14 JAN 2021 · 14 January 2021 In this roundtable event, Islah Jad, Sara Ababneh and Nicola Pratt discuss women’s activism in the Levant, with a focus on Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon. Based on their respective research in this area, they explore how women’s activism has emerged and changed over time, its relationship to nationalism and state-building, to feminism, international hegemonic discourses on women's rights and development, as well as to other socio-political forces, its goals and its achievements. The panel will consider similarities and differences between different country contexts as well as theoretical, conceptual and methodological issues involved in researching women’s activism in the region.

17 FEB 2021 · 17 February 2021 This webinar will investigate the development of complex societies in the Lebanese coastal zone during the Early Bronze Age (EBA). New evidence shows that coastal Lebanon, with its unique mountainous setting and ample water resources, developed a distinct pathway to complexity. Dr Kamal Badreshany will discuss ceramic and architectural evidence from recently excavated sites in the region to assess the economic underpinnings of EBA communities. He will examine the distribution of EBA settlement in coastal Lebanon with a view to understanding the underlying logic, and to contrast the distribution of EBA settlements with that documented for other parts of the Levant during this time. The webinar will be chaired by Professor Graham Philip.

3 MAR 2021 · 31 March 2021 Current global climatic and ecological changes present a profound threat to the long-term wellbeing of humanity. Solutions to mitigate against or adapt to society’s grand sustainability challenge will come from many quarters – science and technology, humanities and the creative arts, health, business and education – but the historical sciences of archaeology and geology also offer important past perspectives. This webinar will explore the role and responsibility of geo-archaeological science in addressing fundamental aspects of sustainable development, including water, mineral resources, energy, and disaster risk. Prof. Iain Stewart will begin with a keynote presentation, before bringing in the perspectives of our panellists Prof. Nizar Abu-Jaber and Dr Carol Palmer. The webinar will be chaired by Prof. Matthew Jones. About the speakers: Professor Iain Stewart is the newly appointed El Hassan Research Chair in Sustainability at the Royal Scientific Society. The former director of its Sustainable Earth Institute at the University of Plymouth, Iain’s long-standing research interests are in geological hazards, geology for sustainable development, and geoscience communication. His geo-communication work has built on a 15-year partnership with BBC television presenting Earth science programmes, including Earth: The Power of the Planet; How Earth Made Us; How to Grow a Planet; The Rise of the Continents; and Planet Oil. Awarded an MBE for his services to geography and geology education, he currently holds a UNESCO Chair in Geoscience and Society and leads the UNESCO’s International Geoscience and Geoparks Programme project 685 on Geology and Sustainable Development. Professor Nizar Abu-Jaber is the Director of the Center for Natural and Cultural Heritage (CSNACH) at the German Jordanian University (GJU). Previously, he worked at Yarmouk University where he directed the UNESCO Chair for Desert Studies and Desertification Control. At GJU, he was the Dean of Research and Graduate Studies before moving on to establish CSNACH in 2011. A geologist by training, his diverse interests revolve around the use of Earth science in resolving pressing issues related to water resources and management, climate change, sustainable planning and cultural heritage. Most recently, he has led a number of CSNACH projects aimed at reviving the ancient Nabatean flood control system in Petra, a project which won the ICCROM-Athar award for Good Practices in Cultural Heritage Conservation and Management in the Arab Region (2020). Dr Carol Palmer is Director of the Council for British Research in the Levant based in Amman. She is an anthropologist, environmental archaeologist, and botanist. She wrote her PhD on traditional farming in northern Jordan and subsequently studied Bedouin from southern Jordan as part of the Wadi Faynan Project. Her research interests concentrate on recording rural life in its many forms, the contemporary and recent use of plants on the broadest level, cultivated, gathered, and grazed, and the effects of changes in food production practices on the landscape and in society. She is an Honorary Fellow at Bournemouth University.

4 MAR 2021 · 4 March 2021 This webinar, co-hosted by the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) and the British Institute at Ankara, will showcase the latest debates and scholarship on modern and contemporary feminist art practices and histories from the Middle East and Turkey. The panellists will share their perspectives on feminist art in Syria, Turkey and Palestine. Dr Charlotte Bank will discuss feminist approaches in works by Syrian women artists and how they have been a vehicle for social change; Dr Ceren Özpınar will examine how the history of feminist art in Turkey has been commonly told and why that should be challenged; and Dr Tina Sherwell will highlight the work of Palestinian women artists. The webinar will be chaired by Dr Toufic Haddad, Director of CBRL’s Kenyon Institute in Jerusalem.

22 MAR 2021 · 22 March 2021 The Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL), in partnership with the Educational Bookshop, are pleased to invite you to the Jerusalem book launch of Mahmood Mamdani’s latest title “Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities.” This “genealogy of political modernity” offers original arguments regarding the co-constitutive relationship between the nation-state and the colonial state. According to the book’s description, “[i]n case after case around the globe – from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan – the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicisation of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. […] “Neither Settler nor Native” offers a vision for arresting this historical process. It rejects “the ‘criminal’ solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors – victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries – based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native.” This event features Dr Mamdani presenting on his book’s findings and arguments, followed by a discussion moderated by CBRL's Kenyon Institute Director Dr Toufic Haddad. About the speaker: Dr Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University and Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala. He is the author of “Citizen and Subject, When Victims Become Killers” and “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.”

