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Salman Abu Sitta, Founder and President of Palestine Land Society, London, dedicated to the documentation of Palestine’s land and People. Website www.plands.org. Author of six books on Palestine including the compendium Atlas of Palestine 1917- 1966, English and Arabic editions, the Atlas of the Return Journey and over 300 papers and articles on the Palestinian refugees, the Right of Return, history of al Nakba and human rights.

The Nahrein network's visiting scholars programme, of which CBRL is a partner, is now open. Academics, cultural heritage professionals, and NGO workers based in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and Turkey are invited to apply for funding to visit the UK for 1-2 months for training and research. Deadline is the 15^th February. More details here. 

Earlier this week, over forty scholars from the UK and from across the Levant came together in Amman for an innovative three-day symposium to discuss the theme of 'Belonging.' The event was jointly organised and hosted with the British Academy. Read more about the event here.

ARAB BEDOUIN: No Future Without Past in pictures

We were thrilled that Bedouin from Jordan, Palestine and Lebanon were able to travel to London for the opening of this exhibition that marked the culmination of the current phase of the Cultural Corridors of Peace project. Follow the Jordanian delegation as they discover London as well as the exhibition opening night through these fantastic photos, most of which are taken by Khadija Alfaqeer, the project's officer for Jordan. See more here.

2019 CBRL Fellow Mirjam Twight draws on her fieldwork with Iraqi and Syrian refugees in Jordan to provide an ethnographic exploration of the ways that refugees living in prolonged displacement use technology. Read more.

2019 Sam Lieu Travel Grant recipient, Christos Papadopolous,describes the second phase of his fieldwork research that included a trip to Pylos to develop a comparative data set to chart the biological distance between the prehistoric Cypriots & the Bronze Age Greeks. Read more here.

CBRL’s Honorary Treasurer, Pat Sucher, will be stepping down in March after shortly over a year of service. If you know of someone who may be interested in this position, please do spread the word. To find out more about the role, please see here. 

Salman Abu Sitta, Founder and President of Palestine Land Society, London, dedicated to the documentation of Palestine’s land and People. Website www.plands.org. Author of six books on Palestine including the compendium Atlas of Palestine 1917- 1966, English and Arabic editions, the Atlas of the Return Journey and over 300 papers and articles on the Palestinian refugees, the Right of Return, history of al Nakba and human rights.

Dr Gerasimos Tsourapas is Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Birmingham and CBRL’s Acting Honorary Treasurer. His research focuses on the politics of migrants, refugees, and diasporas in the Middle East and the broader Global South. He has also written on the international dimension of authoritarianism. Gerasimos’ first book, The Politics of Migration in Modern Egypt – Strategies for Regime Survival in Autocracies (Cambridge University Press, 2019), was awarded the 2020 ENMISA Distinguished Book Award by the International Studies Association. His second book, Migration Diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa – Power, Mobility, and the State, is forthcoming with Manchester University Press.

Gabriel Varghese is a former CBRL postdoctoral fellow whose research engages with anti-/post-/de-colonial theatre, performance and literature, and the questions they raise about social movements, dramaturgies of urban life, and regimes of gender, sexuality and race. He is also a playwright, theatre director, and co-artistic director of Sandpit Arts, an award-winning platform for producing film, music and performance events. He holds a PhD from the University of Exeter.

Kristin Flade is a performance scholar and author. The focus of her ethnographic and artistic work lies in the representation of violence, political conflict and the potential of negotiating the struggle for human rights in performance, theatre and the arts. She is the author of The Good Pain?: Applied Theatre and Social Circus in Palestine (2018). Kristin holds a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin. She lives and works in Berlin.

Call for papers to enter the 2020 Contemporary Levant Prize for Best Article is now open. Contemporary Levant is CBRL''s international peer-reviewed journal. The award recognises excellent research and scholarship that engages with current and emerging issues in the Levant and advances our understanding of the region. More here.

Arwa Badran is a researcher at Durham University on an AHRC funded project on engaging the youth in museums in Jordan. After completing her BA in Archaeology at the University of Jordan, she worked as a field archaeologist for a few years before pursing higher education in museum studies at Newcastle University, where she read for an MA on building connections between museums and the public and later a PhD on the introduction of museums in school curricula. She worked as Lecturer in Museum Studies at the Hashemite University in Jordan, contributing to the establishment and development of the first BA degree in cultural heritage and museology in the Middle East. She has also worked as a consultant for UNESCO on heritage education projects in the Arab region and currently sits on the Executive Committee of the World Archaeological Congress. 

Shatha Abu-Khafajah is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at the Hashemite University in Jordan. Shatha graduated as an architect from the University of Jordan in 1997. She specialized in documentation and conservation of archaeological heritage while doing her Masters degree in archaeology. Her PhD in cultural heritage management from Newcastle University, acquired in 2007, enabled her to synthesize architecture and archaeology with special interest in establishing a sustainable approach to heritage management in the Arab region that is community-based and context-oriented.

