognizable to visitors who have not seen the country since before the uprising. Politically, economically, and culturally, boundaries have shifted. The urban landscape has changed, sometimes dramatically: in downtown Cairo alone, new landmarks have sprung up, for example in Tahrir Square, now anchored by an obelisk that refers to a past far more ancient and pervasive than that of the uprising. Elements that were part of the background have taken center stage, while features Egyptians took for granted seem never to have existed. Despite these far-reaching transformations, the past weighs heavy on the regime and the population alike, shaping horizons of possibility and limiting what may be articulated in word or deed. How, then, has heritage been imagined and produced in Egypt since 2011? In what ways has the regime co-opted the past to project itself into the future? What alternative visions of the past exist, and how have they been articulated?

For more information, please have a look here: https://shorturl.at/eBW45

Pascale Ghazaleh: Archives, Heritage and Discontent: Who Owns Egypt’s Past?

Çiçek İlengiz (Postdoctoral Researcher ERC BEYONDREST) talk “Inheriting Anatolia: Representation, Knowledge Production and Imagination” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 25 October 2023, and was part of the conversation series Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm of the BEYONDREST Research Group. The talk was chaired by Shoghig Elke Hartmann (Freie Universität Berlin).

“To be honest, I first visited the Pergamon Museum in Berlin before visiting the actual site […] although I grew up so close to the city.”[1] On the backdrop of ongoing scholarly debates on restitution, this talk revisits the notions of preservation and inheritance through the ancient site of Pergamon that is situated in Turkey’s Aegean region. As the quote reveals, Pergamon is a site where invisibility meets hypervisibility. The Pergamon Museum in Berlin was built in 1899, following the transportation of the Zeus Altar from Bergama to Germany. Although Turkey has been left out of scholarly production on restitution due to its imperial history, the vivid debates on the Altar’s possible return have been occupying the local, national and international cultural arena since the 1990s. With the inclusion of Pergamon and its multi-layered cultural landscape into the World Heritage List of UNESCO in 2014, the debate on the Altar has started to be shaped around “who owns what belongs to everybody.” Through discussions on the Altar’s rightful ownership, its case became a venue for reinforcing civilizational narratives onto the politics of heritage. Based on the preliminary ethnographic work conducted in Bergama, the talk examines how discourses on preservation of cultural heritage are operationalized by different heritage actors. It argues that the paradigm of preservation reinforces the politics of dispossession in multiple ways while simultaneously creating obstacles in the processes of inheriting the past.
[1] Quote from the interview conducted with a visual artist in Izmir, September 2023.

For more information, please have a look here: https://shorturl.at/bYZ12

Çiçek İlengiz: Inheriting Anatolia: Representation, Knowledge Production and Imagination

Sanabel Abdelrahman (EUME Fellow 2023/24) talk "Eco-Surrealism, Martyrdom, and the Future: Palestinian Magical Realism Meets Indigenous Climate Fiction" was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 10 of January 2024. The talk was chaired by  Yvonne Albers (Freie Universität Berlin/ EUME Fellow 2021-24).

This presentation builds on my research around the potentialities of Palestinian magical realism by integrating indigenous views on climate fiction and futurism. It provides an overview of Palestinian magical realism in folktales and literature, its main functions, and its productive utilization when trying to understand the Palestinian reality and struggle.
The seminar will present preliminary findings around the integrated topics while proposing questions such as: what is climate fiction without a critique of settler-colonialism? What potentialities open up when situating Palestinian liberatory futures within indigenous understandings of climate fiction and futurism? How does Palestinian eco-surrealism compare and complement indigenous views on spaces distorted by colonialism? The presentation will situate several essential Palestinian cultural and identity themes within a greater scale of indigenous hopes and resilience. It will focus on the connection to land and society and the collective imagining of liberated futures within these settler/postcolonial contexts. It will present ghosts as actors capable of disrupting colonial perceptions of the material world through resurrection, return, and transcendence of spatiotemporal limits of reality. This opens possibilities for alternative discourses around just futures and the renewed conceptualizations of martyrdom- a prominent trope in Palestinian and Arabic literature and everyday reality.

