Qajar Iran Digital Archive

Afsaneh Najmabadi (Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University) has launched today a new site on Qajar Women:

http://www.qajarwomen.org/

This site explores the lives of women during the Qajar era (1796-1925) through a wide array of materials from private family holdings and participating institutions. Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran provides bilingual access to thousands of personal papers, manuscripts, photographs, publications, everyday objects, works of art and audio materials, making it a unique online resource for social and cultural histories of the Qajar world.

World Bank - Open Knowledge Repository

World Bank - Open Knowledge Repository

"The World Bank today announced that it will implement a new Open Access policy for its research outputs and knowledge products, effective July 1, 2012. The new policy builds on recent efforts to increase access to information at the World Bank and to make its research as widely available as possible. As the first phase of this policy, the Bank launched today a new Open Knowledge Repository and adopted a set of Creative Commons copyright licenses".

The Open Knowledge Repository is freely available at openknowledge.worldbank.org

Sample reports of interest for Middle East and Islamic studies:
MENA Development Reports
Finance and Financial Sector Development :: Islamic Finance

SemArch : a corpus of Semitic languages recordings

SemArch - Semitisches Tonarchiv

This online archive created by the University of Heidelberg (Germany) contains audio recordings for Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Ethiopian and Neo-South Arabic languages and dialects, divided into:

1960 Audio-documents / 502 Speakers 

20 Countries / 60 Regions / 219 Places

43 Editors and 51 Types of documents.

The Online Bibliography of Ottoman Turkish Literature

Professor Hatice Aynur, the chair of the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Istanbul Sehir University, has been publishing "Üniversitelerde Eski Türk Edebiyati Çalismalari: Tezler, Yayinlar, Haberler" (Studies on Old Turkish Literature Prepared at Universities: Theses and Dissertations, Publications and News) continually since 1990.

Based on the record created by this publication, Professor Aynur launched "The Online Bibliography of Ottoman Turkish Literature" in November 2010.

The bibliography has an English interface http://www.ottomanliterature.com as well as a Turkish one: http://www.osmanliedebiyati.com You can easily search for articles, books, papers, projects, and theses by keywords. Perhaps more importantly, this database allows for pdf and word documents that contain a particular work to be displayed together with the bibliographical entry about that work.  Last but not least, you can suggest the addition of your own work (or someone else's) to the database by using the "Add Entry" button on the main "Bibliography"
page. During the approval process of your submission over e-mail, you could also add the actual text of the work you would like to be included in the bibliography database.

Happy Norouz!

Persian New Year Norouz Celebrations at SOAS

Date: 24 March 2012Time: 7:00 PM
Finishes: 24 March 2012Time: 10:30 PM

Venue: Brunei GalleryRoom: Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre

Type of Event: Celebration

The Programme includes:
Persian instrumental music by Parvaz Ensemble with Arash Moradi, Niloufar Habibian and Fariborz Kiannejad
Sanaz Sotoudeh (Pianist, Royal Academy of Music) performing Schubert, Schumann and Brahms (inspired by Goethe’s West-Östlicher Divan and the Divan of Hafez)
Hafez animation by Jila Peacock
Afghan music played and sung by Professor John Baily and Veronica Doubleday
Works by British contemporary composer Sally Beamish (inspired by Hafez) sung by Rónan Busfield (Tenor) and accompanied by Sharon Griffiths (Harpist, Scottish Symphony Orchestra)
For further information see the attached PDF file
Raffle Prize:Unique embossed Calligraphy by Jila Peacock
£25 and £15 (Concessions: Students and Senior Citizens) includes refreshments and Persian canapés. To book tickets please visit the SOAS Online Store.

Organiser: Centre for Iranian Studies and the British Institute of Persian Studies
Contact email: lh2@soas.ac.uk
Contact Tel: 020 7898 4330
Sponsor: The Hinduja Brothers

BRISMES Conference 2012

BRISMES Annual Conference 2012

Revolution and Revolt: Understanding the Forms and Causes of Change

26-28 March 2012, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

The Middle East Centre at LSE will host the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) annual conference on 26-28 March 2012. The conference will be held in association with the European Association for Middle Eastern Studies (EURAMES) and the Asian Federation of Middle East Associations.

The unprecedented uprisings in the Middle East over the past year have drawn comparisons with a wide scope of revolts from the French Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall. This conference seeks to place the focus on a multi-disciplinary consideration of the local and regional sources and forces which have fuelled the uprisings, as well as the narratives of the events. In addition to an emphasis on dynamics within and interpretations of the uprisings, presenters are encouraged to reflect on what the events may mean for the study of the region.

The conference will also highlight the areas of research undertaken by the BRISMES research networks:

• Clerical Authority in Shiite Islam
• Critical Middle East Studies
• Faith, Politics and Society
• Liberation, Domination and Expression
• Resistance, Representation and Identity

And an additional sub-theme organised by LLAS Centre for languages, linguistics and area studies with the sponsorship of the Higher Education Academy Islamic Studies Network:

• Teaching and learning about Islam and Muslims in UK higher education

As in previous BRISMES conferences, panels on topics not covered by the overall theme or the research networks maybe also be proposed. Individual papers, however, will not be accepted unless they are relevant to the overall theme, relevant to the research network sessions, or integral to a panel proposed on the topic.

Non-presenting conference participants are warmly welcomed.

http://brismes2012.com/

Free Online Access to ALL Palgrave Macmillan Journals in March!

Palgrave Macmillan is offering FREE online access to their complete journals portfolio during March 2012.

www.palgrave-journals.com/accessallareas

Access Palgrave Macmillan Journals Online

On-campus access:  http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pal/jnlindex.html Off-campus access: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/nams/svc/institutelogin?target=/pal/jnlindex.html [login via your institution]

Palgrave Macmillan publish high quality, scholarly journals across the core disciplines of the humanities, the social sciences and business and management.

From March 1st to 31st we are providing free online access to the current content and archives of more than 60 Palgrave Macmillan journals – including Journal of the Operational Research Society, Journal of International Business Studies, IMF Economic Review and Feminist Review.