Highlights from the 2025 BRISMES Annual Conference
We are excited to share some highlights from the 2025 BRISMES Annual Conference, held from July 1st to 3rd at Newcastle University and hosted by the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology. The event welcomed over 400 delegates and featured nearly 90 sessions, including plenaries, panels, and roundtables. It was an intellectually enriching gathering of scholars bringing together diverse disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches across fields such as politics, international relations, sociology, anthropology, history, literature, linguistics, and geography.
BRISMES Award for Services to Middle Eastern Studies
At the welcome reception of the annual conference Professor Ilan Pappé was announced as the recipient of the 2024 BRISMES Award for Services to Middle Eastern Studies. This is an honorary award established in 2000 by BRISMES Council presented annually in recognition of outstanding services to Middle Eastern Studies.
Professor Pappé’s contribution to our field has been nothing short of transformative. Over decades, he has helped reshape our understanding of modern Middle Eastern history—especially the history of Israel-Palestine. As one of the original Israeli ‘new historians’, he has challenged dominant narratives and, through meticulous archival work, amplified perspectives of Palestinian historians that had long been marginalized.
Professor Pappé embodies everything this award was created to recognise: a distinguished body of published work; the building of academic institutions; the shaping of new generations of scholars; and an extraordinary contribution to public and political understanding of the Middle East.
You can read the award speech here, by BRISMES President Nicola Pratt:
BRISMES Solidarity Fund
To promote inclusivity at our conference, we continued the BRISMES Solidarity Fund for colleagues without institutional funding or facing financial hardship. This year, the fund assisted 56 applicants by covering conference registration fees and providing bursaries for accommodation and visa costs.
We extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who contributed to the Solidarity Fund in 2024 - your generosity and solidarity are deeply appreciated. We invite both members and non-members to help us continue this important work by donating to the fund for next year’s conference. Your donations enable scholars from the Global South and others without institutional support to attend and contribute to our annual conference.
Initiatives for Gaza/Palestine
In response to the ongoing genocide, BRISMES President Professor Nicola Pratt and Co-Vice President Dr Sharri Plonski organised the session Supporting Universities in Gaza, which outlined ways BRISMES members can support universities in Gaza and resist scholasticide.
BRISMES President Nicola Pratt also organised the panel Resisting Academic Complicity with Genocide, which critically examined how academic institutions in the Western world have responded to Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip and expressions of solidarity with Palestinians, often through censorship and repression, whilst also partnering with arms companies and other organisations supporting Israel's genocide and apartheid practices.
Following our keynote plenary on 1 July, conference participants took part in a photo in solidarity with Palestinians and other peoples in the Middle East region affected by ongoing military bombardment.
Keynote Speeches
We were honoured to host amazing keynote speakers at the conference and are pleased to share recordings of the sessions below.
Why Does History Matter?
Speaker: Rana Barakat
For the past nineteen months, genocidal violence has marked the everyday. Unbearable in its escalation across the geographies of Palestine, this violence is not new. We have a name for the inception of settler colonialism’s fragmentation: Nakba. We have a name for this century of violence working to destroy Palestinian peoplehood: ongoing Nakba. In the face of an escalating Nakba, in an age of catastrophe, our histories, like our bodies, and our lands are in fragments. We have a name for this fragmentation: shatat. In the Nakba War, between the winter months of 1947, throughout the following year of 1948 and into the spring and summer of 1949, Zionist militias displaced three-quarters of the Palestinian people from their homeland. This was the initial making of shatat, the displacement, dispersion, destruction of a people that remains ongoing. The attempt to eliminate Palestinian life in Gaza is its culmination, or at least one of them.
The ongoing Nakba demands and makes demands of the historical. Epistemic erasure has rendered history a necessary means to document and resist the ongoing Nakba. The imperative of writing history has borne rich methodological contributions from the permission to narrate, to storytelling as navigating catastrophe, to memories of forgetfulness. These methodological interventions, like Palestine itself, are today under duress.
Palestine is not an exception. Today catastrophe is global. In 2025, Palestine is where the world is imploding through extraordinary explosions. The unbearable accumulation of horror requires documentation of death and destruction, of relentless war from the shores of the sea to the mountains that frame the river, and far beyond. Palestine is world making. As Palestinians are being brutally targeted from the air, sea and land, as infrastructures of life and living are destroyed, we struggle to count, the injured, the arrested and the dead — we struggle to claim life.