For more information, please have a look here: https://shorturl.at/ltzIK

Sanabel Abdelrahman: Palestinian Magical Realism Meets Indigenous Climate Fiction

Hashem Abushama (Oxford University / EUME Fellow 2023-25) talk “Not Just Arts: The Political Economies of Palestinian Cultural Productions in Haifa, Ramallah and Berlin” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 05 June 2024. The talk was chaired by Himmat Zoubi (EUME Fellow 2019-24).

This talk examines the political economies of Palestinian cultural productions in Haifa (1948 Palestine) and Ramallah (occupied territories). It takes the cities as two connected yet distinctly different sites in the production of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. I look at everyday processes of cultural production (theatre, music, and visual arts) and their intertwinement with processes of market reconfiguration, gentrification, and racialization following the neoliberalisation of Israel in 1985. I try to weave together in-depth interviews, counter-mapping, visual analysis, and archival research to trace processes of socio-spatial formation and to offer a materialist understanding of cultural productions that shows how neoliberal capitalism adapts itself to colonial dispossession and racialization. Keeping in mind these questions around the relationships between capitalism, class formation, and arts, the talk concludes with preliminary reflections on how to bring a materialist approach to bear on Arab and Palestinian cultural production in Berlin—the city with the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe. In sketching this approach to Berlin, questions arise around the urban policing of Arab neighbourhoods, especially in the wake of the unfolding genocide in Gaza, and its implications for the city’s Arab communities and their socio-cultural lives. By traversing the three cities, the concern is with how to think about and with arts as entry points into state violence, class formation, and cultural and artistic expression.

For more information, please have a look here: https://shorturl.at/qdJCd

Hashem Abushama: Not Just Arts: The Political Economies of Palestinian Cultural Productions

C. Ceyhun Arslan (Koç University / EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 2023/24) talk “Becoming Mediterranean: Views from Arabic, French, and Ottoman Literatures” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 10 July 2024. The talk was chaired by Loaay Wattad (EUME Fellow 2023/24).

Arslan will discuss his current book project, tentatively entitled Becoming Mediterranean: The Sea Reconfigured in Arabic, French, and Turkish Literatures, which examines the political and cultural relevance of the Mediterranean for authors from the basin’s eastern and southern shores. The authors he analyzes for his book, such as Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan (1852–1937), Ahmad Shawqi (1868–1932), and Jeanne Archache (1902–1961), were born during the final years of the Ottoman Empire and eventually found themselves living in nation-states. Arslan argues that their writings assigned geopolitical divisions and historical turning points that we do not see in mainstream accounts of the basin because these authors had a less hierarchical attitude towards the Mediterranean than Orientalist writers did. As they witnessed unprecedented political shifts, these authors, as Arslan puts it, “thought with the Mediterranean” to situate themselves within a centuries-long history and seek in this history moments of inspiration for new forms of political and cultural solidarity. Becoming Mediterranean also demonstrates how the postcritical turn in literary studies can offer a repertoire of new concepts and phrases that shed new light on world literature scholarship as its Mediterranean framework offers new interpretations on well-known works of Middle Eastern literatures. 

For more information: https://www.eume-berlin.de/veranstaltungen/kalender/details/becoming-mediterranean-views-from-arabic-french-and-ottoman-literatures

C. Ceyhun Arslan: Becoming Mediterranean: Views from Arabic, French, and Ottoman Literatures

Ido Fuchs (Tel Aviv University / EUME Fellow 2024/25) talk “Writing Returns: The Poetics of Return in Palestinian Literature” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 18 December 2024. The talk was chaired by Loaay Wattad (Tel Aviv University / EUME Fellow 2023-26).

The talk delves into the diverse and transformative poetics of return in Palestinian literature. Rooted in the 1948 Palestinian Nakba and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, return has long been a core issue in Palestinian politics, cultural production, and research. Since Israel persists in denying the return of the Palestinian refugees and continues to displace more Palestinians, and since Palestinian refugees experience different forms, conditions, and localities of exile, the question of return is as acute and complicated today as it was in 1948. Its acuteness and complexity, nonetheless, call for a nuanced understanding of the myriad ways in which Palestinians perceive and formulate return. To provide such understanding, the talk looks into different articulations of return in Palestinian literary texts. The literary approach allows exploring fundamental questions: What is a return? What can it be? What are its implications? As the talk demonstrates, the answer is radically open, as return unfolds as a plastic figure that can express radical and critically different linguistic, social, and political possibilities. As such, it argues, the question of return may offer a prism that simultaneously connects and holds critical differences, among Palestinian literature and culture and beyond.

