The Middle East Section requests submissions for our Student Paper Award. Both undergraduate and graduate students are eligible. The winner will receive a prize of $500, plus a chance to summarize the award winning paper in AN and at the 2019 AAA meeting in Vancouver .
Continue readingCategory: Awards
Call for Nominations for the 2019 MES Book Award
The Middle East Section is now accepting nominations for its biennial book award. This award is given to an anthropological work (single- or multi-authored, but not edited volumes) that speaks to issues in a way that holds relevance beyond our subfield. Criteria may include: innovative approaches, theoretical sophistication, and topical originality.
Continue reading2018 Distinguished Scholar Award: Saba Mahmood (in memoriam)
The Middle East Section’s 2018 Distinguished Scholar Award was awarded in memoriam to Dr. Saba Mahmood (1962-2018). Dr. Mahmood published groundbreaking work in feminist anthropology, religion, and secularism, particularly in Egypt. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1998 and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, since 2004. She received numerous honors and awards and was the author of several notable books, including Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton University Press, 2015) and Politics of Piety: the Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005).
2018 MES Student Paper Award Winner: Noha Fikry
The 2018 Middle East Section Student Paper Award Winner:
Noha Fikry (American University in Cairo), “Spaces of Life, States of Death.”
Based on one year of fieldwork in a number of multispecies-inhabited rooftops across Cairo and Alexandria, Fikry‘s paper examines the interplay of life and death as twin forces that are complementary, co-constitutive, and co-productive rather than merely opposed. In doing so, Fikry uncovers an innovative understanding of life-and-death as simultaneous and co-occurring. Both anthropological and ecological, Fikry‘s work does not offer a treatise on what life and death are or might be, but rather follows life-and-death as they unfold through the cacophonous social lives of humans and other species (such as goats, chickens, rabbits, and pigeons). In short, the paper asks: What does life-and-death do, and how? Describing life-and-death as different instances of “enfleshment,” Fikry‘s ethnography provides nuanced understanding of worlds as a continual circulation of flesh.
Extended Deadline! Now July 1. Call for Nominations for the 2018 MES Distinguished Scholar Award
MES Distinguished Scholar Award
The Middle East Section requests nominations for its bi-annual distinguished scholar award. This award is for a senior scholar in Middle Eastern anthropology who is an outstanding academic in terms of scholarly publications and service to Middle Eastern anthropology, including mentorship and interventions in public debates. An award of $500 will be offered to the winner.
Continue readingCall for Nominations for the 2018 MES Student Paper Award
The Middle East Section requests submissions for our Student Paper Award. Both undergraduate and graduate students are eligible. The winner will receive a prize of $500, plus a chance to summarize the award winning paper in AN and at the 2018 AAA meeting in San Jose.
Continue readingCall for Nominations for the 2018 MES Distinguished Scholar Award
MES Distinguished Scholar Award
The Middle East Section requests nominations for its bi-annual distinguished scholar award. This award is for a senior scholar in Middle Eastern anthropology who is an outstanding academic in terms of scholarly publications and service to Middle Eastern anthropology, including mentorship and interventions in public debates. An award of $500 will be offered to the winner.
Continue reading2017 MES Book Award Winner
Winner
Zuzanna Olszewska, St. John’s College, Oxford: The Pearl of Dari: Poetry and Personhood Among Young Afghans in Iran (Indiana University Press, 2015).
Honorable mention
Alice Wilson, University of Sussex: Sovereignty in Exile: A Saharan Liberation Movement Governs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).