Palestine is today, the place of old worlds dying and new ones being born. We have names that respond to catastrophe and fragmentation, methods to gather the past and the present towards the future. Shatat is not simply exile or diaspora, it is a fragmentation that demands new ways a unification. We have a name, and a practice for that remedy: lam shaml. It means to be under collective care, to be covered, to be nurtured, to be gathered and to gather. Writing history in the present moves from and through shatat to this condition of nurture, care, and unity. It is a return of sorts in the conceptual horizon of ongoing return. For the Palestinians of the past and the present, under the constant reality of catastrophe and fragmentation, have honed practices of gathering and returning to land, to people, and to one another.
Ruins and Rebuilding: Academic and Activist Solidarities Across Borders
Speakers: Hashem Abushama, Muna Dajani, Jasmine Gani, Gholam Khiabany, Aya Nassar, Hala Shoman
Contributors to this plenary each spoke on themes of debris, rubble, and loss to consider looming ruination and strategies to recover and resist the forces that threaten ways of life, livelihoods, home-making — and existence itself — in the Middle East. Amid the possibility of irrevocable injuries — and the fully realised potential of destruction in Palestine and Lebanon — the question of recovery is vital. Responding to the threat and realisations of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other forms of collective violence in the region, discussion on this plenary orientated around academic and activist modes of documenting and examining destruction and recovery in the Middle East.
A panel of six speakers tackled a series of key questions: How do we negotiate activist/academic subject positions? How is loss, ruination, and recovery experienced and what are the possibilities of solidarities? What are our ethical duties across space and borders? How can academic labour work for recovery and against ruination?
Graduate Section Event
Pathways to Publishing: Navigating Early Careers in Middle East Studies
Organised by the Co-Presidents of the BRISMES Graduate Section, Motasem Abuzaid and Yara Zebian, this year’s Graduate Section panel brought together academics and publishers to demystify the early stages of scholarly publishing in the field of Middle East Studies. Aimed at graduate students and early career researchers, the session explored practical strategies for turning a thesis chapter into a journal article, navigating the peer review process, and choosing between Open Access and traditional publishing models. With insights from editors, publishing professionals, and scholars who recently made the leap, the panel also discussed evolving trends in academic publishing, including interdisciplinary expectations and the politics of knowledge production.
The panel included distinguished experts: Mattia Ravasi (TandF), Jen McCall (Lynne Rienner Publishers), Sophie Rudland (Bloomsbury) and Sharri Plonski (BRISMES Co-Vice President).
BRISMES AGM
For members who were not able to attend this year’s Annual General Meeting (AGM), which took place on 2 July at the annual conference in Newcastle, we are happy to report the extension of Nicola Pratt’s term as President and the election of the following Council Members (in order by surname):
- Khuloud Alsaba
- Aya Nassar
- Sara Tafakori
The AGM marked the end of the terms of the following Council members, who we thank for their contribution to BRISMES over the last years:
- Mezna Qato
- Ala’a Shehabi
A Thank Note
We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to the BRISMES Conference Committee, José Ciro Martinez and Sharri Plonski, BRISMES Manager and Conference Organiser Rosa Sansone, our Conference Coordinator Amar Elaydi, as well as our dedicated conference volunteers and support staff at Newcastle University.
Our hosts at Newcastle University have been a constant source of inspiration and support, helping to create a conference atmosphere marked by intellectual generosity and solidarity. We are deeply grateful to Mark Griffiths, Jemima Repo, Una McGahern, Burak Tansel, Craig Jones, Deniz Yonucu, Mohamed El-Shewy, Mori Ram, Olivia Mason, Silvia Pasquetti, Soudeh Ghaffari, who gave their time and care to make this event possible. We look forward to working with similarly dedicated hosts at future BRISMES conferences.
We also extend our sincere thanks to the reviewing committee: Feras Akabani, Marianna Charountaki, Mohamed El-Shewy, Soudeh Ghaffari, Neve Gordon, Mark Griffiths, Craig Jones, José Ciro Martinez, Olivia Mason, Una McGahern, Silvia Pasquetti, Sharri Plonski, Mori Ram, Jemima Repo, Burak Tansel, Lewis Turner, and Deniz Yonucu.
Finally, we warmly thank our conference sponsors - Al Mandumah and the Taa Marbouta Language Centre - for their generous support.