Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Category: EUME

Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME) is a multi-disciplinary research program at the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien. The guiding idea of EUME is to explore the historical, political, religious, social and cultural interconnections and demarcations that link and divide Europe and the Middle East. In contrast to thinking in terms of opposites and dichotomies, the diverse processes of reception and translation, common historical legacies, and the mobility of persons, ideas, and societies are to be brought into focus.

Editors: Georges Khalil, Claudia Pfitzner, and Chiara Midulla

Logo depicting Digital Al Andalus with a sword logo standing in for the L in digital and the L in Andalus.

EUME / Issues

New Podcast Series “Digital Al-Andalus: On the Record” – Imaginations of Al-Andalus and How History Returns in the Present  

By Cristina Moreno Almeida and Hanan Natour.

What do we really mean when we speak of “Al-Andalus”? Was medieval Iberia a model of coexistence, a lost paradise, or something far more complex? How do historians find people and ideas that barely appear in the official record? And how do political and cultural actors today reach back to remember, romanticise, or instrumentalise the medieval past for political mobilisation?  Cristina Moreno Almeida and Hanan Natour discuss how the digital Al Andalus project, an engaging podcast series, connecting scholars across disciplines, can engage and bring new light to these questions.

Photo showing a lecture hall with rows of metal desks and benches heavily damaged, debris and broken wood scattered across the floor, and sunlight entering through windows on the left.

EUME / Issues

Pedagogy Under Fire: Teaching Archaeology with WhatsApp during Sudan’s Civil War

This paper examines the educational experience in Sudan from 2023 until the present. In 2023, with the outbreak of the civil war, the Sudanese universities completely ceased operations. In this text, Adam explores the innovative ways Sudanese educators and students continue university education during times of war and what this means for education, community and contribution of knowledge and innovation from the Global South.

Newspaper front page with a headline in Spanish about an attack on the Israeli embassy.

Conversations / EUME

Who Owns a Story? Palestinian Memory, Family Archives, and the Ethics of Witnessing

Nada El-Kouny in conversation with Hadeel Assali. In 1969, Golda Meir’s government drew up a secret plan to move up to 60,000 Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip and resettle them in Alfredo Stroessner’s Paraguay. Only a handful made the journey before the scheme was exposed. One of them was Mahmoud, a nineteen-year-old who boarded a plane believing he was bound for work and a future in Brazil, and who realized only later that the promise was a lie. Decades on, his great-niece, the anthropologist Hadeel Assali, has spent years documenting his story and those of the other transferees. Palestinians in Paraguay, a four-part investigative documentary series, for Uncovering Roots co-produced by Max Saakyan, Nada El-Kouny and Nadeen Shaker tells this story.

Cover of an album, showing a tree covered in snow.

EUME / Issues

The Cold That Stays. The 1953 Coup and Its Afterlife in Iranian Political Memory

By Mina Khanlarzadeh. Sometimes a parent’s story touches a larger history and defamiliarizes them: you glimpse someone who belonged to a world before you, and who is now quietly offering you its interior. This essay traces a personal memory of a father, a Persian song and tries to understand his hopes and disappointments, and their entanglement with Iran’s political fate.

Hebrew text in a black font on a white background, arranged in six lines.

EUME / Issues

Ghayath al-Madhoun in Hebrew Translation Today

By Daniel Behar. In Arabic literary circles the rumor circulates that Ghayath al-Madhoun is the only living Arab poet in 2026 who can live off his poetry. As his Hebrew translator, I can attest that the rumor is plausible, even if matters might be more complex than the formula suggests. In a binational reading group where we read the poems in Hebrew and Arabic side by side, emotions ran high, but the debates were never strictly political, because in al-Madhoun’s work the politics cannot be separated from the personality. That inseparability is precisely what the poems aim for.

A woman standing on a staircase, surrounded by books and magazines.

5in10 / EUME

Humanities scholars have the ability and responsibility to bridge clashing worldviews – 5in10 with Hanan Natour

Hanan Natour is a German-Palestinian scholar of Arabic and Comparative Literature and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London, where she contributes to the UKRI-funded project “Digital Al-Andalus: Radical Perspectives Of and Through Al-Andalus”. Hanan obtained her PhD in Arabic and Literary Studies with a thesis on modern Tunisian fiction at Freie Universität Berlin, co-supervised at the University of Oxford (2024). During her PhD, she served as a Research Associate to the ERC-funded project “PalREAD – The Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present” where she explored literary networks between the Maghreb and Mashreq.

A man in a white shirt with long dark hair.

5in10 / EUME

Writing Poetry and Writing Criticism are not at all Distinct Categories of Creation ‒ 5in10 with Ammar Kandeel

Ammar Kandeel is a literary and art critic whose work lies at the intersection of visual culture, decolonial studies, and literary/art theory. His main research area spans issues of Palestinian transnational creations and self-representations. He earned his PhD from the University of Montpellier 3 with a dissertation analyzing Edward Said’s writing of the critical discourse on orientalism. Recipient of postdoctoral mobilities (funded by the FMSH, ACSS, UNIMED, and Columbia Global Centers – Amman), Ammar’s research focuses on Palestinian testimonial strategies and agency across various mediums. In the academic year 2025/26, he is a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.

A Renaissance painting of hell by Hieronymus Bosch.

EUME / Issues

Cynical Uses of Suffering: Gaza, Antisemitism, & the New Digital Right

By Aya Labanieh. During the pandemic, the landscape of the Anglophone Internet, especially in North America, drifted rightward—rewarding influencers who churned out pandemic disinformation and conspiracy theories with high engagement, fame, and easy income. The popular term online for such a person is a “grifter”: someone who betrays their convictions, political or otherwise, for material gain, transforming what they claim to believe based on what is trending or what sells. While one can never be sure what a particular influencer truly believes, especially since many content-creators became as radicalized as their own audiences during lockdown, grifters can serve as useful indicators of where money can be made online.

A person wearing blue gloves is holding a poster with Arabic text and an image of wheat.

5in10 / EUME

Food is Where all my Interests Meet – 5in10 with Omri Polatsek

Omri Polatsek is a historian of science, technology, and the environment, with a regional focus on Egypt and the Middle East. He is a doctoral student at the International Max Planck Research School “Knowledge and Its Resources: Historical Reciprocities” at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte and a researcher at the “History of Technology” Department at the Technische Universität Berlin. Before joining EUME, Omri was an affiliated researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient. He holds an MA in Global History from Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a BA in Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science from Tel Aviv University.

An illustration of a power cable in the shape of Iran.

Comment / EUME

Epistemic Siege: Digital Blackout and the Fight for Meaning in Iran

By Fatemeh Shams. When the first U.S.-Israeli bombs started falling on Tehran on February 28, 2026, it wasn’t just the noise and destruction that shocked Iranian citizens. The nationwide digital blackout imposed by the government and the darkness that followed exacerbated the fear of millions of Iranians, who were cut off from any communication with the outside world. Almost overnight, Iran was thrown into a near-total digital silence. News of the outbreak of war arrived only in pieces, if at all. This was deliberate and tactical: the blackout cut off families and isolated communities, turning simple facts into rumors and confusion.