Forum Transregionale Studien | Veranstaltungen

Heritage Beyond the National Frame

Wed, 11 Nov 2026 17:00:00 +0100

In the past decade, discourse around heritage in Egypt has shifted its focus from comparative advantage within a nation-state framework to commodity value within a global marketplace. Debates about the meaning of heritage and the right to define it now also accommodate a truth acknowledged by various actors: heritage may serve as backdrop or as product in a widening quest for revenue. The nation-state, in this context, becomes a brand justifying the violence of dispossession and displacement; appreciating heritage comes to mean marketing it to the highest bidder. Taking three case studies – Ras al-Hikma, the waqf of Mustafa Abd al-Mannan, and Art d’Égypte – I propose to show how considerations related to national security and preservation of heritage have been elided to allow for the sale of state property, blurring boundaries between public funds and private profit.

Pascale Ghazaleh is Associate Professor of history at the American University in Cairo. She teaches courses on family history, cultural heritage, and urban history, among others. Her research interests include property relations and state formation in the Ottoman Empire. She was a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in 2017/18, and returned in 2019 as a EUME-FU Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Currently she is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Forum Transregionale Studien.

Georges Khalil works for the Forum Transregionale Studien since 2009, has been the academic coordinator of Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe (EUME) since 2006, and of the Working Group Modernity and Islam at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin from 1998 - 2006. Khalil studied History, Political Science, Islamic, and European Studies in Hamburg and Cairo.

The event is part of the conversation series Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm of the BEYONDREST Research Group. “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge” (BEYONDREST) is an ERC-funded, five-year research project at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Project No. 101045661). More information on the project and the conversation series can be found here.

Views and opinions expressed are however those of the speaker(s) and author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union, nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Please register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.

Affective Structures of Ruin and Repair: In and Around the Middle East

Tue, 17 Nov 2026 10:00:00 +0100

The workshop brings together contributions on affect, language, public life, and mourning in and around the Middle East. It concludes with an open discussion on academia, structures of (un)feeling, and crisis.

With contributions by EUME Fellows Ido Fuchs, Nahid Siamdoust and Jad Kiadan.

Please follow this link for more details and the workshop program.

Religion, Marxism, and Social Change: Emile Tuma’s Social Movements in Islam

Wed, 18 Nov 2026 17:00:00 +0100

Emile Tuma (1919–1985) was a Palestinian communist intellectual and historian. His al-Harakat al-Ijtima’iyya fi al-Islam (Social Movements in Islam) is one of the most ambitious Arab Marxist readings of Islamic history, yet it has received little attention outside Arabic-speaking circles. This talk presents the first English edition of the work, newly translated and critically annotated, and asks what it means to read Islam’s history through the lens of historical materialism.
Tuma treats religion as a social formation rather than a timeless doctrine. In this reading, the transition from tribe to umma, early Shiite thought, revolutionary Isma’ilism, Mu’tazili rationalism, Ash’arism as the ideology of a “feudal” era and the Shu’ubiyya are expressions of class struggle and political contestation. The second half of the book extends this analysis to the 20th century. It examines the relationship between religion and Arab nationalism, the Muslim Brotherhood, and sectarianism as a tool of Ottoman, French and Israeli rule.
The talk places Tuma in his intellectual and political setting: the Nakba, Palestinian life under Israeli rule, and debates within the Arab left. It argues that his project, an attempt to recover progressive traditions within Islam, remains a vital resource for thinking about religion, hegemony and emancipation in the Middle East today.

Abed Kanaaneh is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. He is a historian of modern Lebanon and Middle Eastern intellectual history. He works on Shiite political thought, Hezbollah, and the Arab left through Gramscian and post-Marxist frameworks. He is the author of Understanding Hezbollah: The Hegemony of Resistance (Syracuse University Press, 2021). He is also the editor of Islam, Marxism, and Social Change: Emile Tuma’s Social Movements in Islam (De Gruyter Brill) and author of its first part. His articles have appeared in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Middle East Critique, Historical Materialism, the Journal of Israeli History, and Left History, as well as in Arabic and Hebrew journals. He is currently a visiting scholar at Freie Universität Berlin and EUME fellow for the academic year 2026/2027.