For more information: https://www.eume-berlin.de/veranstaltungen/kalender/details/writing-returns-the-poetics-of-return-in-palestinian-literature

Ido Fuchs: Writing Returns: The Poetics of Return in Palestinian Literature

Wendy Doyon (EUME Fellow 2024/25) talk “Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt: Arabic Field Diaries from Egypt and Sudan in the History of Archaeology” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 15 January 2025. The talk was chaired by Ilona Regulski (Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin).The seminar was in cooperation with the BEYONDREST Research Group.

In the early part of the twentieth century, the rural community of Quft, Upper Egypt, provided the setting for an ethnographic account of spirit possession among the so-called “fellahin,” a term often associated in popular culture with a traditional and presumably uneducated peasantry from the South of Egypt. Hans Alexander Winkler’s Ghost Riders of Upper Egypt (originally published in 1936) showed the folksy side of village life, but Quft was also home to Egypt’s most elite community of archaeological foremen (rūyasa) known as Quftis, renowned for their advanced knowledge and skills in archaeological excavation since 1895. In this talk, I will present an overview of the Quftis’ historical record as “Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt”: skilled foremen and field technicians whose embodied knowledge lurks behind the monographic publications that make up our body of modern literature about ancient Egypt, the Sudan, and the Middle East. As part of the Quftis’ unpublished written record, the talk will focus on the production of a large archive of Arabic excavation diaries documenting archaeological work in Egypt and Sudan in the first half of the 20th Century. The main corpus of this material includes over 6,500 unique manuscript pages in 73 diary volumes, which form part of archaeological archives at Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. These diaries were written by two generations of Egyptian foremen in a mixture of Classical, Cairene, and Upper Egyptian Arabic. The presentation will cover aspects of their collective authorship, dialects, narrative voice, challenges of translation, and trans-archival context.

For more information: https://www.eume-berlin.de/veranstaltungen/kalender/details/ghost-writers-of-upper-egypt-arabic-field-diaries-from-egypt-and-sudan-in-the-history-of-archaeology


Wendy Doyon: Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt: Arabic Field Diaries from Egypt and Sudan in the History of Archaeology

Khaled Fahmy (Tufts University) talk “The History of the Egyptian Missile Project in the 1950s and 1960s” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 09 October 2024. The talk was chaired by Alia Mossallam (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin/ EUME Fellow 2017-25).

Following the 1956 Tripartite Aggression on Egypt (a.k.a. The Suez Crisis) in which Israel invaded Sinai and threatened the Suez Canal with the assistance of the British and the French, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was determined to establish a military deterrent. Especially after losing the entire air force in this war, Egypt was determined to launch a missile project that would act as a deterrent against possible future attacks. For that purpose, the Egyptian Air Force intelligence services sent agents to Europe to recruit German scientists to help build the project. But as soon as Israel got wind of the project, it considered it an existential threat and became determined to abort it by any means possible, including diplomatic pressure, sabotage, and even assassination. This presentation tells the story of this chapter of the Middle Eastern missile age. It studies steps taken by Egypt to build a missile project, Israeli measures to abort this project, and Egyptian countermeasures that aimed to neutralize Israeli efforts. By following the technical, military and intelligence aspects of the Egyptian missile project, the paper asks a wider question about the nature of the Nasser state and its ability to confront the existential threat that Israel posed.

For more information: https://www.forum-transregionale-studien.de/veranstaltungen/kalender/details/the-history-of-the-egyptian-missile-project-in-the-1950s-and-1960s

Khaled Fahmy: The History of the Egyptian Missile Project in the 1950s and 1960s

Samah Selim (Rutgers University / EUME) talk “Comparison and Scalar Reading: Niqula al-Haddad’s Translation of Ignatious Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column, a Tale of the 20th Century” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 30 October 2024. The talk was chaired by Georges Khalil (EUME / Forum Transregionale Studien).

