Opportunities

The Saudi Ministry of Culture has launched KSA-UK Arabian Peninsula Cultural Research Fellowships in partnership with Effat University and The National Archives of the United Kingdom. The fellowships encourage research on archival materials and cultural research on the Arabian Peninsula, and are open to a broad range of cultural research projects on the Arabian Peninsula.

The fellowships are open to academics and cultural heritage professionals based in Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom, regardless of their career stage. Fellows are expected to conduct their research between 1 August 2026 and 31 July 2027. The fellowships will include a 10-week residency in the National Archives where fellows will receive practical training in archival skills and opportunities to visit other collections and cultural institutions within the United Kingdom.

Conference, University of Cambridge, 17–18 September 2026

The Syrian Academics and Researchers’ Network in the UK (SARN UK) is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for its 2026 international conference, co-hosted with the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies (MAC) at Newnham College, University of Cambridge.

This year's theme, “Syria in Transition: Knowledge, Memory, and the Everyday Aftermath,” invites Syrian and Syria-focused scholars to reflect on the evolving role of academic, cultural, and intellectual work in shaping Syria’s futures. At a moment marked by deep political uncertainty, contested narratives of reconstruction, and widening gaps between exile and those inside the country, the conference offers a space to come together in critical solidarity.

We welcome papers that explore how Syrian scholars, artists, and practitioners — wherever they are — engage with the complex legacies of violence, displacement, and resistance, and how their work contributes to imagining more just, plural, and inclusive futures. We are particularly interested in proposals that bridge disciplines and challenge inherited binaries of inside/outside, past/future, victim/agent, or state/society.

We accept individual as well as co-authored paper proposals.

Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science

The Research Group: Teachers, Inequality and Collective Action (TICA) is inviting applications for the position of Postdoctoral Researcher. The post is designed for an outstanding early career candidate to conduct quantitative research on the Arab region for the project, including survey design, fieldwork oversight, and analysis.

Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science

The Research Group: Teachers, Inequality and Collective Action (TICA) is inviting applications for the position of Doctoral Researcher. The post is designed for an outstanding candidate to develop and conduct thematically relevant doctoral research (single case or comparative) on the Arab region.

Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science 

The Research Group: Teachers, Inequality and Collective Action (TICA) is inviting applications for the position of Postdoctoral or Doctoral Researcher for up to one year to write up and submit for publication research on inequality or collective action in education, with preference for work on Germany or the Middle East and North Africa/SWANA.

Papers are invited for the 3rd workshop of this multi-year research programme funded by the British Institute of Persian Studies (BIPS). The aim of this project is to involve scholars from a wide range of disciplines in the commencement of an organised effort to utilise an extensive range of sources to recover evidence of the ‘voices’ of ‘subalterns’ across the pre-modern and modern terrains of both rural and urban society across the Persianate world. 

The third workshop on subalterns across the entire Persianate world in the Zand and Qajar periods will be held at the University of Edinburgh, UK, on 27-29 October, 2026. 

Papers from PhD students, ECRs and unaffiliated scholars are encouraged.

RSVP to anewman@ed.ac.uk by Friday, 12 June, 2026.

2027 Virtual Conference, British International Studies Association (BISA), Online, 11-13 January 2027

Submissions have opened for our next virtual conference in January 2027, where we hope to have participants from all over the world. The conference will be ‘virtually hosted’ by the Department of International Politics at City St. George's, University of London. This conference will be in addition to the main #BISA2027 in-person conference taking place in June 2027.

Recent years have seen profound political, social, and economic upheaval. These shifts present serious challenges as well as new opportunities. Existing institutions are transforming or failing by the wayside. At the same time, new areas of both competition and cooperation are emerging. This conference seeks new ways to understand and transcend current political realities across a wide range of perspectives and approaches. These include, but are no means limited to, changes in the international system, increasing violence, vulnerability and risk, the rise of artificial intelligence and the fast pace of technological change, enduring inequalities between the Global North and Global South, and the dangers of climate change. We invite submissions that seek to deepen our understanding of this global moment, how it has emerged, and potential futures. We aim to identify the potential for positive changes as well as pitfalls to avoid. We also seek to integrate how our teaching and research both influences and is influenced by these shifts.

