Professor Martin van Bruinessen delivered a keynote lecture on the history and development of Kurdish Studies as part of a series of activities surrounding the LSE Middle East Centre's inaugural Kurdish Studies Conference on 24-25 April, 2023.
The first attempts at institutionalising Kurdish Studies in European academia emerged as a result of the First Worl ... Show More
Jan 2022
David Leupold, "Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory" (Routledge, 2020)
Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory (Routledge, 2020) explores the complex relationship between competing national myths, imagined boundaries and local memories in the threefold-contested geography referred to as Eastern Turkey, W ... Show More
51m 21s
Sep 2020
Majid Daneshgar, "Studying the Qur’an in the Muslim Academy" (Oxford UP, 2019)
“Consider the works of the renowned Nobel-prize-winning African American writer, literary and social critic, and activist Toni Morrison (b. 1931),” writes Majid Daneshgar. “Hers—like Said’s—are popular in the West and cover most of the principal themes covered by Orientalism, inc ... Show More
40m 34s
Oct 2021
Hans Martin Krämer and Julian Strube, "Theosophy across Boundaries: Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Modern Esoteric Movement" (SUNY Press, 2020)
Theosophy across Boundaries: Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Modern Esoteric Movement (SUNY Press, 2020) brings a global history approach to the study of esotericism, highlighting the important role of Theosophy in the general histories of religion, science, ... Show More
1h 3m
Mar 2023
Hilary Falb Kalisman, "Teachers as State-Builders: Education and the Making of the Modern Middle East" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Today, it is hard to imagine a time and place when public school teachers were considered among the elite strata of society. But in the lands controlled by the Ottomans, and then by the British in the early and mid-twentieth century, teachers were key players in government and le ... Show More
1h 1m
Feb 2018
Alexander Knysh, “Sufism: A New History” (Princeton UP, 2017)
Sufism, like many terms in the study of Islam, can be difficult to define and even more difficult to handle, but Alexander Knysh, in Sufism: A New History (Princeton University Press, 2017), has produced a primer that will both challenge and reinforce many of the assumptions we’v ... Show More
56m 2s
Jan 2018
Adam Mestyan, “Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt” (Princeton UP, 2017)
Studies of Arab nationalism populate the field of Middle Eastern studies, perhaps even overpopulate it. However, what Adam Mestyan does in Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2017) is very different: he looks speci ... Show More
49m 13s
Jun 2021
Richard Antaramian, "Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire: Armenians and the Politics of Reform in the Ottoman Empire" (Stanford UP, 2020)
In today's program, I speak with Richard E. Antaramian about his recent monograph, Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire: Armenians and the Politics of Reform in the Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2020).
In Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire, Antaramian shows that the ... Show More
1 h
Jul 2023
Ilkim Büke Okyar, "Arabs in Turkish Political Cartoons, 1876-1950: National Self and Non-National Other" (Syracuse UP, 2023)
The emergence of Turkish nationalism prior to World War I opened the way for various ethnic, religious, and cultural stereotypes to link the notion of the “Other” to the concept of national identity. The founding elite took up a massive project of social engineering that now requ ... Show More
1h 9m