In 1910, after returning to Cairo from a three year sojourn in New York, Niqula al-Haddad published an Arabic translation of an 1890 speculative fiction novel by American author and politician Ignatius Donnelly. Caesar’s Column tells the story of a workers' revolution that begins in New York City and sets off a global apocalypse of death and destruction. This talk will use the novel and its translation as a starting point to explore different ways of thinking about the objects and ends of comparative method in relation to the literary archive. Selim is especially interested in how scalar inquiry allows the reader to gather the seemingly incommensurable geographies and temporalities generated by postcolonial historiography into flexible and productive relationships  between people, texts and social movements that unsettle dominant liberal/national paradigms of history-making. 

For more information: https://www.forum-transregionale-studien.de/veranstaltungen/kalender/details/comparison-and-scalar-reading-niqula-al-haddads-translation-of-ignatious-donnellys-caesars-column-a-tale-of-the-20th-century

Samah Selim: Comparison and Scalar Reading: Niqula al-Haddad’s Translation of Ignatious Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column, a Tale of the 20th Century

Munira Khayyat (NYU Abu Dhabi) talk “After the End of the World: Another Season of War in South Lebanon” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 26 March 2025. The talk was chaired by Diana Abbani (MECAM / Forum Transregionale Studien).

The end of the world is nothing new for many inhabitants of the Global South, and South Lebanon has just lived through another end of the world. This talk insistently speaks from the spacetime of devastation, after the end of the world, and describes resistant ecologies that have taken root through generations of military destruction in this landscape of war. In this apocalyptic moment, and with the Lebanese military resistance in momentary abeyance, the inhabitants of Lebanese frontline villages continue to resist occupation and annihilation through ordinary acts of living. When life is the intentional target of the settler-colonial war machine, life in all of its forms becomes resistance.

For more information: https://www.eume-berlin.de/veranstaltungen/kalender/details/after-the-end-of-the-world-another-season-of-war-in-south-lebanon

Munira Khayyat: After the End of the World: Another Season of War in South Lebanon

Özgür Balkılıç (Fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation) talk “Aşık/Alevi Music Revival and the Turkish Left in Turkey, 1960-1980” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 21 May 2025. The talk was chaired by Ali Sipahi (Özyeğin University / EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 2024/25)

This presentation focuses on the entangled history of affiliation of traditional âşık (folk minstrel) musicians with the Turkish left between 1960 and 1980. Following the Second World War, many âşık musicians migrated to major cities alongside their communities as a part of broader waves of migration. Therein, they found ample opportunities partly due to their affiliations with the left- wing movement to turn out to be a considerable part of national and less efficiently international music scenes. Through this affiliation, âşık/Alevi musicians secured a significant cultural role by (re)articulating the political ideologies of the left, actively participating in cultural debates, taking stages in the urban setting and engaging with the popular music genres and artists. As a result, they secured a public recognition as artists and earned a position of authority to establish the aesthetic standards of the folk music worlds in the urban sphere. The presentation finally argues that while the growing left- wing movement has seen the living example of tradition of dissent in the figures of âşıks in its attempt to establish a cultural hegemony, the âşıks translated the socialist lexicon into a more accessible language for the urban and rural poors and fused the socialis discourse with a utopian/millenarian heritage of the Alevi community. 

For more information: https://shorturl.at/DBLD4

Özgür Balkılıç: Aşık/Alevi Music Revival and the Turkish Left in Turkey, 1960-1980

Loaay Wattad (EUME-FU Berlin Fellow of the Minerva Foundation 2025) talk “The Uprooted Olive Tree: Ecopolitics in Palestinian and Israeli Children’s Literature” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 12 Feb 2025. The talk was chaired by Maysoon Shibi (Research Fellow of the Minerva Foundation at Freie Universität Berlin).

