Yale Postdoctoral Trainees | Yale MacMillan Center Council on Middle East Studies

InterAsia Initiative Online Lecture: Professor Manan Ahmed

In this talk, drawn from my book *The Loss of Hindustan*, I sketch an intellectual geography for understanding the history of Firishta, written in early seventeenth century Deccan. The world of the Deccan is both connected to the Indian Ocean circuits, sketched in Arabic merchant accounts and histories, as well to the network of city-states, represented by the Persian histories produced in Uch or Delhi. The immediate milieu of Firishta under the ʿAdil Shahi was a polyphonic Hindustan where the exchange of knowledge, letters, and histories was foundational.

InterAsia Initiative Online Lecture: Professor Arash Khazeni

The City and the Wilderness recounts the journeys and microhistories of Indo-Persian travelers across the Indian Ocean and their encounters with the Burmese Kingdom and its littoral at the turn of the nineteenth century. As Mughal sovereignty waned under British colonial rule, Indo-Persian travelers and intermediaries linked to the East India Company explored and surveyed the Burmese Empire, inscribing it as a forest landscape and Buddhist kingdom at the crossroads of South and Southeast Asia.

Lebanon in 2021: An Examination of the State of Humanitarian Work, Public Health, and Finances

Join the Yale Arab Students Association for a panel discussion on Lebanon in 2021, featuring Sally Abi Khalil, 2020 World Fellow and Country Director of Oxfam in Lebanon. Please register in advance to receive the Zoom meeting link.

Rain in a Dry Land – Movie Screening and Refugee Panel

Movie screening available from Friday February 12th, 2021 to be followed by Panel and Q&A session on Monday, February 15th , 2021.

Population Movements Under Lockdown: Refugees and Migrants in Greece and Lebanon

Join us as Epaminondas Farmakis, founder of HumanRights360, and Sally Abi Khalil, Country Director of Oxfam in Lebanon, bring us up to date on the refugee and migrant experience during the Covid19 year in Greece and Lebanon.

PRFDHR Seminar: Impacts of a Refugee Shelter Program: Experimental Evidence from the Syrian Refugee Life Survey, Professor Edward Miguel

With a record number of refugees moving across the globe, there is much debate among policymakers and academics on how best to provide for refugees’ humanitarian needs while also ensuring the stability of host countries’ political and economic institutions and preventing radicalization among affected groups. As a result, many non-profits and intergovernmental organizations have come together to implement programs that support both refugees and host communities.

PRFDHR Seminar: Prison or Sanctuary? An Evaluation of Camps for Syrian Refugees, Dr. Thomas Ginn

Camps are a controversial strategy to manage an inﬂux of refugees. Host countries want to minimize negative eﬀects on citizens, but relief organizations worry that isolation reduces employment and self-reliance over time. Using a large and representative survey, Dr. Ginn studies Syrians in Jordan and Iraq, comparing camp residents to other refugees who self-settle in the same country. He identifies the eﬀects of camp residence with multiple strategies: controlling for a rich set of observables, and a diﬀerence-in-diﬀerences with Lebanon where camps were never opened.

PRFDHR Seminar: Refugee-led Responses to Overlapping Precarity: Views from North Lebanon, Professor Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh

Professor Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh traces the different ways that residents of Baddawi refugee camp in North Lebanon have been affected by COVID-19 since March 2020, and how they have been responding to protect themselves and other conflict-affected people in the midst of the pandemic. The latter include processes that resonate with a long history of refugee-led mutual aid initiatives.

InterAsia Online Lecture - Connecting People, Places and Things: Itineraries of Chinese Porcelain in around the Arabian Peninsula

In the early eighteenth century, the Red Sea served as the maritime crossroads for a number of different commodities that captivated global consumers, such as Arabian coffee, eastern spices, Chinese porcelain, and Indian textiles. But, the Red Sea was not only a transit route, these items were also consumed and used in the port cities around the coasts of this body of water and their adjacent hinterlands.

InterAsia Virtual Two-Day Workshop: Itinerant People and Moving Objects Across Islamic Asia

This workshop requires reading of pre-circulated material to participate, since the goal is to provide critical feedback to junior scholars working on their first monographs. Conceptually, the goal of the workshop is to think critically about itinerant communities and moving objects. By privileging the lens of mobility, and in some cases immobility, as an analytical tool, the workshop reconsiders and rearticulates ideas about space and space-making, boundaries or borders that are formed and defied, and issues of longing and belonging.