Opportunities

The graduate Program in Public Policy and International Affairs (PPIA) in the Department of Political Studies and Public Administration at the American University of Beirut invites applications for a one-year Visiting Professorship in the Political Economy of the Middle East, beginning in September 2026. The position is open rank, and candidates at the Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor level are welcome to apply.  

We encourage applications from scholars trained in political science, economics or international affairs, with a specialization in Political Economy, Peace Studies, State-Building, and Post-Conflict Reconstruction with demonstrated policy professional experience in the Middle East with and particularly the Levant/Mashriq. 

Special Issue, Women's Studies International Forum

For many women, law is encountered through uneven and overlapping systems of governance in which legal authority is dispersed across state institutions, administrative mechanisms, religious actors, and socially embedded forms of regulation. In the Middle East, these configurations extend beyond classical understandings of legal pluralism. Rather than simply reflecting the coexistence of multiple normative orders, they reveal uneven distributions of institutional authority, legal access, and political legitimacy across legal, social, and administrative domains.

This special issue examines how women interpret, negotiate, and engage fragmented legal and institutional environments shaped by state restructuring, conflict, administrative differentiation, and competing forms of authority. Law is approached not as a coherent or autonomous domain, but as a politically embedded field continuously shaped through governance practices, unequal institutional reach, and social power relations.

Moving beyond descriptive approaches to legal pluralism, this issue foregrounds women’s lived and strategic engagement with law under conditions of uncertainty, uneven governance, and competing normative expectations. Contributions are invited from interdisciplinary and empirically grounded perspectives, including socio-legal studies, political science, anthropology, sociology, history, gender studies, and Middle East studies.

The Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS) is a scholarly association that works to promote scholarly excellence, to facilitate collaboration among scholars and academic institutions, and to support the work of graduate students and early career scholars. Our awards programme has been running since 2012 and recognises exceptional work on the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula, inclusive of the transnational flow of people, material and ideas across the Gulf, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean. The AGAPS 2026 awards include a PhD dissertation award, a graduate student paper award, and a travel bursary towards attending the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) conference (21–24 November 2026, Boston, USA). Winners will be presented with their awards at the AGAPS Business Meeting during the MESA conference. For more details, visit https://agaps.org/awards-2026/.

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

Submissions are now open for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award's 21st edition. The Award, organised by the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre (ALC), recognises the work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers across 10 categories. Each winner receives a career-changing prize of AED 750,000 and will be invited to an award ceremony at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair in 2027.

Categories open to international submissions include:

• Arab Culture in Other Languages: This category celebrates works in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish in a broad range of disciplines relating to Arab culture, with recently shortlisted titles ranging from critical studies of Arabic poetry to histories of Arab cultural influence around the world. 
• Translation: This category is open to any translation either from or to the Arabic language.
• Publishing and Technology: This category is open to submissions by publishers, distributors, research institutions and cultural institutions who work to advance Arabic culture.
• Editing of Arabic manuscripts: This category is dedicated to efforts in editing Arabic manuscripts in any field of knowledge in the Arabic tradition
• Cultural Personality of the Year: This category honours prominent figures or organisations who have contributed to the advancement of Arabic culture. This category is open to nomination from academic, research, or cultural institutions, cultural figures, and literary bodies and universities.

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. 

This edited volume centers the space that is bounded by an Arab East, a European North, an African South, and an Atlantic West. Generally encompassing Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, the label used to name this region variously includes or excludes Mauritania, Libya, and Egypt. Tamazgha, the Maghreb, al-Maghrib al-‘Arabi, and North Africa: each label originates in specific historical-political junctures and comprises particular power relations. 

This collective book seeks to provide a view of visual, literary, and cultural aspects of the region to explore and critically interrogate the multifaceted encounters between the peoples and ideas of Tamazgha, the Maghreb, North Africa, and the world. It invites chapters that examine how Western images of this region have evolved over time and how local representations of the West have developed in response—including through trans-Saharan and trans-Mediterranean networks, borderland formations, and other sites of mobility and encounter. 

Emphasizing a contrapuntal reading and a multidisciplinary and decolonial methodology, the book seeks to reassess how this region of complex and contested identities and cultures have been shaped by engagements with Western and non-Western thought, aesthetics, and ideology. It centers local and indigenous perspectives in shaping and contesting cultural representations, while fostering dialogue across disciplines. The book encourages innovative methodologies that challenge previous approaches and discourses while also opening space for more nuanced and decolonial readings of cultural production and exchange.