CBRL Sound

'Hamas Contained' offers the first thirty-year history of the group on its own terms drawing interviews with organisation leaders, as well as publications from the group. The book maps Hamas's transition from fringe military resistance towards governance and shows how, under Israel's approach of managing rather than resolving the conflict, Hamas's demand for Palestinian sovereignty has effectively...

Book launch for 'From the River to the Sea: Palestine and Israel in the Shadow of “Peace”' and discussion chaired by Dr Toufic Haddad. Can anything new really be written about the century-old conflict over Palestine and the Oslo ‘peace process’ since 1993? This book proves that it can. By focusing in on specific communities, each of the contributors provide original analyses of how the past 25 yea...

'People like us? The Neolithic in Southwest Asia' given by Professor Bill Finlayson (University of Reading) at CBRL’s AGM and Crystal M-Bennett Memorial lecture with an introduction by Dr Andrew Garrard (UCL). The CBRL and its predecessors have played an important role in developing our understanding of the Southwest Asian Neolithic, one of the key transitions in human history, with the emergence...

Stone Men: the story of Palestine's stonemasons and the building of Israel with author Andrew Ross in discussion with Fida Touma Using some of the best-quality limestone deposits in the world and drawing on generations of artisanal knowledge, Palestinian stonemasons have built almost every state in the Middle East except one of their own. Today the business of quarrying, cutting, fabricating and d...

Nomads, soldiers, musicians and hairdressers: Some thoughts on language and identity in the Roman Provinces of Syria and Arabia While Latin was the official language of the army, Greek was the language of government in Roman Syria and Arabia and was used among some of the population, particularly in towns and cities. However, several other languages were spoken and written in different areas and a...

Of all subjects of scholarly inquiry, few could be more contentious than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. How might we research and teach our way through it in an age of narrowing conversations? Two authors who have written extensively on the topic discuss their thoughts on engaging the history and contemporary politics of Palestine and Israel today. When seeking to reach a wider audience, what a...

Drought is a major natural hazard in the Eastern Mediterranean, including the Levant and Middle East, with documented impacts on historical and contemporary societies. Further, this region is likely to experience increased drought risk and severity with climate change in the coming century. In this talk, Dr Benjamin Cook will review the main drivers of natural drought variability in the region ove...

American interventions in the Middle East over the past fifty years have been a popular subject for scholars, yet the first major American diplomatic foray into the region occurred a century ago. The King-Crane Commission of 1919, sent to the Middle East by Woodrow Wilson in order to ascertain the political desires of the (no longer) Ottoman people, generated a moment of intense political debate a...

1919 was the year in which Woodrow Wilson commissioned an Inter-Allied investigation from the Paris Peace Conference into the desires of the populations in the former Ottoman Empire. Great Britain and France pulled out of that commission leaving two Americans, Henry King and Charles Crane to lead a quixotic mission to get the borders of Greater Syria right. Their investigation into the desires of...

T E Lawrence played a central role in the outcome of the First World War in the Middle East. His own testimony in his famous war memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom has now been ground-truthed by a ten-year archaeological field project. This provides a firmer base for examining his character, achievements, celebrity status, and endless cultural reconfiguration over the last century. These matters remai...

Gendering 'Everyday Islam' was the theme of a recent special issue of the journal Contemporary Levant - an issue that set out to address the aspect of gender in the recent debate on 'everyday Islam' in scholarship, particularly anthropology, of Muslim societies. This special issue offers a valuable contribution to rethinking the gendered meanings of ‘everyday Islam,’ Islamic piety and normativity...

Dawn Chatty, author of ‘Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State’ and Diana Darke, author of ‘The Merchant of Syria: A History of Survival’ will each give a presentation on their recent books. Together, these talks will explore Syria’s historical embrace of refugees of all hues - Christian, Muslim and Jewish and its impact on its people. Using individual case studies, they will illustrate...