To enable a broader international participation in BISA conferences, and to bring together scholars from the UK and across the globe, the conference aims to be inclusive of researchers at all career stages who, for various reasons including cost and visa rules, might find it more difficult to participate in our in-person events. Our first virtual conference in 2025 saw around 200 attendees from 31 countries come together to share and develop their

Special Issue, Editors: Tamara Tamimi and Kiran Grewal

Inspired by postcolonial and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarship, we take up the challenge of articulating a decolonial alternative to existing power structures, systems of knowledge, and ways of doing peace, justice and development. We are therefore calling for papers from different geographical, disciplinary and epistemic locations that offer empirical and/or theoretical contributions to thinking about peace, justice and development in contexts of political violence through a decolonial lens. We conceptualise decolonial approaches in a broad sense that encompass varying theoretical and epistemological perspectives. In this sense, we are looking for papers that propose not just a critique of existing liberal frameworks of peace, justice and development but try to lay the ground for alternatives. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions; suggested questions and areas of inquiry of the special issue include, but are not limited to: 

• How are notions of ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ interpreted? Are there comparative differences across cultures, geographies, and economic contexts? 
• What does ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ entail in situations of complex and/or sustained political violence? 
• How have predominant approaches been able (or not) to address these needs? 
• What foundational issues and practical gaps continue to permeate these approaches? 
• To what extend are these limitations related to the dominance of liberal peace and rule of law frameworks? 
• Can we identify viable alternatives to liberalism-based approaches? 
• What opportunities exist in decolonial approaches, and what limitations and gaps permeate these avenues? 
• What prospects do decolonial, postcolonial, and TWAIL approaches hold for international solidarity and deconstruction of predominant liberalism-based frameworks? 

The Global Digital Humanities programme at the University of St Andrews offers a flexible, fully online postgraduate route for students interested in the relationship between technology, language, literature, culture, and heritage. Taught jointly by the School of Modern Languages and the School of Computer Science, the programme combines humanities inquiry with computational methods including Python, machine learning, and data visualisation.

With PGCert, PGDip, and MSc pathways, students can build their studies around their goals and commitments while learning from anywhere in the world. The programme is designed for those who want to upskill, change direction, deepen their research practice, or prepare for doctoral study.

Applicants to the full online MSc may also be eligible for the Global Digital Humanities Online MSc Scholarship. Up to six scholarships are available each academic year, with each award worth up to £4,500 towards tuition fees for up to three years. Applicants can apply for the scholarship after submitting their course application and do not need to wait for an offer before applying. Selection is based partly on financial need and includes short statements on financial circumstances and course suitability.

Explore how digital tools are reshaping the humanities — and how you can help shape that future.

Find the full details and application information below and feel free to contact Dr Orhan Elmaz (oe2@st-andrews.ac.uk) with any questions.

This Special Issue of International Journal of Fashion Studies asks what it means to think about clothing under conditions of state violence, and what it means to do so at this current juncture. We take the ongoing destruction of life in Gaza as a central provocation, while also acknowledging other contemporary sites of mass violence, including Sudan, Congo, Lebanon and Iran, among other contexts. Indeed, we welcome contributions on/from other locales extending beyond Palestine.

The Special Issue will foreground interdisciplinary approaches, drawing from visual culture, media studies, anthropology, sociology, art history, photography theory, gender and sexuality studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, alongside fashion studies.

The issue will include five to seven articles in the 6000–8000-word range that combine theoretical and empirical work, as well as shorter submissions, visual essays, creative and/or reflective works and reviews (which will be featured in the journal’s ‘Open Space & Reviews’ section). Submissions may address, but are not limited to:

●    dress under siege, displacement and occupation

●    dress in images of mass violence

●    uses of clothes in solidarity movements

●    repression, looting, or confiscation of clothes by military enforcement entities

●    archives of clothing, disappearance and loss 

●    garments as trace or evidence or memorial form

●    clothing and grief, mourning and care

●    interdisciplinary approaches to, and methodological interventions for, the study of dress and violence

BRISMES Trustee and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Dr Feras Alkabani, has been commissioned to edit The Bloomsbury Handbook to LGBTQ+ Culture in the Middle East and North Africa, and would like to invite scholars working on relevant areas covered in the edited collection to contribute a chapter. 

The Bloomsbury Handbook to LGBTQ+ Culture in the Middle East and North Africa offers an exploration of LGBTQ+ culture across a region often overlooked or misrepresented in global queer narratives. Through a blend of historical context and contemporary cultural analysis, the book challenges monolithic portrayals and highlights the resilience, creativity and complexity of queer identities across diverse MENA societies and in their diaspora.

Chapters will typically be around 8,000 words (with some flexibility); first drafts are expected to start arriving in early 2027. 

If you are interested or would like to discuss your potential contribution, please contact Dr Alkabani directly: f.alkabani@sussex.ac.uk.