CBRL Sound

This is a joint lecture in partnership with the Palestine Exploration Fund held in honour of Andrea Zerbini. Access to satellite imagery has enabled major advances in archaeology and other disciplines studying the Middle East and North Africa. A comparable impact had not been realised over Israel and Palestine, where U.S. restrictions known as the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment limited imagery resolution...

The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) together with the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) are pleased to announce their second joint mentoring webinar for our members. Targeting postgraduate students and early career researchers, these on-line events offer practical advice and support from specialists, equipping the next generation of Middle East scholars with th...

Using the Master’s Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House: International Law and Palestinian Liberation It is commonplace to seek to enforce international law as a means of vindicating the rights of the Palestinian people, including, fundamentally, the right to liberation. Legal “tools” deployed to dismantle the “master’s house” of colonial oppression, to borrow from Audre Lorde. But the internatio...

This talk summarises the main arguments in Awad Halabi’s forthcoming book, Palestinian Rituals of Identity: The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850-1948 (University of Texas Press, late 2022). The work focuses on the festival (mawsim) that honours the 13th century shrine of the Prophet Moses (maqam al-Nabi Musa) located south of Jericho, Moses’s reputed tomb. In the mid-19th century, though,...

The heritage agenda in the Levant, whether focused on tourism, local communities, or sustainability, has typically been set by external agents. This event addresses this issue through presentations and discussion from two previous winners and co-authors of CBRL’s Contemporary Levant best paper prize – Christina Luke, 2021 – and Shatha Abu-Khafajah, 2019. The discussion will be chaired by cultural...

23 February 2022 This webinar explores the history, archaeology and architecture of this historic city, located in central Israel. Ramla is significant because it was the only new city founded by the Muslim Arabs within Palestine and for a short period functioned as capital. From the eighth to the tenth century Ramla grew to be the most populous city in Palestine extending over a vast area with di...

February 2022 In this interview, CBRL’s Director Carol Palmer speaks to Andrew Arsan about his research on the twentieth century history of the Levant with a focus on the potential for Arab democracy. About the speaker: Andrew Arsan is Professor of Arab and Mediterranean History in the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St John’s College. A political, cultural, and intell...

19 January 2022 Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, reproduction, and death in modern Palestine. A book conversation with Frances S. Hasso. Bringing together a vivid array of analog and non-traditional sources, including colonial archives, newspaper reports, literature, oral histories and interviews, Buried in the Red Dirt tells a story of life, death, and reproduction, and missing bodies and experience...

01 December 2021 This lecture revisits the notion of “unfree labour” through the study of refugee workers in Middle Eastern agriculture. It presents findings from the Refugee Labour under Lockdown project, drawing on interviews with 80 Syrian agricultural workers, 20 intermediaries, and 20 employers in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. The International Labour Organisation’s definition of “force...

Syria’s conflict has metamorphised into a hybrid: a partially frozen proxy war over territory combined with a battle over sanctions and reconstruction. This lecture will explore three aspects of this contest. The lecture will look at the stalemated proxy war; the effort of the regime to use reconstruction to consolidate its power and marginalize opposition and the US effort to obstruct this. At st...

For 10 years, between 2005 and 2014, the ‘Great Arab Revolt Project’ (GARP) investigated the remains of the 1916-1918 Arab Revolt in southern Jordan, from Ma’an to Mudawwara. Expecting initially to survey and excavate the mainly ruinous Hejaz Railway stations for perhaps three years, events soon changed this to a 10-year project. The stations were investigated, but it was the unexpected discovery...

Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank Dr Yael Berda (Harvard) in conversation with Professor Rema Hammami (Birzeit University)

Book launch in partnership with the Educational Bookshop, the American Colony Hotel and Stanford University Press presented by the author Tareq Baconi in conversation with Jose' Vericat.

From the River to the Sea: Palestine and Israel in the Shadow of ‘Peace’ provides original analyses of how different coping strategies were developed as well as new forms of political expression, interaction, and mobilization since the 1993 peace deal between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel. Its premise is that an historical realism is essential in order to develop a route out of...

In the wake of the Nakba, and the destruction of much of Palestinian society and its major cities, Nazareth remained almost intact. As the dust of the war settled, this heretofore small town turned into the only Palestinian city to survive the events of 1948, and became the cultural and political centre for the Palestinians that remained as a minority in the new self-identified Jewish state. In th...

'Palestine Ltd' by Toufic Haddad explores how neoliberal frameworks have shaped and informed the common understandings of international, Israeli and Palestinian interactions throughout the Oslo peace process. Drawing upon more than 20 years of policy literature, field-based interviews and recently declassified or leaked documents, he details how these frameworks have led to struggles over influenc...

9 May 2019 Adnan Abdelrazak, in conversation with Raja Khalidi, discusses the new era of urban development in Jerusalem brought about by the replacement of the Ottoman Empire’s rule over Jerusalem by British forces in 1917 and by the imposition of a British Mandate on Palestine by the League of Nations in 1921.

28 August 2017 Book launch with Katharina Galor and Nazmi Jubeh. A joint event between the Kenyon Institute, the Educational Bookshop and Dar al-Tifel al-Arabi. This event will bring author Dr Katharina Galor (Humboldt University, Berlin) into discussion with Dr Nazmi Jubeh (Birzeit University, Palestine) about the findings of her new book: Finding Jerusalem: Archaeology Between Science and Ideolo...

31 July 2019 Book launch with Professor Marc Lamont Hill and Attorney Sarah Francis.

15 August 2017 Book Launch with Hannes Baumann and Toufic Haddad. Joint event between the Kenyon Institute, the Educational Bookshop and Dar al-Tifel al-Arabi. This book assesses the legacy of the man dubbed 'Mr Lebanon' and charts the social and economic transformations his rise represented. At this event, author Hannes Baumann (Liverpool University, UK) will be in discussion with Taufic Haddad (...

29 September 2021 | The politics of water scarcity in the Levant The Middle East is the most water scarce region in the world. In this webinar we will consider the causes and consequences of this water scarcity. We will discuss how climate and management of water resources impacts this water crisis. Three speakers will provide perspectives from the Levant: an exploration of the politics behind pol...

In this speaker event, Lori Allen will present on her latest book, A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine, in conversation with Toufic Haddad. Based on archival and ethnographic research, this book examines a history of international investigative commissions in Palestine as liberal performances and enactments of international law. A History of False Hope offers new perspe...

This lecture, in partnership with CBRL and UCL Press, provides an opportunity to summarize, share insights, and discuss the recently published volume: “Olga Tufnell’s ‘Perfect Journey’: Letters and photographs of an archaeologist in the Levant and Mediterranean.” Olga Tufnell (1905–85) was a British archaeologist working in Egypt, Cyprus and Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, a so-called golden age...

A Christian ‘Oriental question’ or an ‘Orient belonging only to Easterners’? In this webinar, the panellists will discuss European cultural diplomacy in Ottoman and Mandate Syria and Palestine, how it impacted the cultural identification of indigenous Christians, and the variety of Christian Arab agendas towards such policies, relying predominantly on unpublished sources. They will present some of...

Are you interested in getting your research published in a leading peer-reviewed journal focused on the Middle East? Join us for a conversation with the editors of four prominent international journals who share their perspectives and advice on how to get your research published. Our panellists share their insights on the publishing process and provide tips for what they are looking for in their s...