Opportunities

This year, the Balfour Project Fellowship Programme is offering a small number of paid fellowships for those with experience in advocacy, education, or social media. These positions will be called: Advocacy Fellow, Social Media Fellow, and Education Fellow. They are distinguished from the Associate Fellows as they are specialised roles that will require more working hours on specific projects, for which there will be a small budget. 

The Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World invites distinguished scholars to apply for its inaugural writing retreat from January 6-24, 2025. Taking place at NYU Abu Dhabi, this retreat aims to foster a scholarly community for up to 6 scholars from around the world and to advance research projects in all areas of the Humanities related to the study of the Arab world, its rich literature and history, its cultural and artistic heritage, and its manifold connections with other cultures. Scholars will have the opportunity to work on any type of academic writing, including a research article, book manuscript, chapter or essay. 

We welcome applications from international senior scholars with outstanding scholarly accomplishments and mid-career scholars with strong publication records and exceptional scholarly promise.

The Humanities Research Fellowship program will arrange and cover the costs of the scholar’s travel to and from Abu Dhabi and their accommodation and meals for the duration of the three-week retreat.

Institute for Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, Durham University

The Sir William Luce Memorial Fund welcomes applications for the 2025 Sir William Luce Fellowship, 28 April-27 June 2025.

The Sir William Luce Fellowship is awarded annually to a scholar at post-doctoral level, diplomat, politician, or business executive, working on those parts of the Middle East to which Sir William Luce devoted his working life (the Gulf states, Yemen, Iran, Sudan and South Sudan). The fellowship is hosted by Durham University during the Easter term of each academic year. Recent fellows have included Professor Mark Katz, Edward Thomas, Helen Lackner, Richard Barltrop, Ambassador John W. Limbert and Dr Leben Moro.

The Fund is looking for research proposals that provide fresh perspectives on urgent regional issues in the area comprising the Sudans, Yemen, the Gulf States and Iran. The Fund notes that the University holds a Sudan Archive containing records relating to both Sudan and South Sudan and several collections relating to the MENA region. For the 2025 fellowship applicants are encouraged to devise proposals for research that would draw on these historical collections and in particular which situate the current conflict in Sudan in its regional context. 

Institute for Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies (IMEIS), Durham University

The Mohamed Ali Foundation Fellowship Advisory Panel welcomes applications for the 2025 Mohamed Ali Foundation fellowships, the residencies for which will run from 28 April-27 June 2025. The Mohamed Ali Foundation is a UK charity whose aims include advancing the education of the public in the history of the Islamic World, of Egypt and of the Mohamed Ali Family in particular, especially the period of reign of Khedive Abbas Hilmi II (1892-1914). Fellows will be early career (post-doctoral) or established scholars. 

Scholars are invites scholars to contribute to the forthcoming edited volume Foodways to the Divine: Faith and Food in the Middle East, North Africa, and Beyond. 

The potential publishing house for our volume is Edinburgh University Press as part of the Food and Foodways in the Middle East, North Africa, and their Diasporas Series. Selected contributors will be invited to workshop their chapters at a seminar at the Orient Institut Istanbul (OIIST) in April 2025, where they will have the opportunity to engage with other contributors and receive feedback in person. 

This Fellowship supports an artist of Palestinian heritage to spend a period of two months as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) between May and July 2025. A key objective of the Fellowship is to support the artistic practice of those who have faced severe threats to their lives and/or artistic practice and freedom of expression, or who have been forced to flee because of conflict or discrimination. Artists can be working in any field of practice.

The Fellowship provides a grant for living expenses in the UK which is currently at the monthly rate of $3,000 (approximately £2,290), and a contribution of £1,000 towards the cost of travel to the UK. IASH will also cover visa fees for the successful applicant.

Seminar, Istanbul, 9-12 April 2025

Proposals are invited for contributions to Travellers in Ottoman Lands, Seminar Three (TIOL3) Places Forgotten, Places Remembered. Three days of presentation sessions in the historical neighbourhoods of Karaköy and Beyoğlu will be followed by one day of excursions. The Seminar is presented by Travellers in Ottoman Lands, in association with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Sabancı University, The Netherlands Institute in Turkey (NIT), The British Institute at Ankara (BIAA), The Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTENE) and Cornucopia, The Magazine for Connoisseurs of Turkey.