This talk explores the intersection of ecology, politics, and literature in Palestinian and Israeli children's books, focusing on how environmental themes shape national narratives and ideological landscapes. Through an analysis of forty-four picture books published between 2000 and 2023, I examine the ecopolitical underpinnings of children's literature in both societies, highlighting contrasting approaches to environmental storytelling.
Palestinian children's literature intertwines ecology with nationalism, using symbols like the olive tree to represent resilience, displacement, and the struggle for land preservation. These narratives emphasize Sumud—the concept of steadfastness—depicting nature as a site of both cultural identity and political resistance against Israeli occupation. In contrast, Israeli children's literature largely eschews direct political engagement, focusing instead on urban ecological themes that contribute to a broader national image of environmental consciousness. However, this approach often aligns with greenwashing narratives, presenting Israel as a global environmental leader while omitting the ecological impact of the occupation. 
By situating these literary works within broader ecocritical and postcolonial frameworks, this talk interrogates the role of children’s literature in shaping ecological consciousness and national identity. Ultimately, I propose that greater cross-cultural engagement and translation between these literary traditions could foster new conversations on environmental justice and sustainability.

For more information: https://shorturl.at/HCyJ5

Loaay Wattad: The Uprooted Olive Tree: Ecopolitics in Palestinian and Israeli Children’s Literature

Zoya Masoud (BEYONDREST / Forum Transregionale Studien) talk “Dislocation and Heritage: On Radical Hope and Experiences of Loss in Aleppo/Syria” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 04 June 2025. The talk was chaired by  Çiçek İlengiz (BEYONDREST / Forum Transregionale Studien).

Centered on individuals from Aleppo, this seminar explores how the extensive destruction of urban heritage affects the sense of belonging and self-identification(s) with urban or built heritage. The old city of Aleppo, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986, became a focal burning point during the war between 2012 and 2016. In this period, the inhabitants of Aleppo were dislocated from the center by military interests of the warring parties who regarded them as dispensable. For the local population, the experience of loss became a daily routine, manifesting in the loss of friends, family members, property, and cultural heritage. Throughout these years, individuals found themselves in a perpetual state of exception and vulnerability. Through my research, I identified various patterns of belonging and self-identification tied to built heritage, which emerged in response to the experience of loss and the processes of understanding that loss. These patterns indicate my interviewees’ attempts to reach an understanding of their reality during the war, particularly as their state of exception became normalized, while standing continuously on the brink of the abyss of many discourses they adopted. The fugitivity of their own agency became evident and influenced their interaction with their (host) communities. 

This seminar is part of the open lecture series “Syria at a Crossroads”, organized jointly by the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg, the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) in Tunis, and Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME). It is also part of the conversation series “Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm” of the ERC-project “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge” (BEYONDREST).

For more information: https://www.eume-berlin.de/veranstaltungen/kalender/details/dislocation-and-heritage-on-radical-hope-and-experiences-of-loss-in-aleppo-syria

Zoya Masoud: Dislocation and Heritage: On Radical Hope and Experiences of Loss in Aleppo/Syria

Rawia Aburabia (Sapir Academic College School of Law) talk “Gendered Silencing: Restrictions on Palestinian Citizens of Israel’s Freedom of Expression Post-October 2023 ” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 30 April 2025. The talk was chaired by Schirin Amir-Moazami (Freie Universität Berlin).

This study investigates the gendered dimensions of freedom of expression restrictions experienced by Palestinian citizens of Israel in the context of the ongoing War in Gaza, particularly since the escalation of violence on October 7, 2023. Amid increasing state severe constraints on speech, Palestinian women have disproportionately faced repressive measures, revealing a complex interplay between gender, nationality, and state control. The dismissal and brutal arrest of prominent female academics further underscore the heightened vulnerability of women within this oppressive environment. By synthesizing existing scholarship on state power, the socio-political status of Palestinian citizens, and feminist analyses of repression, along with data from human rights organizations, this study aims to explore how repression and conflict are deeply gendered phenomena. It examines the unique challenges faced by Palestinian women in their struggles for expression and the ways in which they are subjected to political violence by the state. Ultimately, this research contributes to an understanding of the systematic silencing of women during periods of conflict and highlights the mechanisms through which such repression is legitimized by the legal and political systems.