Florian Zemmin is Professor of Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin since 2021 and since 2023 also Director of the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. Previously he was Senior Researcher at the Humanities Center for Advanced Study “Multiple Secularities: Beyond the West, beyond modernities” at the University of Leipzig. His main field of research is religion and society in the modern and contemporary Arab and Islamic world. In that field, more specific topics include Islamic reformism, theories of secularity and Arabic sociologies of religion. Next to sociology of religion and sociology of knowledge, he mainly works with approaches of conceptual history.

This seminar will be held in cooperation with the Institute of Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.

Towards a rule of law culture? The imaginaries and conditions of legal education in Europe

Thu, 19 Nov 2026 10:22:00 +0100

We are delighted to announce this workshop organised by re:constiution Alumnae Olga Ceran and Katarzyna Krzyżanowska, taking place at UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles on 19 and 20 November 2026.

Against the backdrop of the Venice Commission’s revised 2025 Rule of Law Checklist which, for the first time, explicitly recognises academic institutions and legal education as key components of the rule of law framework, this workshop explores critical questions at the intersection of legal education, democracy, and constitutionalism:

How does legal education shape future lawyers’ capacity for critical reasoning? How does legal education shape future lawyers’ capacity for critical reasoning?
Can structures or practices in legal education inadvertently contribute to democratic backsliding?
How should academic freedom be understood in this context? How should academic freedom be understood in this context?

War, Migration, Memory: Ukrainian Perspectives

Mon, 23 Nov 2026 18:00:00 +0100

The volumes from the Prisma Ukraïna Dossiers series bring together perspectives on the dimensions of Russia’s war against Ukraine exploring displacement, migration, memory and images and objects shaping the experience of war. On 23 November, we will bring the three volumes together for a joint book discussion, in which the editors reflect on how their research connects to one another and to today’s realities of war, displacement, and memory in Ukraine.

Please register via prisma(at)trafo-berlin.de.

Amazigh Cultural Artifacts in German Museums: Language Documentation, Recirculation and Fair Engagement

Wed, 25 Nov 2026 17:00:00 +0100

More information will follow soon.

Empire of Dust: Archaeology and the Making of Modern Egypt

Wed, 02 Dec 2026 17:00:00 +0100

More information will follow soon.

Iran Amplified: Women Vocalists, Cultural Politics, and Social Media

Wed, 09 Dec 2026 17:00:00 +0100

In this talk, Nahid Siamdoust will introduce her newly published co-edited volume (with H.E. Chehabi) Iran Amplified: One Hundred Years of Music and Society (Harvard 2026) before delving into her own chapter on the state’s regulation of women’s vocals in postrevolutionary Iran. Iran Amplified is the first edited volume on music in modern Iran, seizing on a burgeoning academic field to present a cross-genre collection of compelling scholarship, musician narratives, and primary sources. This groundbreaking volume offers historiography and critical examination of music’s significant role in social and political mediation in Iran spanning a century, investigating central analytical vectors such as Islam, gender, media technology, alterity, transnational flows, and diasporic communities.

Nahid Siamdoust is an assistant professor of media and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran (Stanford 2017), co-editor of Iran Amplified: One Hundred Years of Music and Society (Harvard 2026), and has published in Iranian Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Cultural Anthropology. Her recent commentaries have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Lines Magazine, Foreign Policy, BBC, and NPR. She is currently a EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, jointly hosted by the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, writing her book on postrevolutionary Iranian publics and media.

Ironic Uncanniness: Temporal Disorientations and Futures with no Telos in Post-2024 Syria

Wed, 16 Dec 2026 17:00:00 +0100

More information will follow soon.

The Politics of Intention in Palestine-Israel

Wed, 06 Jan 2027 17:00:00 +0100

More information will follow soon.

Disposable no More: The Urgency of a New Palestinian Political Strategy

Wed, 13 Jan 2027 17:00:00 +0100

More information will follow soon.

On the Beginnings of Palestinian Solidarity in the Mexican Mahjar

Wed, 20 Jan 2027 17:00:00 +0100

More information will follow soon.

Crossing Borders, Rethinking Juridical Boundaries: The Israeli-Palestinian Case

Wed, 27 Jan 2027 17:00:00 +0100

More information will follow soon.

Politics, Agriculture and Labour in Syria (1921-1963)

Wed, 03 Feb 2027 17:00:00 +0100

More information will follow soon.

Between Turāth and Decolonial Discourse: The Crisis of Language after Gaza

Wed, 10 Feb 2027 17:00:00 +0100

More information will follow soon.