28 APR 2021 · 28 April 2021 Are you interested in getting your research published in a leading peer-reviewed journal focused on the Middle East? Join us for a conversation with the editors of four prominent international journals who will share their perspectives and advice on how to get your research published. Our panellists will share their insights on the publishing process and provide tips for what they are looking for in their submissions. We will be joined by Joel Gordon, Editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies; Noha Mellor, Associate Editor of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies; and Salim Tamari, Editor of Jerusalem Quarterly. The event will be chaired by Sarah Irving, Editor of CBRL’s journal Contemporary Levant. This is the first of CBRL's skills sessions, which offer practical advice and support on a range of academic topics that are particularly relevant to postgraduate students and early career researchers. We will be hosting a variety of events this year to equip scholars, focused on or based in the Levant, with the knowledge and skills to help them get ahead in their research and careers. If you have ideas on subjects you would like us to cover, please get in touch. About the speakers: Joel Gordon is Editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies and a Professor of History at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville. He is a political and cultural historian of modern Egypt and the Middle East/Islamic world. He teaches and writes about political change, the intersections of public and popular culture, historical memory and nostalgia, and religious and secular crosscurrents, with emphases on cinema, music and mass media. He is the author of three books on the era of Gamal Abdel Nasser and numerous articles, book and film reviews. Noha Mellor is a Professor at the University of Bedfordshire and an Adjunct Professor at Stockholm University. She is the author of several books about Arab media including The Making of Arab News (2005), Modern Arab Journalism (2007), Arab Media (2011), Reporting the MENA Region (2015), and Voice of the Muslim Brotherhood (2017). She has recently co-edited the first comprehensive Handbook on Arab Media (2020). She is Associate Editor of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and a member of the editorial board of Arab Media & Society, International Journal of Press/Politics, Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research, and Journalism Studies. Salim Tamari is Professor of Sociology (Emeritus) at Birzeit University; Research Associate at the Institute for Palestine Studies; and Editor of The Jerusalem Quarterly. He has previously been the Editor of the Heritage and Society Journal, the Birzeit Social Science Review and Afaq Falastiniyya. Salim is the author of a number of publications including: Mountain Against the Sea: A Conflicted Modernity; The Storyteller of Jerusalem: The Life and Times of Wasif Jawhariyyeh (with Issam Nassar); and Year of the Locust: Erasure of the Ottoman Era in Palestine. He was the winner of the 2018 Middle East Monitor prize for his book Great War and the Remaking of Palestine and won the 2017 State of Palestine Prize for Lifetime Achievements in the social sciences and humanities. About the chair: Sarah Irving is Editor of the CBRL journal Contemporary Levant and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, researching a social history of the 1927 earthquake in Mandate Palestine. She has worked in and on the Levant region, particularly Palestine, since 2001 and has written and edited a number of academic and trade books on its culture and history. Most recently these include Cultural Entanglement in the Pre-Independence Arab World, edited with Tony Gorman of Edinburgh University and published by IB Tauris, and articles in Jerusalem Quarterly, Contemporary Levant and Revue d’histoire culturelle on aspects of the intellectual and social history of Mandatory Palestine.

25 MAY 2021 · 19 May 2021 A Christian ‘Oriental question’ or an ‘Orient belonging only to Easterners’? In this webinar, the panellists will discuss European cultural diplomacy in Ottoman and Mandate Syria and Palestine, how it impacted the cultural identification of indigenous Christians, and the variety of Christian Arab agendas towards such policies, relying predominantly on unpublished sources. They will present some of the conceptual and archival challenges, and link the study of the micro-scale level of everyday cultural and religious life to the macro-narratives of global change affecting Christian communities, in a connected perspective. ______________________________ The Panellists: Karène Sanchez Summerer Konstantinos Papastathis Lora Gerd Dimitrios M. Kontogeorgis Chair: Sarah Irving