For more information: 
https://www.eume-berlin.de/veranstaltungen/kalender/details/gendered-silencing-restrictions-on-palestinian-citizens-of-israels-freedom-of-expression-post-october-2023

Rawia Aburabia: Gendered Silencing: Restrictions on Palestinian Citizens of Israel’s Freedom of Expression Post-October 2023

Yuval Evri (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) talked on “Translating the Arab-Jewish Tradition: From Al-Andalus to Palestine” at the EUME Berliner Seminar on 25 June 2014 that inaugurated the three-day EUME workshop “The Possibilities of Arab-Jewish Thought” (25-27 June 2014, Forum Transregionale Studien). His talk was also published in our Essay series. For three days a group of scholars and intellectuals that included Najat Abdulhaq, Moshe Behar, Zvi Ben-Dor, Elias Khoury, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Yehouda Shenhav, Ella Shohat, Yasir Sulaiman, Raif Zreik and others discussed aspects of the modern history of Arab Jewish thought, the idea of the Arab Jew, and the possibilities that Arab-Jewish thinking offers for the future of Palestine and Israel. The question of the Arab Jew evoked a growing amount of attention in recent years, both in popular and in academic circles, in Israel and Palestine, and in the Arab World. Dozens of academic works, novels, memoirs and documentaries have been written and produced in the past few years - creating a growing body of knowledge that sheds light on the history of Jewish presence in the Middle East before and beyond 1948. Revisiting this multifaceted history of the Mizrahi, the oriental Jews, offers perspectives beyond the conceptual limits of modern Jewish and Arab historiography, cultural and political imagination, and the binary logic of “Jews” and “Arabs”.

Yuval Evri: Translating the Arab-Jewish Tradition

Alia Mossallam's (Cairo / EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung 2017-19) talk on "Popular Historiographic Practices: Documenting War, Loss and Sacrifice (in Song) in the 50s and 60s in Egypt" was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 15 February 2017 at the Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin.

“The simsimiyya (1) gives voice to those whom history forgets” - Ibrahim al-Mursi - Poet, Port Said.

The 1950s-60s in Egypt were a period of heightened popular mobilization that have since been neatly packaged and presented in the framework of the period’s many wars and nationalist projects. The Aswan High Dam alone attracted tens of thousands of peasants from all over the country and displaced at least 40,000 Nubians in its wake. While the wars in the canal area displaced a million civilians in the period between 1967 and 1974. Mossallam's work explores the struggles of the people behind these nationalist projects; such as the civilian resistance in the wars in Port Said (1956) and Suez (1967-1974) and the builders who insisted on working on the High Dam despite the perilous working conditions. These are stories and experiences that had drowned in the din of the larger battles. How did these communities interpret their struggles? What drove their sacrifices? How did these nationalist projects become common grounds for the strategics of state building and the dreams and aspirations of ordinary people? 

(1) Traditional string instrument of Port Said

Alia Mossallam: Documenting War, Loss and Sacrifice in Egypt

Islam Dayeh (Freie Universität Berlin) investigated “Taha Hussain, Israel Wolfensohn and the Construction of the Arab Jew” on 26 June 2014 at the EUME workshop “The Possibilities of Arab-Jewish Thought (25-27 June 2014, Forum Transregionale Studien).

For three days a group of scholars and intellectuals that included Najat Abdulhaq, Moshe Behar, Zvi Ben-Dor, Elias Khoury, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Yehouda Shenhav, Ella Shohat, Yasir Sulaiman, Raif Zreik and others discussed aspects of the modern history of Arab Jewish thought, the idea of the Arab Jew, and the possibilities that Arab-Jewish thinking offers for the future of Palestine and Israel. The question of the Arab Jew evoked a growing amount of attention in recent years, both in popular and in academic circles, in Israel and Palestine, and in the Arab World. Dozens of academic works, novels, memoirs and documentaries have been written and produced in the past few years - creating a growing body of knowledge that sheds light on the history of Jewish presence in the Middle East before and beyond 1948. Revisiting this multifaceted history of the Mizrahi, the oriental Jews, offers perspectives beyond the conceptual limits of modern Jewish and Arab historiography, cultural and political imagination, and the binary logic of “Jews” and “Arabs”.

