November 2022 Newsletter
There's always something happening at NMC, missed out?
Here is a snapshot of what went on this month and what's to come.
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Father Marcos Memorial Fund
in Coptic Studies
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(Photo from left to right: NMC Chair Mary-Ann Pouls Wegner, Dr. Ramez Boutros Bishara, Father Pishoi Atalla, Courtney Boost, Dr. Helene Moussa)
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On Friday, November 11, 2022, a delegation from the Coptic community, headed by Father Pishoi Atalla and Dr. Helene Moussa, presented NMC with a generous donation to help support instruction in the fields of Coptic language, culture, and history. The funds from annual initiatives of the local Coptic communities and the hard work of Dr. Ramez Bishara have allowed NMC to offer a broad spectrum of courses in Coptic studies over the years, building a vibrant curriculum and engaging students from across NMC in this field.
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Professors Razzaque and Zakar Received Connaught New Researcher Awards
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Assistant Professors Arafat A. Razzaque (left) and Adrien Zakar (right) have received Connaught New Researcher Awards for their projects for the 2021-2022 year.
- Arafat Razzaque: Moral Regulation of Speech in Early Islam: A Study of Ibn Abi I-Dunya’s Book of Silence
- Adrien Zakar: Ottoman Territory and the Instruments of Empire, 1800 – 1950
The Connaught New Researcher Award is supported by the Connaught Fund, which celebrates its 50th Anniversary this year. The award is to help early-career faculty members establish their research programs and increase competitiveness for external funding.
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Congratulations Negar Banisafar !
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The Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations is pleased to share the news that NMC graduate student Negar Banisafar has won the Norman Itzkowitz Turkish Short Story Award from the American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages (AATT) with her story entitled "İsim Şehir Oyunu". It is the story of Narcissus's revolt against the mythological gods and written in the genre of tragicomedy.
NMC also would like to acknowledge Assistant Professor Gözde Mercan for encouraging her to participate in this competition with the instruction and support and her academic advisor, Professor Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, for the support and guidance throughout her studies.
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NMC's 2021-22 CGS-Doctoral and CGS-Master's Competition Awardees
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Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, together with Canada’s federal granting agencies, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, announced the results of the 2021-2022 Canada Graduate Scholarship - Doctoral (CGS-D) and Canada Graduate Scholarship – Master’s (CGS-M) competitions.
The Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations would like to congratulate all the NMC students on their awards. (See below for the list of awardees.)
CGS-Doctoral awardees:
- Jadaon Akhtar
- Ghassan Osmat
CGS Master’s awardees:
- Timothy Boudoumit
- Teagan Cameron
- Ofelia Tychon
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NMC at SSEA Symposium and Scholars’ Colloquium
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Clockwise, from top left: PhD candidates Jordan Furutani, Thomas Greiner, and Marla Szwec presenting (Photo Credit: Rebecca Safi)
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The Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities (SSEA) held its 46th Annual Symposium and Scholars’ Colloquium on November 4 - 6, 2022. The hybrid meetings were held both virtually (live) and on U of T’s St. George Campus. The theme for Saturday’s Symposium was Digging into Egyptology’s Past and Present. More than 30 speakers from around the world presented over the three-day event, and NMC was well represented by Associate Professor Katja Goebs, PhD candidates Jordan Furutani, Thomas Greiner, and Marla Szwec, and NMC Alumni Gayle Gibson (MA), Meira Gold (BA, MA), Jackie Jay (BA), Virginia Martos Armenteros (MA), and Kei Yamamoto (PhD) as moderator.
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NMC at ASOR Annual Meeting
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The American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR)'s 2022 Annual Meeting convened in Boston on November 16 - 19, 2022, as a continuation of the virtual sessions held in October. As in past meetings, there was strong representation by NMC students, faculty, and alumni as presenters, session chairs and respondents. Student presenters included PhD student Tucker Deady, PhD candidates Jean-Philippe Delorme, Dominique Langis-Barsetti, Annissa Malvoisin, and NMC graduate student Roan Fleischer.
