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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

A group of children looking up towards a photographer.

“Maybe we should start by admitting the truth” – 5in10 with Eli Osheroff

Eli Osheroff is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a focus on Arab political and intellectual history and the Arab-Zionist conflict. He holds a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Truman Institute, at the Jacob Robinson Institute at the Hebrew University, and in the Dan David Society of Fellows at Tel Aviv University. His first book, based on his doctoral dissertation, is forthcoming from the Van Leer Institute and deals with Arab political imagination from the late Ottoman period to 1948. The book focuses on Arab visions for an independent Palestine and the place of Jewish settlers in the future Arab state. Eli’s articles have appeared in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the Israel-Palestine Review, and other venues.

Dalia Halabi in a red blouse, listening and taking notes during an event.

“Gaining Access was a Major Challenge” – 5in10 with Dalia Halabi

Dalia Halabi is a sociologist of education who adopts a “study up” approach to critically examine educational and social disparities. She holds a PhD in Leadership and Policy in Education from the University of Haifa and an MA in Conflict Management and Mediation from Tel Aviv University. Her doctoral research explored the formation of elite identity among Palestinian students and alumni of private schools in Israel, analyzing how educational experiences shape distinction, belonging, and social trajectories within a context of national marginalization.

Illustration of workers protesting in front of a ship.

Solidarity against Empire in a Colonial Port City

By Rim Naguib. In January 1907, days of demonstrations swept through the streets and port of Alexandria and spread to Cairo. They had been provoked by the arrest of three migrant trade unionists from Odessa on accusations of intended sabotage on a Russian ship. Through this little-known event, much is revealed of the nature of colonial governance and the rule of difference. The event sheds light on the possibilities of a movement of anti-authoritarianism and solidarity that cuts across race, communal affiliations and social class, despite the colonial setting that fostered racial hierarchies and communalism, and where internationalist ideas and mobilisations were highly policed.

A statue in front of a building.

Precolonial Memory, Postcolonial Critique: Ibn Khaldun in Tunisian Arabic Fiction of the 21st Century

By Hanan Natour. As part of this publication series on the decolonial Mediterranean, focusing on Tunisian literature serves as a gateway to creative engagements with the country’s significant geography. Tunisian literature links to the region in several directions — it is part of North African literature and modern Arabic literature. Grounded in the violent experience of colonialism, it also finds multiple ways of engaging with French literature from the other end of the Mediterranean Sea.

Part of the book cover.

Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War – A Conversation with Amir Moosavi

Amir Moosavi in conversation with Anne-Marie McManus. In his book “Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War”, Moosavi explores the massive literary output of the Iran-Iraq War, choosing a comparative approach: In contrasting Iranian and Iraqi writers, it shows the common experiences of war and writing under authoritarian regimes as well as the writers’ various entanglements with this war that overlapped and diverged over time.

Group photo in front of a staircase.

„Zwischen den Welten“. Diasporas, Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees from Europe in the Middle East and North Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Von Sary Halayqa. Vom 08.-10. Juli 2025 fand der internationale Workshop “Diasporas, Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees from Europe in the Middle East and North Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries” am Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin statt. Er wurde von Alexandros Lamprou (Research Fellow, Philipps-Universität Marburg), Esther Möller (Centre March Bloch), Rim Naguib (EUME Fellow der Gerda Henkel Stiftung 2024/25) und Georges Khalil (Forum Transregionale Studien / EUME) geleitet und behandelte Themen wie Staatsbürgerschaft, Identität, Zwangsmigration, Netzwerke und interkulturelle Begegnungen.

Women, Visibility, and Politics of Night from Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey

By Nurçin Ileri. When Kamelya Hanım was found dead in her home on Taksim Street in 1896, the news made headlines with sensational details in the newspapers of the time. In January 2016, 19-year-old E.F.B. was raped and robbed while returning home at night on Istanbul’s Bağdat Avenue, causing a similar media coverage. What was it that made the attitudes toward the victims in these two separate incidents, a murder and a rape that took place in vastly different historical periods and social contexts, so strikingly similar? The discourses and policies that aim to exclude women from urban spaces and the public sphere continue to persist by relying on traditional moral codes and the belief that the city can never be safe for women.

Portrait of Wendy Doyon.

“I’m fascinated by language in all its facets” – 5in10 with Wendy Doyon

Wendy Doyon is a historian of modern Egypt and Egyptology. She received her PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 and is currently revising her dissertation for a book entitled Empire of Dust: State, Labor, and Archaeology in Nineteenth-century Egypt. She was a CAORC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt 2022–2024, and she co-directs the Arabic Excavation Archive from Quft project at Harvard University. Her research focuses primarily on French, English, and Arabic sources in archaeological archives from Egypt and Sudan and she writes on the history of archaeology from both Egyptian and multicultural/global perspectives. In the academic year 2024/25, she is a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.

Whose Imaginary? Coptic Intellectuals and the Question of Subjectivity

By Ismail Fayed. The collapse of the Assad regime and HTS’s rise in Syria have revived debates in Egypt and the region, over the fragile status of religious minorities, particularly Copts, long caught between authoritarianism and Islamist extremism. But when freed from such choices, what kind of worlds do they imagine? In this paper, Ismail Fayed explores this question through the life histories and reflections of two prominent Coptic intellectuals, Salama Musa and Louis Awad.

‘Isn’t Everything an Afterlife?’

Yasmine Kherfi and Sigrid Corry in Conversation with Dr Atef Said on Ethnographic Methods, Temporality and History. What does it mean to write, witness, and take part in history in the making? Yasmine Kherfi and Sigrid Corry speak to Dr Atef Said, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, to explore questions of methodology, as well as its personal, scholarly and political implications. His book, Revolution Squared: Tahrir, Political Possibilities, and Counterrevolution in Egypt (Duke University Press, 2024), traces the story of the Egyptian revolution of 2011, documenting the spaces and histories through which it unfolded. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Tahrir Square, its surrounding streets and digital platforms, Said examines the dynamic character of revolution—one that is both indeterminate and shaped by historical contingencies.