Robin Skeates is a Professor in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University in the UK. His research and publications explore a wide variety of themes within the overlapping fields of material, visual and sensual culture studies, and museum and heritage studies. His recent books include Museums and Archaeology (Routledge, 2017) and The Oxford Handbook of Public Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Elizabeth F. Thompson is Professor of history and the Mohamed Said Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace at the American University in Washington, DC. Her new book is titled How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Arab Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of its Historic Liberal-Islamic Alliance.  The book offer a new argument for the importance of the Syrian Arab Kingdom in the history of democracy and the rise of anti-liberal Islamism in the Arab world. Dr Thompson is also author of Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East and the prize-winning Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon. She has received fellowships from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and is former co-director of the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on the World War I in the Middle East.

Eugene Rogan is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University, where he has taught since 1991, a Fellow of St Antony’s College and Director of the Middle East Centre. He took his B.A. in economics from Columbia, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Middle Eastern history from Harvard. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He is author of The Arabs: A History (2009, 2017), named a best book of 2009 by The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. His recent book, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (2015), was named a best book of 2015 by The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. His earlier works include Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1999), for which he received the Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the Fuad Köprülü Prize of the Turkish Studies Association; and The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2001, second edition 2007, with Avi Shlaim). His works are translated into 18 languages.

Professor Avi Shlaim is an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony''s College, a former Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford, and an elected Fellow of the British Academy. Among his many books are Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988); The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000, second edition 2014); Lion of Jordan: King Hussein’s Life in War and Peace (2007), and; The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences (2012). Professor Shlaim is a frequent contributor to the newspapers and commentator on radio and television on Middle Eastern affairs.

Dr Simon Mills is Lecturer in Early Modern History at Newcastle University. He received his PhD from Queen Mary University of London in 2009, and held a series of research fellowships at the Council for British Research in the Levant, Amman; the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge; and the Dahlem Humanities Centre, Freie Universität Berlin. Between 2014 and 2017, he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Kent. His interests lie in the religious, cultural, and intellectual history of early modern Britain and Europe, with a particular focus on the relationship between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, the histories of biblical and oriental studies, and the history of philosophy.

Professor Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Professor of History at Princeton University, Director of the Princeton Geniza Lab and Director of the Near Eastern Studies Programme. She is the author of ''Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate'' (2008) and of ''The Lost Archive: Finding a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue'' (2020).

We''re thrilled to bring you the latest issue of the CBRL Bulletin, our first to be published in-house. It''s a bumper issue combining 2018 - 2019 and includes feature articles, summaries of all the research that we''ve sponsored, been affiliated to or conducted over the past two years along with updates from our institute directors and committee chairs. The online version of the Bulletin is now available open-access here and we hope to have printed copies available for members post-lock-down.

Call for papers to enter the 2020 Contemporary Levant Prize for Best Article is open - deadline for submission is 10th July. Contemporary Levant is CBRL''s international peer-reviewed journal. The award recognises excellent research and scholarship that engages with current and emerging issues in the Levant and advances our understanding of the region. More here.

In this latest research blog post, CBRL Pilot Study awardee Jeanine Treffers-Daller describes how her project sets out to discover how the way Cypriots'' approach to multilingualism may be a reflection on their socio-cultural identities. Read more here.

Diana''s book, My House in Damascus, upon which much of this talk is based is currently available with a 30% discount with 10% of the the cost of the book going to NHS Charities Together. More details here.

Pierre Doumet is a founding member and currently the president of APJM. Although a volunteer position, Pierre dedicates more time and effort in managing APJM than he does on managing three other companies which he directs. Renowned for his pioneer work in the private sector, Pierre brought the professionalism and focus of the private sector to the not-for-profit domain of APJM. Under his management, Jabal Moussa, designated a Biosphere Reserve in 2009, became one of the most important ecotourism destinations in Lebanon, receiving an exponentially growing number of visitors every year.

Joelle Barakat is Conservation Manager at AJPM. Born and raised in Yahchouch, one of the villages of the Biosphere Reserve, Joelle has been working for APJM for 8 years, competently overseeing projects pertaining to the conservation of natural and cultural heritage as well as sustainable development and local outreach.

Jennie Bradbury is an Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr College, USA. A former CBRL committee member, her main research interests focus on social complexity; the role of ‘non-optimal’ zones; burial traditions and mortuary practices; landscape archaeology, GIS and archaeological survey techniques; and cultural heritage. An active field archaeologist, she has worked in Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Syria, and since 2018 has been working in collaboration with the APJM on an archaeological and heritage field survey.

Stephen McPhillips is a landscape archaeologist whose research interests focus on rural society and hydro-agricultural and ceramic technologies of medieval and Ottoman periods. He has worked on projects in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and the Arabian Gulf and was an Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen, a fellow at the University of Bonn, and an independent consultant. He is currently working with the Honor Frost Foundation in Lebanon and has been working in collaboration with the APJM on an archaeological and heritage field survey since 2018.