With the end of the three-year term of the current Honorary Treasurer, the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA) seeks to appoint a new Honorary Treasurer to the Council of Management at its next AGM in December 2024. Experience of financial management in the commercial or not-for-profit worlds and an accountancy qualification is desirable, but not essential. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until 15^th November 2024

Special Issue, Mashriq & Mahjar

Migration has long been a prominent feature of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, characterized by a wide range of mobilities. Historically, this phenomenon includes trade migrations such as those along the cross-Sahara trade routes and the Silk Road, as well as movements related to Ottoman expansion, European colonialism, and decolonization. In more recent times, other events and circumstances have driven significant migration in the region including the creation of the state of Israel in 1948; irregular cross-Sahara migration; student migration to diverse MENA countries; labor migration to the Gulf countries; and substantial forced migrations propelled by conflicts within the MENA region in the twenty-first century—such as those in Syria, Libya, and Yemen—as well as in neighboring regions like the Horn of Africa and South Asia.

This special issue seeks to examine how different forms of mobility shape understandings of family structures and relationships within historical and contemporary religious and socio-economic contexts. Different to other studies on marriage and (forced) migration, this themed issue will: a) link two currently distinct MENA research areas together: women in Islam and migration studies; and b) consider issues such as family, sexuality, love, law, and citizenship through new perspectives beyond religious and gender essentialism and neo-orientalist stereotypes.

Peace Politics in the Middle East aims to present reflective and cutting edge research that provide a forum for critical debate between scholars and politicians from across the Middle East and beyond. The focus is on presenting solutions to seemingly intractable problems and situations, and to explain the ramifications of their potential implementation.

Peace Politics in the Middle East delivers texts which predominantly deal with the prevention, causes and resolution of wars, terrorism, genocide, and gross violations of human rights. The series will aim to provide in-depth understanding that can assist academics and practitioners to work towards building a just and peaceful system. It delves into substantial analyses of constructive relationships across ethnic, religious, class and gender that can contribute to peacebuilding and mutual coexistence.

The Middle East is experiencing major political transformations, some of which continue from the Arab uprisings of 2011, which invite historical and comparative examinations. The first of its kind, Disruptions publishes studies on the origins, nature, and impact of the ideas, events (uprisings, revolutions, protests), and actors (ordinary people, activists, intellectuals, or leaders) that are now disrupting the social orders in the region.

We welcome monographs and, in exceptional cases, edited volumes that offer novel theoretical and conceptual frameworks and/or empirical material generated from the region. Disruptions fosters the principle of pluralism in knowledge generation in the Social Sciences, and will be open to various theoretical and methodological approaches in Political Science, History, Sociology, Social Psychology and Middle Eastern Studies.

Under the direction of the new series editors, the Global Ethics book series seeks to advance research and conversation around a broad array of ethical issues in international and global matters. The editors are interested in publishing both monographs and edited collections from scholars, practitioners, and those engaged in civil society. These may include topics such as global governance, global health disparities, international intellectual property, climate change, economic sanctions, food security, civil and transnational conflict, and migration. Our particular interest is to provide a platform for scholars and practitioners from the Global South, and to host a dialogue involving diverse perspectives on issues of concern to the Global South.

The editors would welcome submissions of books, book proposals and inquiries about possible projects.

This series approaches gender as a category of analysis, a platform of mobilisation and activism, an essential aspect of governance and a signifier of power relations that intersect with other inequalities. Encouraging interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies, Critiquing Gender & Islam mainly features empirically grounded work, including ethnographic, visual and discursive material. Sexuality and queer politics are important aspects of the series’ understanding of the politics of gender.

I.B.Tauris and the British Institute at Ankara are seeking book proposals for the Contemporary Turkey academic book series. The Contemporary Turkey monograph series is a joint initiative by the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA), internationally renowned for its support of independent academic research, and leading publisher of Middle East and Turkish Studies I.B. Tauris, an imprint of Bloomsbury Academic.

The series publishes cutting-edge research monographs and edited collections from a new generation of scholars working on modern Turkey across the social sciences and humanities. In bringing to light new data and insights directly from the field, this series is distinguished by its emphasis on innovative approaches that challenge established ways of examining Turkey.

The Board of Electors to the His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said Professorship of Modern Arabic Studies invite applications for this Professorship from candidates whose work focuses on the study of Modern Arabic and/or the Modern Arab world. The ideal candidate will have an innovative vision for the future of Modern Arabic Studies at Cambridge and enthusiasm to build on current strengths in maintaining and developing a leading research presence. They will hold a PhD or equivalent postgraduate qualification and would ideally currently hold a professorial position.

