Volume 1

Malumat: Resources for Research, Writing/Publishing, Teaching, & Performing Arts

Kate Wilson
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Malumat:
Resources for Research, Writing/Publishing, Teaching, & Performing Arts
Compiled by Kate Wilson
  Arab Stages, Volume 1, Number 1 (Fall 2014)
 ©2014 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications

RESEARCH
Research Grants: Jordan (and Levant region)
Deadline: February 1, 2015
Auspices:  American Center of Oriental Research, Amman, Jordan

  1. National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship: One to two awards of four to six months for scholars who have a PhD or have completed their professional training. Fields of research include: modern and classical languages, linguistics, literature, history, jurisprudence, philosophy, archaeology, comparative religion, ethics, and the history, criticism, and theory of the arts. Social and political scientists are encouraged to apply. Applicants must be U.S. citizens or foreign nationals living in the U.S. three years immediately preceding the application deadline. The award for six months is $25,200. Awards must be used between August 15, 2015 and December 31, 2016.
  2. ACOR-CAORC Post-Graduate Fellowship: Two or more two- to six-month fellowships for post-doctoral scholars and scholars with a terminal degree in their field, pursuing research or publication projects in the natural and social sciences, humanities, and associated disciplines relating to the Near East. U.S. citizenship required. Maximum award is $31,800. Awards must be used between August 15, 2015 and December 31, 2016. Funding for this fellowship provided by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
  3. ACOR-CAORC Fellowship: Two or more two- to six-month fellowships for masters and doctoral students. Fields of study include all areas of the humanities and the natural and social sciences. Topics should contribute to scholarship in Near Eastern studies. U.S. citizenship required. Maximum award is $23,800. Awards must be used between August 15, 2015 and December 31, 2016. Funding for this fellowship provided by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Deadlines: Feb. 1, 2015

Full information at URL:  http://www.bu.edu/acor/fellowsh.htm OR www.acorjordan.org

Research Grants: Middle East    
Deadline: January 31, 2015
Auspices:  Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC)

  1. (CAORC) Multi-Country Research Fellowships:

The program is open to U.S. doctoral candidates and scholars who have already earned their PhD in fields in the humanities, social sciences, or allied natural sciences and wish to conduct research of regional or trans-regional significance. Fellowships require scholars to conduct research in more than one country, at least one of which hosts a participating American overseas research center.

  1. (CAORC) Mediterranean Regional Research Fellowships:

A new focused regional fellowship program enabling U.S. doctoral candidates and scholars who have recently earned their PhD in fields in the humanities, social sciences, or allied natural sciences and wish to conduct research of regional or trans-regional significance in countries bordering the Mediterranean and served by American overseas research centers. Funding for this program is generously provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Deadline: January 31, 2015
Information & Application forms:  http://www.caorc.org/programs

Contact:
Email: fellowships@caorc.org,
Tel.: 202-633-1599
Mail:  Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC)
PO Box 37012, MRC 178
Washington, DC 20013-7012

Field Research Grant – United Arab Emirates
Deadline: March 1, 2015
Auspices:  The Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi Foundation for Policy Research CALL

The Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi Foundation for Policy Research is pleased to accept proposals from visiting scholars to conduct field research in Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates. Doctoral and faculty scholars from a wide range of disciplines and professional fields are invited to apply, and proposals should address issues related to the Foundation’s research priority areas:

  • Education
  • Public Health (social dimensions)
  • Urban & Community Development

The next deadline for Doctoral, Faculty, and Seed Grant submissions is March 1, 2015. Eligibility criteria and grant inclusions vary based on the specific program. In addition, the Al Qasimi Foundation has a limited number of internships annually available for students in undergraduate and master’s programs.

Please share these opportunities with interested faculty and students in your program or colleagues in your professional field. Additional details can be found by visiting the Al Qasimi Foundation’s website: http://www.alqasimifoundation.com/en/Home.aspx

Specific inquiries can also be sent to info@alqasimifoundation.rak.ae.

Organization: The Al Qasimi Foundation was established in 2009 to aid in the social, cultural, and economic development of Ras Al Khaimah, a northern emirate in the United Arab Emirates. Although education was the initial focus for the Foundation’s research and capacity development initiatives, it is branching into other public policy areas as it matures including urban planning and public health.