Guy Burton is Adjunct Professor at Vesalius College, Brussels and Fellow on the ''Sectarianism, proxies and de-sectarianisation'' project at Lancaster University. He has previously held research and teaching positions at the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government in Dubai, Nottingham University’s Malaysia campus, the University of Kurdistan-Hewler in Iraq and Birzeit University in the West Bank. His research interests include the role of rising powers and the politics and international relations of the Middle East. He is the author of China and Middle East conflicts (Routledge, 2020) and Rising powers and the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1947 (Lexington Books 2018).

Arwa Badran is a researcher at Durham University on an AHRC funded project on engaging the youth in museums in Jordan. After completing her BA in Archaeology at the University of Jordan, she worked as a field archaeologist for a few years before pursing higher education in museum studies at Newcastle University, where she read for an MA on building connections between museums and the public and later a PhD on the introduction of museums in school curricula. She worked as Lecturer in Museum Studies at the Hashemite University in Jordan, contributing to the establishment and development of the first BA degree in cultural heritage and museology in the Middle East. She has also worked as a consultant for UNESCO on heritage education projects in the Arab region and currently sits on the Executive Committee of the World Archaeological Congress. 

Shatha Abu-Khafajah is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at the Hashemite University in Jordan. Shatha graduated as an architect from the University of Jordan in 1997. She specialized in documentation and conservation of archaeological heritage while doing her Masters degree in archaeology. Her PhD in cultural heritage management from Newcastle University, acquired in 2007, enabled her to synthesize architecture and archaeology with special interest in establishing a sustainable approach to heritage management in the Arab region that is community-based and context-oriented.

Robin Skeates is a Professor in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University in the UK. His research and publications explore a wide variety of themes within the overlapping fields of material, visual and sensual culture studies, and museum and heritage studies. His recent books include Museums and Archaeology (Routledge, 2017) and The Oxford Handbook of Public Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Dr Gerasimos Tsourapas is Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Birmingham and CBRL’s Acting Honorary Treasurer. His research focuses on the politics of migrants, refugees, and diasporas in the Middle East and the broader Global South. He has also written on the international dimension of authoritarianism. Gerasimos’ first book, The Politics of Migration in Modern Egypt – Strategies for Regime Survival in Autocracies (Cambridge University Press, 2019), was awarded the 2020 ENMISA Distinguished Book Award by the International Studies Association. His second book, Migration Diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa – Power, Mobility, and the State, is forthcoming with Manchester University Press.

Alexander Wasse is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, Yeditepe University, Istanbul. His work focuses on the Late Neolithic of the upper Mesopotamian and Levantine ‘desert line’ and Cyprus, with research interests in eastern Jordan specifically. He is co-director of the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project. Alexander is interested in late prehistoric ‘globalisation’, early pastoralism and zooarchaeology, the correlation of archaeological with climatic records, and cycles of economic intensification / deintensification in prehistory.

Gary Rollefson is Professor emeritus, Whitman College and Professor Emeritus, Anthropology at San Diego State University. Gary directed and co-directed the lower and middle Paleolithic projects at ‘Ayn al-Assad and ‘Ayn Sawda in Azraq; excavations at Neolithic ‘Ayn Ghazal; excavations at Pre Pottery Neolithic B and Late Neolithic at Bawwabat al-Ghazal (Azraq Wetlands); Chalcolithic/Early Bronze survey and excavations in Wadi Rum; Survey at Wadi Hudruj (Southeast Jordan); Survey at Jebel Tharwa (Black Desert); and Survey and excavations at Wadi al-Qattafi and Wisad Pools in the Black Desert. 

Matthew Jones is Professor of Quaternary Science at the School of Geography and Future Food Beacon, University of Nottingham. Matt’s research focuses on understanding changing water availability and how changing environments have impacted human populations, and vice versa, over the last 20,000 years. Geographically he has research foci in Southwest Asia and Mexico. He specialises in the use of oxygen isotopes as tracers of the hydrological cycle, especially when preserved in lake sediments, and how these can be used to quantify past changes in water availability. His interests in changing hydrological conditions have led to him working on archaeological projects in Jordan and Iran to provide an environmental context for past human populations in these regions.

Yorke Rowan is a Research Associate Professor in the Archaeology of the Southern Levant at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and is currently co-director of the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project as well as the Galilee Prehistory Project, both Oriental Institute field programs. Yorke’s research focuses on late prehistory (Late Neolithic – Chalcolithic) in the southern Levant, with interests in ritual and economic intensification, craft specialization, and emergent social inequality.

Daniel Marwecki is a lecturer at Hong Kong University’s Department of Politics. He previously taught in Leeds, London and Leipzig and holds a PhD from SOAS. Before his PhD, he worked for a brief time with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in East Jerusalem. 

With Alexander Wasse (Yeditepe University),

This event is in held in partnership with the Palestine Exploration Fund.