Islam Dayeh: The Construction of the “Arab Jew”

Zvi Ben-Dor (New York University) talked on “Between Muhammad 'Abduh and Rabindranath Tagore: The Connected Worlds of Hayyim Ben-Kiki, an Arab Jew“ on 26 June 2014 at the EUME workshop “The Possibilities of Arab-Jewish Thought” (25-27 June 2014, Forum Transregionale Studien).

For three days a group of scholars and intellectuals that included Najat Abdulhaq, Moshe Behar, Zvi Ben-Dor, Elias Khoury, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Yehouda Shenhav, Ella Shohat, Yasir Sulaiman, Raif Zreik and others discussed aspects of the modern history of Arab Jewish thought, the idea of the Arab Jew, and the possibilities that Arab-Jewish thinking offers for the future of Palestine and Israel. The question of the Arab Jew evoked a growing amount of attention in recent years, both in popular and in academic circles, in Israel and Palestine, and in the Arab World. Dozens of academic works, novels, memoirs and documentaries have been written and produced in the past few years - creating a growing body of knowledge that sheds light on the history of Jewish presence in the Middle East before and beyond 1948. Revisiting this multifaceted history of the Mizrahi, the oriental Jews, offers perspectives beyond the conceptual limits of modern Jewish and Arab historiography, cultural and political imagination, and the binary logic of “Jews” and “Arabs”.

Zvi Ben-Dor: Muhammad 'Abduh and Rabindranath Tagore

Pascale Ghazaleh's (AUC / EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung 2017/18) talk on "In Search of the Archive: On Writing History in Egypt Today" was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 6. December 2017 at the Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin.

What is a historian, barred from the archives, to do? In the years since 2011, the National Archives in Egypt have come under ever-tighter control from national security. Self-appointed definers and defenders of Egypt’s national interests, _al-amn_ processes and filters applications from scholars wishing to access the archives. Increasingly, this has entailed rejection of some applications, and long postponement of replies to many others. Non-Egyptian researchers have waited for months, frittering away their allocated time and returning, frustrated, to their home institutions. Egyptian researchers whose applications include vocabulary or refer to ideas that could be construed as subversive have found that their prior experience, however long, counts for nothing in ensuring continued admittance.

This, then, is an account by a historian endeavoring to return to the archives after a few years’ absence, and the tale of the Kafkaesque adventures that ensued. It is an account based on personal experience and hearsay – not one based on rigorous empiricism or solid analysis, because most of the vetting process remains shrouded in secrecy. As such, the presentation will be, in part, anecdotal, narrating different phases of one individual’s attempts to breach the barriers erected by security around the archives. These attempts, of course, can be related to those made by other researchers, some fruitful but many unsuccessful. These anecdotes will open up onto a wider reflection on the question of what to do without the relevant archives – the archives one needs to write history.

Pascale Ghazaleh: On Writing History in Egypt Today

Michael Allan's (University of Oregon / EUME Fellow 2017/18) talk on "Reflections on Orientalism and Early Cinema" was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 18. July 2018 at the Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin.

In December 1896, Alexandre Promio arrived in Algiers to begin a journey across North Africa and the Middle East on behalf of the Lumière Brothers film company. He was part of a global network of camera operators and carried with him the newly invented cinématographe, which both recorded and projected scenes at sites including Algiers, Tunis, Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus and Istanbul. His journey inaugurated the arrival of cinema to the region, but also forged formal innovations in visual culture for years to come. Scholars tend to bracket this curious moment of early film history (as a foreign importation of a new medium) and privilege instead the eventual rise of studio-based production. But taking account of film form, what does it matter that one of the first close-ups, for example, occurs in Jerusalem? Or that a film from Algiers occurs off-center and partially out-of-frame? Does place matter in the global history of film form? Focusing on a single fifty-second film shot in 1897 at the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem, the talk will address the emergent framework through which these early films came to picture the world—what they revealed, how they were understood locally, and what alternate media were marshaled in explanation. In the end, this microhistory of the Lumière Brothers will serve as the point of departure for a transnational film theory connecting a single camera operator’s journey to the foundations of film form.

