Call for Participants – Research Network & Workshop

“Memory, Trauma and Identity in Literary and Visual Representations in
the Middle East”

Research Network - Funded by British Society for Middle East Studies
(BRISMES) and the British Academy
Network organizer: Dr Kamran Rastegar, University of Edinburgh

This call seeks applications for members to join a research network
organized broadly around the question of how cultural productions in the
literary and visual representations in the Middle East have attempted to
engage with the social dimensions of traumatic histories of war and
social conflict in the region. The question at the heart of this project
is: how are these historical and social experiences represented in
cultural forms, and how do these representations come to inform social
memorialization of these experiences?

Within the academy these questions have largely emerged from
investigations of European memorializations of World War I and in
ongoing debates over cultural representations of the Holocaust. Yet the
issue of how socially-traumatic experiences in the Middle East are
represented has perhaps not as yet been subjected to a significant level
of critical attention. Events such as the Palestinian nakba, the
Lebanese civil war, the Iran-Iraq war, or the Armenian genocide, all
play important roles in articulating contemporary national and communal
identities in different regional societies. Each of these events is
subject to contestation and cooptation through their memorialization in
a wide range of cultural practices and productions both in literary and
visual registers.

This project proposes to engage broadly and comparatively with these and
other traumatic histories with an aim to both develop this area of
cultural and historical inquiry with relation to scholarship on the
Middle East, as well as to contribute to the wider realms of scholarly
activity on these themes as they concern other regions and histories.
Participants are sought whose research touches upon literary or visual
representations (including but not limited to cinema, painting, design,
design of public space, commemorative architecture, etc) of any
socially-traumatic context situated within the “Middle East” (broadly
defined, including the societies of North Africa and West Asia).

The primary goal of this research network will be to facilitate
communication between researchers working in shared areas, as well as to
assist in raising the profile of work on these themes through
dissemination of new research. The research network will initially
develop around a listserv and through shared access to electronic
resources made available to members of the network. Selected
participants from the research network would be invited to attend a
research workshop (February 2008) to be held at the University of
Edinburgh, UK, and also to participate in a special BRISMES conference
to be held in London in April 2008. Beyond these meetings, participants
will be invited to contribute research to a published collection of
papers. Research network members will ideally include both post-graduate
students as well as established researchers.

Travel and accommodation for these meetings will be provided to
participants.

To apply to join this network, please send a short biographical
statement and a research proposal of no more than 250 words to: Kamran
Rastegar ([log in to unmask])

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