E467 | Modern Mediterranean history and Middle Eastern history rarely dialogue with each other. Whereas European ideas and practices of and in the Mediterranean have been studied thoroughly, only recently did researchers start to examine ideas and experiences through which actors on the Southern shore contributed to the making of the Mediterranean. In this episode, recorded in partnership with the Southeast Passage during a conference in Beirut, we discuss the relevance of the Mediterranean in Arab ideas, institutions and identity constructions in the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman period. We focus on topics such as tourism in the Mandates, spatial transformations in the former Western Arab provinces after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, emigration on sea from the coast of Lebanon, and humanitarianism in Egypt after WWII. Through such diverse perspectives, the episode asks what a focus on the Southern shore might add to our perception of the Mediterranean “liquid continent.”
More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/07/mediterranean.html
Jasmin Daam currently works for the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German National Academic Foundation). Her main research interests concern colonial and global history, the history of the modern Middle East and North Africa, and cultural history with a focus on the history of travel and tourism. Having been a research and teaching assistant at the University of Kassel in the field of global history and the history of globalization processes, she has just submitted her Ph.D. dissertation on tourism and the formation of nation-states in the Arab Eastern Mediterranean in the 1920s and 1930s.
Esther Möller is a visiting professor at the university of the German army in Munich with a focus on the cultural history of North Africa. After her first book on the history of French cultural policy in Lebanon in the first half of the twentieth century, she is now preparing a new book project on the history of humanitarian aid in the Arab world with a focus on Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century. Her research interests include global and transnational history, the history of colonial education, and the history of humanitarianism, human rights and humanitarian law in the Arab world.
Cyrus Schayegh is Professor of International History at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Before joining the Graduate Institute, he was Associate Professor at Princeton University and Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut. His latest book The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 2017) not only presents a history of the modern Middle East, but also suggests a new methodological approach that allows an encompassing analysis of shifting spatial orders in the region of bilad al-sham.
Selim Deringil is Professor of History at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon. He published numerous books and articles on the cultural and intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire, covering topics ranging from citizenship, the role of religion in the Ottoman Empire, to mobilities in the Mediterranean. His latest publication The Ottoman Twilight in the Arab Lands: Turkish Memoirs and Testimonies of the Great War (Academic Studies Press, 2019) sheds new light on the First World War in the Middle East and renders accessible previously unpublished sources to a wide audience.
CREDITS
Episode No. 467
Release Date: 18 July 2020
Recording Location: Beirut, Lebanon
Audio editing by Andreas Guidi
Images and bibliography courtesy of Andreas Guidi
Music by Wajdi Abou Diab
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