Contact:  Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi Foundation for Policy Research
P.O. Box 12050
Ras Al Khaimah,United Arab Emirates
Phone: +971-7-233-8060
Fax: +971-7-233-8070
Email: info@alqasimifoundation.rak.ae
URL: http://www.alqasimifoundation.com/en/home.aspx

 

WRITING & PUBLISHING

Journal:  Performing Islam. Issued by Intellect press UK in both print & digital, the peer-reviewed journal covers “research in Islam in performance studies,” covering the socio-cultural, historical, political context of artistic production, exploring dance, ritual, theatre, performing arts, visual arts and cultures, and popular entertainment in Islam-influenced societies and their diasporas. The mission encompasses the study of the performativity inherent in Islam-related cultural production, homeland and diasporic negotiations, and the complexities of contemporary Islam.

General CFP:  9000-word research articles (Harvard citation style); “open forum” articles (“that encourage challenging debate on problem areas”); and reviews of events, festivals, and conferences.

URL: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=209

Magazine:  Brown Book.  Published in Dubai, this non-academic, English-language, “an urban lifestyle guide focusing on design, culture and travel across the Middle East and North Africa,” issued six times per year, is more thoughtful than the typical lifestyle magazine.  A recent issue, #48, November/December 2014, “Professors,” covered academics in the Arab world.

Send article queries to write@brownbook.me

Url:  http://brownbook.me

Essay Prize:  “Translating Cultures”
Deadline: February 3, 2015
Auspices: Forum for Modern Language Studies

Call:
The Forum for Modern Language Studies Prize competition 2015 invites submissions on the subject of translating cultures.
In an increasingly transnational, multi-cultural and multi-lingual world, translation has a crucial role to play in inter-cultural understanding, to which research in Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures makes a vital contribution. Translation has long been at the heart of LLC teaching and research activity and is a thriving area of interdisciplinary scholarship across a broad range of historical and geographical contexts. ‘Translating Cultures’ is the subject of an important current AHRC research theme in the UK, and is a key area of many research centres, collaborative projects and networks across the world, involving a wide range of disciplinary fields, in both the academic and professional spheres. As well as a textual practice familiar to all learners of language, translation understood as a range of dynamic processes has extended into countless inter-related research domains including such broad fields as adaptation, comparative literature, multilingualism, post-colonialism and cultural identity. Authors may wish to address one or more of the following topics:

  • Comparative analyses of different translations of the same text, their reception and the ways they allow the flow of ideas – and their evolution – across national boundaries.
  • How translation contributes to the development of particular literary forms (and vice versa).
  • Canonisation – the relationship between translation and notions of world literature, or the role translation plays in comparative literature.
  • Questions of genre – what differences or similarities might be observed in the translation of narrative, poetry, prose, drama, opera, subtitles, bande dessinée, fiction and non-fiction, or political, legal, economic and religious texts?
  • The multilingual text, translanguaging, and the relationship between multilingualism and creativity.
  • Intermediality – the ways in which adaptation may be conceived as a form of translation, ekphrastic translations of the visual arts, but also including non-linguistic translation, between music, painting, sculpture, dance, as well as digital culture.
  • The ethics of translation – how notions of domestication or foreignisation raise questions of appropriation and resistance in intercultural dialogues.
  • Migration and diaspora – the migration of texts across boundaries, translation as a form of cultural interpretation, or as catalyst for mobile, dynamic global identities.
  • Linguistics and the linguistic landscape – the politics and practice of bilingual signage, the complex relationship between language and regional, national or transnational identities.
  • Translating between regional and national languages, the question of internal colonialism, and the creation of hybridised global discourses.
  • Representations of the translator in literature or film. How do fictional texts represent, support or subvert the politics and practice of translation?
  • Radical translation practices: intralingual translation and rewriting, feminist translation strategies, translation and phenomenology.
  • The role of translation in producing original cultural artefacts.
  • Mistranslations, deliberate or accidental.
  • The untranslatable, including omitted or untranslated elements, or resistance to translation.
  • Translation and the acoustic properties of a text.

Submissions may address literature of any period, from a literary or linguistic perspective, and in any of the languages covered by the journal (usually Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian, but we will consider others too). The competition is open to all researchers, whether established or early-career: it is worth noting that previous competitions have been won by scholars in both categories.

The winner’s prize will consist of:

  1. Publication of the winning essay in the next appropriate volume of Forum for Modern Language Studies
  2. A cheque for £500

A panel of judges will read all entries, which will be assessed anonymously. At the judges’ discretion, a runner-up prize of £200 may be awarded. The Editors may commission for publication any entries that are highly commended by the judges.

