New Middle Eastern Studies

Welcome to New Middle Eastern Studies

What is NMES? We are a new e-journal for early career researchers and graduate students who study the Middle East (broadly defined).

Who runs NMES? An editorial board composed of early career researchers and graduate students who are members of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES).

Why is a journal like this needed? There are too few places for early career researchers and graduate students in Middle Eastern Studies to showcase and share their work. We aim to become the preeminent journal for this purpose.

How is the journal organised? Our journal publishes articles throughout the year and has no ‘issues’ as such. We have ‘topics’ located on the right of this page through which we organise our articles. We seek to publish articles of an interdisciplinary character which can be cross-listed under several of these topics.

http://www.brismes.ac.uk/nmes/

East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey

Kader Konuk

East West Mimesis follows the plight of German-Jewish humanists who escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in a Muslim-dominated society. Kader Konuk asks why philologists like Erich Auerbach found humanism at home in Istanbul at the very moment it was banished from Europe. She challenges the notion of exile as synonymous with intellectual isolation and shows the reciprocal effects of German émigrés on Turkey's humanist reform movement. By making literary critical concepts productive for our understanding of Turkish cultural history, the book provides a new approach to the study of East-West relations.

Central to the book is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written in Istanbul after he fled Germany in 1936. Konuk draws on some of Auerbach's key concepts—figura as a way of conceptualizing history and mimesis as a means of representing reality—to show how Istanbul shaped Mimesis and to understand Turkey's humanist reform movement as a type of cultural mimesis.

http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=17993

"Ucube Heykel"den Öncesi Var!

PELİN BAŞARAN

Bu yazı 15 Ocak 2011 tarihinde Bianet'te yayınlanmıştır.

http://bianet.org/bianet/diger/127201-ucube-heykelden-oncesi-var

Bir heykelin barışı yüceltmek için yapılmış olması, hizmet ettiği estetik ve değerler sisteminin peşinen kabul edileceği anlamına gelmez. Fakat şu da unutulmamalı: Heykel yıkılırsa, her ne kadar muğlak da olsalar, anıtın yapılmasına sebep olan motivasyonlara ve niyetlere ne olacak?

A Millennium of Turkish Literature: A Concise History

Talat S. Halman

Edited by Jayne L. Warner

From Orhon inscriptions to Orhan Pamuk, the story of Turkish literature from the eighth century a.d. to the present day is rich and complex, full of firm traditions and daring transformations. Spanning a wide geographic range from Outer Mongolia and the environs of China through the Middle East all the way to Europe, the history of Turkish literature embraces a multitude of traditions and influences. All have left their imprint on the distinctive amalgam that is uniquely Turkish.

Turkish Historical Review

The Turkish Historical Review is devoted to Turkish history in the widest sense, covering the period from the 6th century, with the rise of the Turks in Central Asia, until the mid-20th century. All contributions to the journal must display a substantial use of primary-source material and also be accessible to historians in general, i.e. those working outside the specific fields of Ottoman and Turkish history. Articles with a comparative scope which cross the traditional boundaries of the area studies paradigm are therefore very welcome. The editors also encourage younger scholars to submit contributions. The journal includes a reviews section, which, in addition to publications in English, French, and other western European languages, will specifically monitor new studies in Turkish and those coming out in the Balkans and Russia. The Turkish Historical Review has a double-blind peer review system.


http://www.brill.nl/thr

Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces

Harem Histories is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the harem as it was imagined, represented, and experienced in Middle Eastern and North African societies, and by visitors to those societies. One theme that threads through the collection is the intimate interrelatedness of West and East evident in encounters within and around the harem, whether in the elite socializing of precolonial Tunis or the popular historical novels published in Istanbul and Cairo from the late nineteenth century onward. Several of the contributors focus on European culture as a repository of harem representations, but most of them tackle indigenous representations of home spaces and their significance for how the bodies of men and women, and girls and boys, were distributed in social space, from early Islamic Mecca to early-twentieth-century Cairo.