Polly Withers is a CBRL Post-Doctoral Visiting Fellow(2017 - 2018)at CBRL's Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem. In this Podcast she describes her ethnographic research which uses a gender lens to explore the politics of popular youth music in post-Oslo Palestine.

Dr Jennie Bradbury and Dr Philip Proudfoot bring together two branches of CBRL’s traditional disciplines – archaeology and anthropology – into conversation to examine the origins of the 2011 uprising that started in the Syrian countryside and spread to urban centres. They discuss how those same transformations in the rural economy were fundamental in damaging Syria’s natural and cultural heritage...

Major-General Sir Edward Spears was British Minister to the Levant from 1941-44, and played a vital role in Lebanese Independence in 1943. Inspired by six months painting, researching and exhibiting in Spears’s former residence in Beirut, artist, archivist and Beirut resident Tom Young pieces together a complex story full of risk, vanity, courage and contentious issues surrounding the imperial riv...

Dr Mansour Nasasra presents the background to his new book - The Naqab Bedouin - A Century of Politics and Resistance. Here he presents the case for rewriting the narrative of the Arab Bedouin as passive communities and instead, by chronicling their history and politics over the last century, Dr Nasasra brings this question within the context of Palestinian scholarship. Mansour Nasasra is lecturer...

Sarah Tobin is a social anthropologist who focuses on Islam, economic anthropology and displacement/migration in the Middle East and East Africa. In this Podcast, Dr. Tobin discusses her latest project which looks at everyday life and everyday Islam in the Syrian refugee camps of Za`atari and Azraq. Drawing on this research, she examines questions of sectarianism and identity among Syrian refugees...

Devastated Lands: Lebanon at the End of the Great War, 1918 The First World War had brought an unprecedented degree of loss and suffering to the people of Lebanon. This lecture examines through works of literature and eyewitness accounts how the people of Lebanon looked back on the Ottoman experience and their different expectations of the post-Ottoman world. Professor Eugene Rogan is Director of...

Based on personal narratives of women activists of different generations in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, this lecture explores the history of women’s activism in the Arab world from the 1950s onwards. It demonstrates the ways in which this activism has changed over time and what this tells us about the gendered dimensions of geopolitics in the region. The lecture highlights the significance of women...

On the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, Professor Rosemary Hollis - a leading academic expert on the subject - gave a lecture at the British Academy in London, co-hosted by the Council for British Research in the Levant. Professor Rosemary Hollis is Professor of Middle East Policy Studies at the City University, and Member of the Council for British Research in the Levant.

On the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, Dr. Victor Kattan - a leading academic expert on the subject - gave this lecture entitled, "The Rise and Fall of the Balfour Declaration" at the British Academy in London, co-hosted by the Council for British Research in the Levant. Dr Victor Kattan is a Senior Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute and Associate Fellow at the Faculty of Law at th...

To mark the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, Professor Jonathan Schneer - a leading academic expert on the subject- gave a lecture at the British Academy in London hosted by the Council for British Research in the Levant and the British Academy. Jonathan Schneer is a Modern British Historian at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of History, Technology and Society and author of...

The Council for British Research in the Levant In partnership with the Jordan Museum Presents: Settlement in the Petra Region during the Crusader Period Dr Micaela Sinibaldi To launch the book: Crusader Landscapes in the Medieval Levant: The Archaeology and History of the Latin East First Recored on: Monday, April 17th at 6 p.m. at The Jordan Museum -------------------------------------- About the...

The very first British Institute interview podcast with Dr Philip Proudfoot (CBRL) and Dr Ali Abdul Kadir Ali (Oxford). Philip discusses with Ali his most recent project examining the different regional policy responses to the Syrian refugee crisis (Lebanon and Jordan). They compare and contrast the various economic, historical, political factors that act to determine policy responses and how thes...

Jerusalem was a focus of medical attention from the 19th century onwards. This was for reasons owing more to religious and touristic imagination - and later growing flows of immigration - than to epidemiological reasons. One feature of the knowledge of health and healthcare was that it largely followed communal patterns of social organization. Infectious diseases were viewed as hazards that stradd...