MENA-related Events Calendar

The Syrian Academics and Researchers’ Network, in collaboration with the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies, is delighted to welcome Yassin al-Haj Saleh, one of Syria’s leading contemporary writers and public intellectuals, to deliver the keynote lecture at its 2026 Annual Conference.

How are ideas formed, and what do we overlook when we treat intellectual work primarily as an activity of the mind?

Against the background of the Syrian struggle over the past fifteen years, this keynote reflects on method by reconsidering the relationship between thought, emotion, embodiment and lived experience. It explores how extreme experiences become available to thought, focusing on three experiential structures: privation, violation and confinement, and the affects associated with them.

What happens when some experiences resist conceptualisation, while inherited forms of knowledge become detached from experience? The lecture considers method as the difficult work of negotiating between the two: between what remains raw and not yet fully articulable, and forms of knowledge that have become separated from embodied and lived experience.

The keynote forms part of SARN’s 2026 Annual Conference, which brings together scholars and researchers to examine questions of knowledge production and its relationship to periods of profound social and political transformation.

Dates: 23 September–3 October 2026

Venue: Pleasance Theatre, Carpenters Mews, North Road, London N7 9EF

PalArt Collective returns for the fifth edition of PalArt Festival, presenting its most ambitious season yet: eleven days of Palestinian theatre, comedy and music celebrating resilience, creativity and an unbreakable cultural spirit. Bringing together voices from across Palestine and the diaspora, the programme presents a tapestry of sharp-edged humour, vivid storytelling, bold visions of the future and contemporary music.

"I am beginning to wonder what profit I shall get out of it all" Exploring Gertrude Bell's Journey to Arabia and Its Significance by Mark Jackson, Professor of Byzantine Archaeology at Newcastle University and co-curator of the Gertrude Bell Archive. 

2026 commemorates the centenary of the death of Gertrude Bell. Having been one of few British people to have ventured into Arabia, Bell returned from a journey to Ha'il just weeks before the outbreak of World War I. She confided in one of her diary entries that her journey was proving to be a failure. But by 1915 the value of her work had been recognised by the War Office. Indeed by 1918 the Royal Geographical Society awarded her the Founders Medal for her expeditions. Drawing on photographs and documents from the Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle University and the Royal Geographical Society, this lecture will introduce Gertrude Bell and explore the significance of her journey to Arabia.