Palestinian student filmmakers based in the West Bank and Gaza tell stories of daily life in a collected set of short films which provide valuable insights for classes on the Middle East.

Teaching the history of the modern Middle East and North Africa at a small liberal arts university offered an opportunity to address student demands to “decolonize the curriculum.” As the survey course comes under increasing scrutiny, we asked where exactly is the Middle East located in our political imagination today? This essay focuses on the role of maps in rethinking geographic frameworks by using a seaborne perspective, that of the Mediterranean, Arabian and Red Seas (MARS) in contrast to the familiar Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Global Academy is an initiative that sustains research collaborations and knowledge production among regionally-focused scholars from the Middle East and North Africa and their counterparts outside the region. Spearheaded by MESA, the project is an expression of the scholarly field's commitment to scholarship in and from the region. By awarding scholarships to displaced scholars from the MENA region currently located in North America, and thereby enabling them to attend meetings, workshops, and conferences, the project supports individuals whose academic trajectory has been adversely affected by developments in their home countries.

This poster investigates the role that the Sharjah Biennial (SB), an international art showcase in the United Arab Emirates, plays in the development of a local artistic and cultural taste. It argues that the SB contributes to the molding of local aesthetic values through its selection of curatorial themes, artists, artworks, and, especially, venues. Using field visits, interviews, and archival research informed by sociological and anthropological theories on aesthetics, the author shows that organizers of public art exhibitions and programs are in a key position to shape the art to which people are exposed and how this, in turn, creates a public valuation of aesthetics. This project fills a gap in contemporary biennial literature by shedding light on the pivotal roles of art events in shaping societal aesthetic values.

What can film studies bring to the study of Arab culture, politics, and history? The past ten years have seen an increase in historical, theoretical, and methodological exchanges between Middle East studies and film and media studies. The sub-field of “Arab film studies” (Ginsberg and Lippard 2020, viii) has emerged as one possible intersection of these two fields of inquiry. This is illustrated by two recent book series, the Cinema and Media Cultures in the Middle East series at Peter Lang Publishing (edited by Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard) and the Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema series at Palgrave Macmillan (edited by Nezar Andary and Samirah Alkassim). Waleed Mahdi's Arab Americans in Film (2020) and Peter Limbrick's Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi (2020) consolidate these exchanges across ethnic studies, area studies, political sciences, (art) history, and film and media studies. While Mahdi primarily positions himself from within ethnic studies and Limbrick is first a film scholar, both have published in reference journals in film studies, Middle East studies, and cultural studies.

Persia in the post-Mongol era is an ambiguous concept. The area is riddled with different ethnicities, religions, and seemingly endless claims to power. The Timurid Empire is no exception to this trend. Temür rises to power in 1370 using Central Asian nomadic styles of ruling and quickly dominates this geographic region inhabited by a plethora of ethnicities and religions. He understands the volatility of maintaining a large, diverse empire and takes key steps in securing his “united” rule. The key political move that this paper examines is Temür's commissioning of art. The art endorsed by the Timurid government surrounds the illumination of manuscripts and the illustration of literature. The Timurids conveyed two main messages to those living under their empire. The first message targets the main ethnic groups: Iranians, Mongols and Turks, justifying Temür as their rightful leader. The second message is delivered to the ethnic minorities, instilling fear to prevent rebellions and ensure subjugation. This paper will demonstrate that the Timurids decided to present political messages through cultural media because they understood the how literature and art were imperative in shaping identity.

In urban planning, governments usually hold the decision-making power to shape not only city landscapes but also people's lives with the promoted goals of social welfare. Although states expect their own version of ideal scenarios in mind when carrying out infrastructural developments, after competition, people in reality have their own ways of perceiving and utilizing state-made infrastructures and urban transportation, sometimes in alignment with government plan, and sometimes at odds with it. Abu Dhabi is one of the cities in the world in which the government planned out the whole city and created urban infrastructure from scratch, including the city bus system. Although the Abu Dhabi public buses started operating in 2008, car dependency is still high and many residents consider public buses to be inefficient and time consuming and only used by certain immigrant working population.

This poster focuses on three mediums of commemoration: the monument, the memorial, and the museum as tools of state-sanctioned memory creation, and thereby spaces for politicized rituals of memory which further state-building projects. Specifically, during and after The Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) the al-Shaheed Monument (1983), and the Victory Arch (1989) in Baghdad and the Martyrs’ Museum (1996) in Tehran functioned as politically strategic representations of collective trauma. Both the Ba'ath party in Iraq and the emerging Islamic Republic in Iran used these sites to render and politicize memories of violence and loss. Despite obvious differences, the projects in Baghdad and Tehran appealed to a need to address national trauma while bolstering idealized images of statehood. The Ba'athist party under Saddam Hussein capitalized on the collective trauma of the Iraq-Iran war to further a hegemonic Sunni identity, which was both religious and political. The use of immense scale, vulgar displays of power, and Islamic imagery in both the al-Shaheed Monument and Victory Arch linked Sunni and Ba'athist causes and allowed Hussein to characterize the Iran-Iraq War as a sacred project of national and religious vindication. Similarly, the Martyrs’ Museum in Tehran constructs a specific version of history using motifs of the Battle of Karbala, Imam Husayn, martyr and civilian deaths, and blood to tie Iranian national identity to ritualized Shia martyrdom. The Martyrs’ Museum parallels the religification of national identity as seen in Iraq, and configures death as a public, religiopolitical act. Despite Ba'athist Iraq's secular self-image, the strategic harnessing of trauma both Iraq and Iran demonstrates a constructed connection between political state hegemony, religious practice, and rituals of grief. In these ways, state propagated imagery through physical commemorations of the Iran-Iraq War furthered the political – and resulting religious – sectarian divide in the official positions of the two nations.

The study of modern and contemporary art from Islamic lands, and particularly the Arab world, is a developing field. Over the past few decades, a variety of publications on modern and contemporary art from the Arab world and its diasporas has appeared in art magazines, journals, and exhibition and auction catalogues. There is, however, still a lack of scholarly literature and reliable resources on the subject. Many such existing sources have focused on productions that are largely in line with certain interests or agendas pursued by the particular magazine/journal, exhibition, or art market in question. Therefore, although recent scholarly output has played a crucial role in introducing modern art in the Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa, these publications have not sufficiently filled the gap of discussion regarding certain aspects of the subject. Modern Art in the Arab World, a collection of critical writings by Arab intellectuals and artists, offers an unparalleled source for the study of modernism in the Arab world. Mapping the primary documents with additional entries written by the editors and other scholars, this book addresses the major historical, conceptual, theoretical, and aesthetic issues that inform the modern art paradigm in the Arab world. Arranged largely in a chronological order, it explores the art of the Arab world by tracing the main discourses that have shaped artistic practices and transformations in the region from the mid-nineteenth century until the late 1980s.