MENA-related Events Calendar

On 12 March 2026, Taawon’s Isnad Initiative, in collaboration with Friends of Palestinian Universities, invite you to an International Women’s Day webinar amplifying the voices of women academics and students from Gaza.

During this webinar, we will hear directly from women academics and students in Gaza about their experiences of teaching, studying, and sustaining institutional life under scholasticide. This event responds directly to priorities identified by Gaza’s higher education sector through the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza. Palestinian women are not only the majority of students - they are central to the academic workforce that sustains teaching, research, and professional training. Protecting higher education, therefore, means protecting women’s leadership, labour, and futures.

Organiser: Middle East Centre (St Antony's College, University of Oxford)

Speaker: Professor Nizar Messari (Al Akhawayn University

Organiser: Centre for the Study of Islam, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter

Speaker: Matthew L. Keegan (Moinian Assistant Professor in Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University)

At the dawn of the 12th century CE, al-Hariri first circulated his collection of fifty trickster stories or maqamat by having the text read aloud in the presence of the scholarly elite of Baghdad. Over the course of the next eight centuries, this text became a central text in Islamic education and the object of scores of commentaries. This majlis introduces the main arguments of Keegan's first monograph, Before World Literature: The Trickster Tales of al-Hariri in an Age of Commentary. It seeks to understand how the Maqamat became such an important text in the culture of commentary and how it subsequently fell dramatically out of favor in the nineteenth century when both European Orientalists and Arab reformist thinkers derided the text for being decadent and derivative

Organiser: LSE Middle East Centre

Speakers: Sanam Vakil (Chatham House); Toby Dodge (LSE Department of International Relations); Peter Trubowitz (LSE Phelan US Centre)
Chair: Katerina Dalacoura (LSE Middle East Centre)

Join the LSE Middle East Centre for an event that will delve into the geopolitical dynamics shaping the Israel-US-Iran war and its potential consequences at both regional and international levels. The panel will discuss how widely the war may become entrenched across the region beyond its first, tactical phase, affecting the domestic politics of its key players. It will examine how the war will reshape regional power balances, alliances and security structures across the Middle East. Finally, the panel will analyse the war's impact on theatres of conflict in Europe and Asia and the way it will affect an international order already in flux.

Organiser: Department of Gender Studies and Middle East Centre, LSE

This event explores how gender, culture, literature, and practices of writing both shape - and are shaped by - Kurdish lifeworlds.

The invited speakers approach these themes from diverse perspectives: some adopt a contemporary political lens, while others draw on archival research. Together, their contributions will spark conversations about the role of culture, literature and writing in times of conflict.

You're invited to join a drinks reception after the event.

Organiser: Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Research Seminar Series

Palestinian singer, composer, and musicologist Reem Kelani will lead a performative lecture tracing a spatio-temporal mapping of dispossession and migration. With the lecture participants, Kelani will explore traditional Palestinian songs and their pivotal role as testaments of existence and trauma. 

This presentation is interactive, based on the compositional technique of call-and-response, realised through group singing with the participants. No prior musical experience is required — only a willingness to listen, sing, travel across time and history, and celebrate musical memory

Organiser: Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Research Seminar Series

Join us for a hybrid seminar by Rik Janssen and Reem Al-Sada, two IMES PhD candidates, who will respectively give presentations on foreign observations of Ottoman archery, and the proliferation of religious theological ideas across the Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean world.

Organiser: The Alwaleed Centre &  Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Edinburgh 

Palestinian singer, composer, and musicologist Reem Kelani will lead a performative lecture tracing a spatio-temporal mapping of dispossession and migration. With the lecture participants, Kelani will explore traditional Palestinian songs and their pivotal role as testaments of existence and trauma.

The journey moves from Palestine, past and present, to Egypt in 1919 through the music of Egyptian singer, composer, and social chronicler Sayyid Darwish (1892–1923). Andalusian poet, playwright, and cultural activist Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) completes the mapping with echoes of the underexamined expulsion of the Moriscos from Iberia between 1609 and 1614.

The lecture concludes by returning to Palestine, which serves as the pulse for this journey, and at its centre, the voices of older Palestinian women to whom Kelani refers as “Big Mamas” — living repositories of cultural survival.

This presentation is interactive, based on the compositional technique of call-and-response, realised through group singing with the participants. No prior musical experience is required — only a willingness to listen, sing, travel across time and history, and celebrate musical memory.

Organiser: Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL

Join us at the Institute of Advanced Studies for the launch of Critical Conditions, the powerful debut memoir by Hadi Abdullah, newly translated into English by Alessandro Columbu. Written in the aftermath of revolution, war, and exile, Critical Conditions is both a personal account of survival and a profound meditation on witnessing, resistance, and the politics of memory. Blending the immediacy of frontline reporting with lyrical reflection, Abdullah’s memoir traces his transformation from a teaching assistant in Homs to one of the most recognisable media voices of the Syrian uprising. Through his lens, we encounter not only the brutal realities of conflict but also deep bonds of friendship, moments of joy, loss, and the enduring will to document

Organiser: LSE Middle East Centre and the Centre for Peace and Security, Coventry University

We warmly invite you to attend this British Academy Conference, Algeria: Historical Struggles and Imagined Utopias, at the London School of Economics on Thursday 28 – Friday 29 May 2026.

The important historical legacies of the Independence struggle and exciting recent developments in Algerian political, social, cultural and economic fields call for a public platform in the UK for scholars working on Algeria to share their research. Prioritising decolonising, feminist and other innovative approaches in order to learn from Algeria’s important revolutionary history, contemporary struggles and future imaginations, this conference encourages an intersectional and multidisciplinary approach.

We invite you to attend a two-day workshop critically examining decentralised, autonomist, and federalist modes of political organising in West Asia and North Africa. The workshop aims to be a space of interdisciplinary exploration of historical lineages, contemporary manifestations, and future possibilities of decentralised governance in (post)uprising and (post)revolutionary contexts.

The workshop is structured around three core themes:  

• Historiography and Genealogy: excavating and reassessing historical precedents of autonomist organising in the WANA region, challenging statist historiographies.  
• Political Theory and Philosophy: articulating the distinct political thought emerging from these movements, exploring concepts of democracy, ecology, gender, and pluralism.  
• Contemporary Praxis and Future Possibilities: critically evaluating the successes, limitations, and future prospects of existing and emergent autonomist projects.

The workshop will take place at the University of Glasgow on 22 and 23 July 2026 from 10:00 am to 6 pm. To allow the broadest possible participation, the workshop will be held in person and online via Zoom. If you would like to attend the workshop, please register by following this Eventbrite link. There is no conference fee.