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Future Digital Research on/in/from the Middle East
A roundtable examining the present conditions and future (5–10 years) of digital scholarly research on, in, and from the Middle East — including collaboration infrastructure, institutional acceptance, and the perils and promise of funding.
Speakers
University Faculty Scholar and Professor of History. Holds the Khayrallah Chair in Diaspora Studies at NC State and directs the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies.
Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East and director of the Princeton Geniza Lab, which builds a database of documents from medieval Cairo. As of 2021, co-leads an NEH-funded initiative on teaching with manuscripts, rare books, and archives. Author of The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020). MacArthur Fellow (2015).
Comparative medievalist and digital humanist. Research spans late medieval court culture, Mediterranean studies, multilingual corpora analysis, and spatial humanities. Founded and organized the first digital humanities training institute in the Middle East (Beirut, 2015).
Discussant
Director of Graduate Studies in Near Eastern Studies at the Kevorkian Center, NYU. Organized the Digital Forays series during Academic Year 2020–2021.
About This Session
What is the state of digital scholarly research on, in, and from the Middle East — and where is it headed? This roundtable explores the present conditions and the future (5–10 years ahead) of digital scholarship in Middle Eastern Studies. Key questions: What is the difference between digital work produced within the region versus about it? What are the challenges and opportunities for graduate students and junior faculty? What role does collaboration infrastructure play? How do universities accept (or resist) digital scholarship? And what are the perils and promise of funding?
Paired with seminar
Session 13 → Module V: Digital Storytelling: Text/Image/Sound/Video