What’s in an Archive? The Colonial and Anticolonial Afterlives of MENA Archives
Date: 27 January 2026
Time: 15.00-16.30 (GMT)
Venue: Online
BRISMES’ Outreach and Pedagogy Committee is delighted to invite you to its next webinar, titled What’s in an Archive? The Colonial and Anticolonial Afterlives of MENA Archives.
We will be joined by Dr James Downs FRHistS, Archivist of the Middle East Collection at the University of Exeter, and Mr Francis Gotto, Collections Discovery Archivist at Durham University Library Archives and Special Collections.
The webinar will provide an overview of MENA collections in each of Exeter and Durham and raise some of the practical challenges of managing these collections. The webinar will also delve into the ethics of archival keeping, notably the question of providing support for institutions in the region to enable them to improve professional standards and archive storage. Lastly, the webinar offers the opportunity to think critically about engagement with archives, as well as providing guidance in the practicalities of archive research. The event will be chaired by Sabiha Allouche.
Speakers
Dr James Downs has been Archivist of the University of Exeter’s Middle East collections since July 2018, responsible for the sixty or so MENA-related archives within the University's 500 collections. He is also Librarian for the Arab World Documentation Unit (AWDU), housed within the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies, and Project Manager for the Digital Archive of the Middle East (DAME). Having spent four decades working in archives, museums and Special Collections, he has published three books and around seventy periodical articles and reviews in journals including Ancient Egypt, the Innes Review, Magdalen College Record, British Catholic History, Photographica World and Studies in Photography on various aspects of the history of photography and visual culture - in both Britain and the Middle East - book illustration, monasticism and antiquarian scholarship. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq as well as the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES).
Mr Francis Gotto is the Collections Discovery Archivist at Durham University Library Archives and Special Collections, formerly responsible for the Sudan Archive from 2016 to 2024. Alongside the responsibilities of a new role at Durham his interests continue to include expanding the Sudan Archive’s collections, increasing their accessibility online, and building collaborative partnerships with researchers and repositories of related records around the world.
Chair
Dr Sabiha Allouche is Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter and Chair of BRISMES’ Pedagogy and Outreach Committee.
Image caption & credit: Medley photos of montages of some of the archives and photographs of archive materials on display in the Special Collections (University of Exeter).
Database of Expertise
The Database of Expertise in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies provides a publicly available list of MENA experts with their research and areas of expertise.
Search Now