Participation included Associate Professors Heather Baker and Clemens Reichel, Senior Research Associate & Lecturer Stephen Batiuk, Professor Timothy Harrison, Archaeology Lab Collections Manager Stanley Klassen, Assistant Professor Lynn Welton, and NMC alumni Khaled Abu Jayyab (PhD), Kent Bramlett (PhD), Lisa Cooper (PhD), Andrew Danielson (MA), Wajed El-Halabi (MA), Debra Foran (PhD), Morag Kersel (MA), James Osborne (BA), Aaron Schade (PhD), and Tracy Spurrier (PhD).
NMC’s Computational Research on the Ancient Near East (CRANE) Project held a session entitled CRANE 2.0: Large-Scale Data Analysis and the Reconstruction of Human-Environment Interaction in the Ancient Near East with five papers presented by international partners and collaborators.
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Wajed El-Halabi presenting on the “Moabite Painted Wares” from Tall Madaba in the Archaeology of Jordan II session. (Photo by K. Peterson).
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Participants in the CRANE session from left to right, Brita Lorentzen (Cornell), Kevin Fischer (UBC) Sturt Manning (Cornell), Timothy Harrison (NMC), Lynn Welton (NMC). Stephen Batiuk (NMC), Doga Karakaya (Tübingen), and Deepak Chandan (U of T).
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NMC Welcomes New Undergraduate Assistant Iris Li
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The Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations is pleased to welcome new Undergraduate Assistant Iris Li, effective November 21, 2022. She joins NMC from her last position in student services as a senior student services officer at Niagara College Toronto. She majored in the Master of professional education at Western University. Over the past five years, She has been working in the education field, including language institutions, a high school, and a public college, providing teaching, student services, and administrative support for students.
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Translation Attached's
Book Launch Event
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U of T alumni Nefise Kahraman, Yasemin Mangal, and Karolina Dejnicka turned what was once a student club for literature and translation enthusiasts into a publishing house and published their first book, Stories of Exile (Gurbet Hikayeleri) by the Turkish author Refik Halid Karay (1888-1965).
The Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies at NMC hosted the book launch in the same conference room where the student group used to meet for weekly translation sessions, where they would collectively translate stories and poetry from Turkish into English.
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The event attracted a large crowd that helped facilitate lively discussions and was followed by a reception. To learn more about the book and the publishing house, visit the Translation Attached website. |
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The Fifteenth Annual Coptic Studies Symposium was held on Saturday, November 19, 2022, in virtual format. The event was sponsored by the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies (CSCS), NMC, and the Coptic Museum of Canada. Prominent scholars from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, and Egypt presented papers on a broad range of topics related to the symposium theme: Material Worlds: Documenting the Coptic Experience.
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Professor Miguel Ángel Andrés-Toledo has just published two articles in the Journal of the K. R. Cama Oriental Institute, No. 76 (K.R. Cama Oriental Institute, 2022). One is entitled “Explaining the Avesta: Commentaries in historical perspective”, and the other is entitled “The Sasanian Zoroastrian canon revisited”.
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An Arabic translation of Professor Walid Saleh’s first monograph The Formation of Classical Tafsir Tradition (Brill, 2004) has appeared recently. The translation was commissioned by Namaa for Research and Studies. You can find more about the translation, Tashakkul al-Tafsir al-Klasiki (Cairo, 2022), on their website. The Introduction of the translator of the new Arabic translation is also accessible. |
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Professor Jeremy Schipper has just published an article entitled "Hide the Outcasts: Isaiah 16:3-4 and Fugitive Slave Laws" with co-author, J. Blake Couey in Harvard Theological Review, Volume 115 Issue 4 (Cambridge University Press 2022).
The article is available online in an open access format. |
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Patching Seas of War: Convivial Culture and the Joy of Defiance
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- Date: Friday, December 2, 2022
- Location: William Doo Auditorium (45 Willcocks Street, Toronto)
Patching Seas of War is an interdisciplinary, participatory, art-based research exhibition and symposium which patches memories and stories of state violence, conflict, war, and resistance across the Mediterranean and Arabian Seas. Through cultural production, curation, discussion and analysis, the exhibit aims to document, memorialize, and address the destructive effects of state violence and oppression from Iran, Kurdistan, Lebanon to Palestine.