Michael Allan: Reflections on Orientalism and Early Cinema

Arturo Monaco's (University of Rome / EUME Fellow 2018) talk on "The Rebellious in Tradition: Sufism and Surrealism in Issam Mahfouz' Work" was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 11 July 2018 at the Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin.

Issam Mahfouz is remembered in the field of literary studies for his prominent contribution to the development of Lebanese theatre. In fact, a thorough understanding of his poetics should include his first literary attempts as a poet and his prolific production in the spheres of journalism and literary criticism. A reading of these writings in particular may open new perspectives on his literary production stricto sensu. One of these perspectives emerges while reading a selection of Mahfouz’s essays that display a certain interest in two apparently contradictory trends: surrealism and mysticism. Much has been said about the relation between these two trends, both in the Western context and in the Arab francophone one, but only in very few cases the Arabic one has been considered. Mahfouz may provide a case study in this regard. During his long career as a writer, he published a number of essays related to both surrealism and Islamic mysticism, i.e. sufism, suggesting a possible connection between the two in some respects. My inquiry starts from the data collected in these essays and tries to answer the following questions: Is the discourse on surrealism and sufism solely limited to Mahfouz’s essays? Or is it possible to trace its echo in his poetic and dramatic production as well? If this proved true, in which way could we study this interaction? In his study on the Maghrebi literature in French, Hédi Abdel-Jaouad proposes to study the result of the interaction between surrealism and sufism looking at both of these spheres in their ontological and dynamic dimensions, more than in their respective historical ones, thus taking into account the possible variations that may occur in the single experiences. This approach revealed itself fruitful in the field of francophone literature in the Maghreb. Through a reading of Mahfouz’s poetry, we will observe if this approach is viable in the study of Arabic literature as well.

Arturo Monaco: The Rebellious in Tradition: Sufism and Surrealism in Issam Mahfouz' Work

"A War for the Better Past: Political Visions in Post-Soviet Counterfactual Histories" by Oleksandr Zabirko in the framework of the Prisma Ukraïna workshop "When the Muses are not silent: Intellectuals’ and Artists’ Responses to the Ukraine-Russia Conflict and post-Maidan Developments in Ukraine" in Berlin on 19 June, 2018

As one of the most popular types of speculative fiction, the “alternative” or “counterfactual histories” constitute a literary genre, in which one or more historical events occur differently than in the historical record. While in the Western fiction the literary models of time travel and counterfactual history function as the elements of the unreal “secondary world” and thus construct a distance between the fantastic and the mundane, contemporary Russophone  authors exploit the generic conventions of fantasy or science fiction in order to suggest a continuity between fiction and reality. Being omnipresent in various media, this aestheticized, counterfactual reality captivates its consumers and is arguably capable of substituting the real world, thus making it possible to read and interpret current geopolitical conflicts (like the war in Donbas) through the prism of speculative fiction. Focusing on geopolitical and social modeling in post-Soviet speculative fiction, the paper claims that the images of the Other, the archaic communal structures and the transformations of historical time provide here an aesthetic ground for a large patriotic consensus of a community united by common resentment.

O. Zabirko: A War for the Better Past: Political Visions in Post-Soviet Counterfactual Histories

The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien is a platform that promotes the internationalization of research in the humanities and social sciences. It is dedicated to a research agenda that systematically links disciplinary approaches and the expertise of area studies by focusing on entanglements and interactions across national, cultural or regional borders. The Forum invites scholars from all over the world for fellowships and develops transregional communication formats.

The Forum provides scope for collaboration among researchers with different regional and disciplinary perspectives and appoints researchers from all over the world as Fellows. In cooperation with universities and research institutions in and outside of Berlin, it carries out research projects that examine other regions of the world and their relationship to Germany and Europe systematically and with new questions.

The Forum and its research programs, Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe (EUME), Prisma Ukraïna—Research Network Eastern Europe and re:constitution - Exchange and Analysis on Democracy and the Rule of Law in Europe publish audio recordings of selected events like conferences, workshops, lectures and academies. 

Visit us on www.forum-transregionale-studien.de.

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