The Society for Algerian Studies and the LSE Middle East Centre are delighted to announce the fifth round of a prize aimed at Master’s students in the UK conducting research on Algeria. Launched in 2019, the prize is designed to encourage and celebrate outstanding research, prizes will be awarded to the most innovative and significant Master’s dissertations focussing on Algeria. 

The NYU Abu Dhabi Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World (HRF) invites early-career scholars who wish to contribute to the vibrant research culture of NYUAD’s Saadiyat campus to apply for a residential fellowship, starting September 2025.

This workshop explores Shi’ism and Muslim confessionalisation from a global historical perspective, with a special focus on migrations and connections across borders and continents. Its main objective is to flip the central dichotomy at the heart of work on global trends in Islam to date: rather than asking how Shi’i communities globally have been influenced and shaped by religious, political and intellectual developments occurring in the Shi’i heartlands of Iran and southern Iraq, it seeks to understand how processes of Shi’i sect-formation and modern trends in Shi’ism – intellectual, cultural, political and theological – have been shaped by the reality and perception of a global Shi’i public, stretching across the Middle East, Iran and South Asia, but also in Africa, Europe, North America and South America.

The LSE Middle East Centre warmly invites submissions of interest for the upcoming workshop ‘From Past and Present to Future: Finding a Positive Path between Ideals and Possibilities in Yemen’ taking place on Thursday 24 April, 2025.

Proposals for papers to be presented at the workshop are invited on any aspect within the themes of:

• Peace: Yemeni, UN, regional and Western approaches to peacemaking, mediation and peacebuilding in Yemen
• Governance: the Sana’a-based government, the internationally recognised government, political parties, Southern Yemen, local governance
• Economy: the reported and actual economies, international and Yemeni humanitarian and development aid, environmental issues
• Society: culture, education, gender, ideology and religion

Please send your proposed paper title, a 300-word abstract and a short bio by Monday 2 December to Mec.events@lse.ac.uk.

This special issue focuses on an under-researched aspect of the rise of militias and defense groups, namely the role of women in leadership positions in such organisations and groups, paying special attention on Africa and the Middle East to measure the empirical variation between different terrains of inquiry to be analysed through two different theoretical frameworks: the Gendered Theory of Rebellion – the political, economic, ethno-religious and human security motivations – and the Domination/Power Theory – through the profiles of women leaders. The rationale for the special issue is the attempt to analyse and evaluate the experience of women in leadership positions, their motivations for violence and the degree to which their decision-making and influence in the perpetration of violence impacts their definition of feminitity.

Thus, the research questions guiding in the special issue are: How and in which countries did they become leaders? What actions do they carry out and are they part of different logics compared to those carried out by men? Given their personal trajectories, their motivations and their actions, what specific relationships can be established between women in positions of leadership and the use of violence? Do the leadership status of these women and their relationship to violence lead us to revisit the agency of women to the point of talking about empowerment through violence? How can their leadership, beyond gender norms, renegotiate the norms of femininity? 

Paper proposals (max. 500 words) should be submitted to both editors at: muriel.gomez-perez@hst.ulaval.ca and francesco.cavatorta@pol.ulaval.c

The British Association for Islamic Studies (BRAIS) is delighted to announce the 2025 round of the BRAIS Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World. This international prize is awarded annually to one outstanding doctoral thesis. English-language submissions on any aspect of the academic study of Islam and the Muslim world, past and present, including Muslim-minority societies are accepted. Applicants can be based in any country.

The Gulf Research Center (GRC) is pleased to announce that we are accepting paper abstracts for the 15th annual Gulf Research Meeting (GRM), the annual academic conference highlighting critical issues of importance to the Gulf region and providing a basis for undertaking and engaging in academic and empirical research. GRM 2025 will take place in Cambridge (UK) from July 22-24, 2025.

GRM workshops cover a wide range of topics in the fields of politics, economics, gender, culture, energy, security, and the social sciences as they relate to the GCC states and the wider Gulf region.

This special issue addresses the persistent conceptual confusion around ‘state’ and ‘regime’ in academic literature on the modern Middle East and North Africa (MENA). We invite scholars from the humanities and social sciences to grapple with the distinction, or lack thereof, between state and regime in the MENA, exploring its origins and impacts in academia and beyond. The call is open to scholars in and across the fields of History, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, International Relations, and Cultural Studies.

The IHF Modern Iran Series publishes innovative Open Access books with a broad thematic focus on modern and contemporary Iran. The chronological scope of the series covers the late nineteenth century to the present day with thematic areas ranging from cultural and social to political and economic issues. Single and co-authored volumes as well as edited volumes will be eligible for consideration.