Projects
-
Dr Hsinyen Lai has recently been awarded two grants for two separate projects. The first of these is a book manuscript that re-conceptualises, through Antonio Gramsci’s insights, the social origins and evolution of Arab nationalism in the Gulf, by which Lai revisits the role of Arab nationalism in Bahrain’s alignment in the 1970s. This book project is funded by a 1-year grant from the 2023 National Science and Technology Council Taiwanese Overseas Pioneers Grants (TOP Grants) for Young Scholars. The other project Lai is working on is a collaborative one, in coordination with Dr Harry Yi-Jui Wu (National Cheng-Kung University, Taiwan), and funded by a 2-year grant from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation. The project explores the issues around medical humanitarianism and health diplomacy during the Cold War by focusing on the case of Taiwan’s medical Corps in Saudi Arabia between 1975 and 1990.
-
Dr Filippo Costa Buranelli has been awarded a Personal Research Fellowship (£63,572.00) by the Royal Society of Edinburgh to investigate the formation of a regional order in Central Asia. The ongoing war in Ukraine and the seemingly endless cycle of violence in Nagorno-Karabakh have led many commentators to question the stability, legitimacy, and even viability of the current post-Soviet regional order. Yet, the relatively peaceful coexistence of Central Asia has caught several analysts by surprise. Although conflict does occur in the region, as exemplified by the recent border clashes between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, it does so much less pervasively and is much more prone to being contained through both formal and informal bilateral as well as multilateral means. This project intends to demonstrate how the five Central Asian republics have striven to create a regional order structured around the institutions of sovereignty, diplomacy, international law, authoritarianism, and great power management. The adoption of such institutions, the norms attached to them, and their local interpretation have significantly contributed to regional stability and the containment of open conflict in Central Asia. The project, which will start in August 2023 and will end in July 2024, will rely on extensive fieldwork in the region, where both interviews with officials and archival research will take place. The outputs of the project are expected to be a monograph and a research article, plus a series of events to scholarly discuss the topic both in the region and in Scotland.
-
See the project website for further information.
The project is convened by Dr Kirill Dmitriev and Professor Bilal Orfali of the American University of Beirut. It aims to document and study the history of the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat in premodern Arabic literature and culture. Barlaam and Josaphat is an outstanding work of world literature. It was translated into many languages between the sixth and seventeenth centuries and circulated widely in various cultural and religious milieus across Eurasia. The legend was extraordinarily popular in the Arab world. The rich history of its transmission in Arabic sources represents an important chapter in the premodern literary history of the Arab world and reflects its dynamic connections to other cultures. The project aims to edit and study several Arabic manuscripts of the legend. The manuscripts will be published online in an open-access research platform using Ediarum, an online tool for editing manuscripts developed at the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Berlin, Germany). Along with the photocopies of the manuscripts, the platform will feature full transcriptions of the Arabic texts, an English translation of selected manuscripts as well as analytical metadata and a bibliography. This will result in the creation of a comprehensive research tool on the history of Barlaam and Josaphat in Arabic literature. -
See the project website for further information.
Dr Fiona McCallum Guiney was the Project Leader of this HERA-funded interdisciplinary collaborative project with Dr Lise Paulsen Galal (Roskilde University) and Dr Marta Wozniak-Bobinska (University of Lodz) from 2013 to 2015. The research was awarded 785,851 Euros. The project explored migrant experiences of Coptic, Assyrian/Syriac and Iraqi Christians in the UK, Denmark and Sweden and focused on three areas: internal dynamics, interactions with wider society and transnational connections. The research was conducted through interviews with community members, policymakers and civil society actors, as well as focus groups and participant observation. The findings have been published in journals including Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Journal of Religion in Europe, Journal of Church and State, Parole d’Orient, and Journal of Islamic Research. -
See the project website for more information and publications.
The project is a collaborative initiative of the School of Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews and the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge and led by Dr Kirill Dmitriev and Dr Christine van Ruymbeke. The initiative was supported by the ERC Starting Grant within the project Language, Philology, Culture: Arab Cultural Semantics in Transition (the Honeyman Foundation (St Andrews) and various research funding at FAMES (Cambridge). It aims to explore the history of wine poetry in various Near and Middle Eastern works of literature from its origins in the sixth century up until the early modern period. Khamriyya represents, along with ghazal, a major form of poetic expression in various literary traditions, including Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Syriac, Ethiopian, Armenian, Georgian and Ottoman Turkish. The historical diversity and aesthetic versatility of khamriyya defined its development over many centuries in different cultural, religious and social contexts. In order to reveal the richness and importance of khamriyya as a world poetic genre, the initiative applies a comparative approach, which helps understand the transformations of the genre throughout different periods of literary history and across diverse cultural and linguistic milieus. The initiative was conducted in 2014 – 2017 in the form of a lecture series, research workshops in St Andrews and Cambridge, and a conference in Beirut. -
See the project website for more information and publications.
Dr Kirill Dmitriev was the Principal Investigator in the ERC-funded project ‘Language, Philology, Culture: Arab Cultural Semantics in Transition’ between 2012 and 2018. The project explored the pivotal role of language consciousness in the history of Arab culture. It aimed to study the semantic development of the vocabulary of the Arabic language, philological discourses on the semantic changes in the language in the classical Arabic philological tradition (8th – 10th centuries A.D.), and the impact of Arabic philology in the wider historical and cultural context of the Judaeo-Arab neo-classical heritage (12th – 13th centuries A.D.) and Christian-Arab intellectual history on the eve of modernity (19th century A.D.). The project created an Analytical Database of Arabic Poetry. This publicly accessible database represented a ground-breaking contribution to European research on the Arabic language and the Arabic philological heritage, which so far lacked even such fundamental tools as an etymological dictionary of the Arabic language or a complete dictionary of Classical Arabic. -
See the project website for more information and publications.
Professor Raymond Hinnebusch, Director of the Centre for Syrian Studies, together with Dr Morten Valjborn of Aarhus University, received almost £400,000 from the Danish Council for Independent Research to study sectarianism in the wake of the Arab Revolts (SWAR). The grant emerged from their shared interest in the seeming change in the dominant identities in the Middle East to Sunni-Shia rivalry as a result of conflicts after the Arab uprisings. The project published ten peer-reviewed articles, and the researchers are now working on a co-authored book with Cambridge University Press. The findings were also disseminated at numerous keynotes and invited lectures. The project has led to research contracts from the World Bank and the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia. -
The Centre for Syrian Studies, which is part of MECACS, received two research and consultancy contracts to study the consequences of the conflict in Syria and the prospects for reconstruction. The Centre signed a memorandum of understanding with UN ESCWA to collaborate on the production of studies on the Syrian conflict and CSS scholars Prof Ray Hinnebusch and Dr Omar Imady were commissioned to undertake research analysis under a $28.000 contract, with recommendations incorporated into an ESCWA study, Syria at War: Seven Years On, which catalogued the obstacles to societal reconciliation and reconstruction and offered advice on the way forward. The Centre was also commissioned by the World Bank, supported by $47,000 funding, to undertake research on the context of Syrian reconstruction as part of its “Building for Peace in MENA” initiative aimed at generating knowledge on the reconstruction context in order to share this with government policymakers. The report offered advice on how to generate shared interests in reconstruction that could incrementally break the stalemate. CSS researchers presented their findings at World Bank workshops in June and in October 2018 and in a final 20,000-word report in March 2019.