29 JUN 2021 · This lecture, in partnership with CBRL and UCL Press, provides an opportunity to summarize, share insights, and discuss the recently published volume: “Olga Tufnell’s ‘Perfect Journey’: Letters and photographs of an archaeologist in the Levant and Mediterranean.” Olga Tufnell (1905–85) was a British archaeologist working in Egypt, Cyprus and Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, a so-called golden age of archaeological discovery. Based largely on letters and photographs from the Olga Tufnell archive at the Palestine Exploration Fund, the book sheds light on personal experiences of travel and dig life at this extraordinary time. The letters offer insights into the social and professional networks and history of archaeological research, particularly for Palestine under the British Mandate, including through excavations at Tell el Far’ah (South), Tell el-‘Ajjul and Tell ed-Duweir (ancient Lachish). They provide information about the role of foreign archaeologists, relationships with local workers and inhabitants, and the colonial frameworks they operated within during turbulent times. ___________________ About the Speakers: Jack Green, also known as John D.M. Green, is associate director of the American Center of Research, Amman, Jordan, where he is currently engaged in the Temple of the Winged Lions Publication project focused on this important Nabataean site in Petra. He is also focused on the Tell es-Sa'idiyeh Cemetery Publication Project at the British Museum, following his Ph.D thesis (UCL, 2006) on the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age cemetery at Tell es-Sa'idiyeh, Jordan. Jack was Deputy Director of Collections, Research, and Exhibitions at the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY (2016-17), Chief Curator of the Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago (2011-2015), and curator of Ancient Near East at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (2007 - 2011). His academic interests are in the archaeology, history, and art history of the ancient Middle East and East Mediterranean, museum studies, cultural heritage studies, histories of archaeology and museums. Ros Henry assisted Olga Tufnell at the Institute of Archaeology with the publication of the Wellcome-Marston Expedition to Tell ed-Duweir (ancient Lachish) expedition and related material during the 1950s. After Olga Tufnell’s death in 1985, Ros co-authored her obituaries and became involved with the Olga Tufnell archive after the collection of letters and photographs was donated to the Palestine Exploration Fund. She then embarked upon the task of collating, ordering, transcribing, and initial editing of the letters, beginning the process towards the publication of “Olga Tufnell’s ‘Perfect Journey.’” Ros has a MA degree in History from Trinity College Dublin, and lives in Warwickshire, England. ____________________ Additional resources: Watch the video recording of the lecture: https://bit.ly/3qxlSEX The footage mentioned in the lecture comes from Filming Antiquity. Links to the short movies can be found below: Conservation in the field: https://bit.ly/2UPSNc9 Introducing Gerald Lankester Harding: https://bit.ly/3x8tksI

6 JUL 2021 · In this speaker event, Lori Allen will present on her latest book, A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine, in conversation with Toufic Haddad. Based on archival and ethnographic research, this book examines a history of international investigative commissions in Palestine as liberal performances and enactments of international law. A History of False Hope offers new perspectives on Palestinian political history, and a novel methodology bringing anthropology to the archives and the history of international law. ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Lori Allen is Reader in Anthropology at SOAS University of London. Her work has focused on Palestinian society, politics, and history. She is the author of two books, A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine (2020) and The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine (2013), published by Stanford University Press. Her articles have been published in academic and news journals, including American Ethnologist, Contemporary Studies in Society and History, MERIP, Al-Jazeera, and Sada. Lori's most recent contributions include "This Time May Be Different: on the UN commission of inquiry investigating violations in the occupied Palestinian territory" and "The ICC in Palestine: Reasons to Withhold Hope." ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Additional resources: Watch the video: https://bit.ly/3qON0iF

5 OCT 2021 · 29 September 2021 | The politics of water scarcity in the Levant The Middle East is the most water scarce region in the world. In this webinar we will consider the causes and consequences of this water scarcity. We will discuss how climate and management of water resources impacts this water crisis. Three speakers will provide perspectives from the Levant: an exploration of the politics behind policies of water allocation in the case of Jordan, thoughts on food security in water scarce regions whilst protecting the livelihoods of farmers, and discussions on the implications of water scarcity on vulnerable communities in the Levant. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________ About the speakers: Hussam Hussein is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Oxford and Fellow at the Oxford Martin School in Transboundary Resources Management. His research focuses on the role of discourses in shaping water policies in the Middle East, on transboundary water governance, and on the political economy of water resources in arid and semi-arid regions. He obtained his PhD degree from the University of East Anglia, with a thesis focusing on the discourse of water scarcity in the case of Jordan. Martin Keulertz is an adjunct assistant professor to the food security program at the American University of Beirut. He acted as director of the program until 2020 and continues to teach in the online delivery of program. Martin also works as a consultant to governments, the private sector, NGOs and to a wide range of organisations in the Middle East and North Africa on issues related to water, food and trade. Majd al Naber is the team leader and senior researcher in the sustainable development pillar at West Asia-North Africa (WANA) Institute. She manages several projects addressing the environmental challenges facing the WANA region. She takes a multidisciplinary approach that encompasses the fields of climate change, gender, water, agriculture and energy from a transboundary dimension. She is a specialist in integrated water resources management and water policy for arid land. She received her Doctor of Philosophy Joint degree from the Wageningen University, The Netherlands and SupAgro, France. Her doctoral research investigated the dynamics and governance of groundwater use in the Middle East and North Africa; technical and institutional innovations in arid zones: groundwater-based agriculture in arid land; the case of the Azraq basin, Jordan. She has authored and co-authored numerous publications. About the chair: Carol Palmer is the Director of CBRL, based in Amman. She is an anthropologist, environmental archaeologist and botanist. Her research interests concentrate on recording rural life in its many forms, the contemporary and recent use of plants on the broadest level, cultivated, gathered and grazed, and the effects of changes in food production practices on the landscape and in society. Please see here for more details.