This exhibit and symposium will include a panel discussion on “Women, Life and Freedom”: Revolutionary Feminist Hope.
For more information, visit the Jackman Humanities Institute event page.
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Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies: The Ottoman and Other Imperial Turns in the Historiography of the 1821 Greek Revolution
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- Date: Monday, December 5, 2022
- Time: 5 PM - 7 PM
- Location: BF 200B, Bancroft Building (4 Bancroft Avenue, Toronto)
- Speaker: Sakis Gekas, York University
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The bicentennial of the 1821 Greek revolution signalled a turn in the historiography of the great event towards Ottoman and other imperial (British, French, Russian) histories. The paper will discuss the contextualization of the Revolution within trans-imperial and trans-national networks, and will focus on the much more advanced understanding of the Ottoman context of the revolution. Works published by historians of the Ottoman Empire, including the publication of primary sources, and a focus on the empires that lined up in support of the Greek cause and against the Ottomans, allow for a richer and more nuanced understanding of the Greek revolution than before.
* This event is sponsored by the Departments of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, the Department of History, and the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies.
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Inaugural Inclusion in Action Speaker Series: Examining Whiteness in Higher Education
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- Date: Monday, December 5, 2022
- Time: 1 PM - 3 PM
- Location: Online via Zoom
- Speakers: Sheela McLean, Alex Wilson
The University of Toronto’s Institutional Equity Office (IEO) invites you to the inaugural Inclusion in Action Speaker Series.
The Inclusion in Action Speaker Series is a collaboration between the Institutional Equity Office (IEO), UTM Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Office (UTM EDIO) and the Office of Indigenous Initiatives (OII).
The goal of this series is to host local and international experts, academics, and advocates to increase dialogue and understanding of equity, accessibility, and inclusion in postsecondary environments. Through an intersectional lens, the series focuses on systems of discrimination with the aim of dismantling attitudes and processes that uphold ongoing exclusion and marginalization.
For more information or to register, visit the IEO event page. |
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More NMC Winter Courses for Winter 2023
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NMC379H1S LEC0101/NMC2350H LEC0101
Capital, Technology, and Utopia in the Modern Middle East
How does the workings of capital intersect with technological innovation and political visions in the modern Middle East? This course approaches this question through critical reading in the histories of capitalism, crisis, science, politics, and intersections between cultural history and technology studies using the Middle East as a starting point for the study of global phenomena. We will examine the ways in which constructions like race and ethnicity, gender, and the human/non-human divide have mediated the social and spatial expansion of capital in the region, especially through technological infrastructure and utopias between the late 18th and the 21st centuries.
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NML490H1S LEC0101 The Art of the Diary: Questions of Form and Issues of Content
This seminar seeks to examine the “art of writing about the self” (from autobiographies, to memoirs, to auto portraits) as an art form that has been practiced across cultures and as an individual practice within and outside the literary establishment. The course introduces students to the diary as a literary art form, including its development and philosophies both as a matter of theory and of practice.
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We will learn about the genre’s luminaries (such as Anne Frank, Franz Kafka, José Saramago, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo) and the main themes they have written about during war and peace: the world of war, trade, sex, illness, writing, violence, racism, religion, politics, and creativity.
The course will also highlight the role that diaries and journals have played in social transformations and their documentation of difficult historic times. And additionally, we will trace the developments that allowed the transformation of this genre from an intimate individual practice at the margins of literature to a recognized literary form, and even to an art form that reaches beyond literature to other art forms. Finally, we will also tackle the reasons why diary/ journal writing remains rarely practiced in the Arab world, despite its importance.
* The language of instruction in this course is Arabic. Accordingly, native or near-native proficiency in Arabic is a prerequisite.
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Upcoming Events
There's always something happening at NMC, keep up to date with our upcoming events at NMC's Events page.
Contact us if you would like to have your event featured.
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