Research Projects

Research Projects

'People Power and State Power: Religious and Political Dialogue in the Middle East'

This network is organised through the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW) and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
It represents the uniting of two research networks formally supported by British Academy funding, namely Liberation, Domination and Expression of the Middle East which was led by Dr Frederic Volpi and Resistance, Representation and Identigy which was led by Dr Ewan Stein.

The newly formed network organised the following event in Tunis in December 2012:

'Tunis conference: This workshop focuses on the comparative aspect of the transformations brought about by the 'Arab Spring' in the Maghreb. We seek to obtain a better understanding of the interrelationships between religious and secular interpretations of these events and visions for the future. This event strengthened the regional dimension of the research by enabling network participants to compare and contrast different representations of the 'Arab Spring', particularly from religious and cultural perspectives, within and between countries.'

The conference programme and conference report are available at:

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/intrel/mecacs/researchnetworks/casaw/

Culture and Learning in the Seminaries of Iraq and Iran

Dedicated project website

Introduction

This project is collaborative grant, awarded by the British Academy, and administered by BRISMES.  The total award is circa £142k over three years, 2009-2012.  It is informally referred to as the “Hawza project” as it aims to encourage research, particularly from doctoral, post-doctoral and emerging scholars on the system of clerical seminary education known as the Hawza.  One additional aim of the project is to increase scholarly traffic between the Hawza and western academic research on the Hawza.

The project’s activities include:

(1)   a series of workshops (some large and more formal, and some small and more intimate).  The most recent workshop was held on 24th September 2010 at Birkbeck College, London, as part of BRISMES Summer Event to showcase the work of our research networks.  The previous workshop was held on 9^th December at the University of Exeter.  Details can be seen online at:  http://people.exeter.ac.uk/rmg205/hawzaprojectworkshop2.htm

The final workshop of year 1 was held at Royal Holloway, University of London on 30^th March 2010.

(2)   annual research programme grants (4 each year, totalling £5000 each)

(3)   visiting scholarships (one month visits from scholars based outside of the UK to be stay at a UK institution, work with a UK-based academic on an agreed programme of research work).

(4)   Publication of proceedings (projected as three collections of papers, relating to the research sponsored in each year of the project).

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