Entry requirements and Submission details for the Forum Prize 2015.
The closing date for entries is Friday 3 April 2015.

Entries must be written in English, between 6,000 and 10,000 words in length including notes, should conform to MHRA style, and must be accompanied by an abstract (approx. 150 words) summarizing the principal arguments and making clear the relevance of the article to the competition topic.

Articles should be submitted online at www.fmls.oxfordjournals.org, flagged as Forum Prize entries and following the guidelines for authors. We will also accept submissions by email or hard copy and disc, if there is a compelling reason: in this case, please contact: formod.editorialoffice@oup.com

Full details of the Essay Prize rules can be found at:

http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/formod/forum_prize

Email:  dee3@st-and.ac.uk

 

Call for papers (journal):  “Survival “ special issue WSQ    

Deadline (full essay): March 1, 2015

Journal:  Women’s Studies Quarterly at the Feminist Press

Call for Papers, Poetry and Prose (fiction, essay, and memoir)
WSQ Special Issue Spring 2016: Survival
Guest Editors: Frances Bartowski, Elena Glasberg, and Taylor Black

CALL:
To survive is messy, elaborate, layered. The metaphysics of deferral are entwined in the root and the prefix sur (over) vive (life): to live beyond. Survival conjures hills alive with survivalists, such misconstrued terms as “survival of the fittest,” the defiance reflected in Gloria Gaynor’s 1980s disco anthem “I Will Survive,” as well as states of being “a survivor” of incest, war, or rape. Survival’s topicality extends beyond controversies around life/death expectancy, planned life termination, as well as the continuing fascination of suicide and now ecocide. Posing “Survival” invites the question: What didn’t survive? As life (or living) is a strategic, representable mode of survival over time, the biopolitics of control and management have made both politics and representation always already invested in surviving and in survival. As Jacques Derrida (1995) has made explicit, the archive (of the past) relies for its value, or its survivability, on a promised futurity. Lee Edelmen’s No Future (2004) is a frustrated calling out of the biopolitics of normalization under edicts to live, to be healthy, to reproduce (a future). Sarah Lochlan-Jain’s concept of “prognosis time” (“Cancer Butch” 2007) reveals the anxious disciplining of those living with cancer (or with certain disabilities or age that places them in a zone of limited survivability) through the enforcement of a future as strictly coterminus with survival. What happens when survival is no longer suppressed or assumed, taken as inevitable or as the condition of possibility of both temporality and disciplinary knowledge, or periodization?

Much of survival’s force and promise stems from its unpredictable attachments across the biological and social sciences, where it long ago escaped the box of mechanism to become a metaphor. Orphaned traditions are survivals of bygone cultures. Legal regimes sometimes remain in force beyond the period of their initiating circumstances; the Antarctic Treaty, for example, is a Cold War survival. Survival signifies as actuarial differential in Ruth Wilson-Gilmore’s work on racialized survival within the US prison system (2007), or what Lauren Berlant has named “slow death” (2007); it is revived in controversy around medical practices, most obviously with organ transplants, but also on the level of the cellular, as in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), about the exploitation of a North Carolina woman’s cellular property after her death from cancer. Jodi Byrd in Transit of Empire (2011) offers “Survivance” as a counter to the notion of a serviceable Native disappearance as it continues to limit Native sovereignty under various regimes of settler occupation. Elizabeth Grosz (2011) revives the disruptive potential of female-driven sexual selection as an aesthetic, willful, irrational force—an anthropogenic factor not necessarily coordinate with environmental management as an untrustworthy guarantor of human survival.

We invite submissions that explore classic, contemporary and subterranean feminist texts that think through the politics of surviving and explore untimely ethics of survival. In the introduction for this issue, we revisit Valerie Solanas’s classic SCUM Manifesto (1967). Although hardly in need of rediscovery, SCUM Manifesto has not been understood for its hilarious invocation of a specifically biological rationale for the r/evolutionary (and environmentally salutary) extinction of the male sex. Its language of male mutation and its invitation to enlightened men to “relax” and enjoy the ride to their “demise” casts the war of the sexes as inevitable. Solanas’s radical vision of feminist essentialism presents the extinction of man as an apocalyptic rendering of the near future. Her commitment to the death of all men invites a range of response across disciplines, media, and time frames and represents the contrary spirit supporting this present feminist meditation on survival.

Topics and themes we are interested in exploring include but are not limited to:

  • R/evolution: Evolution, Capital, and Neo-Darwinism
  • Ethics of suicide and gender
  • Un/natural Selection
  • Ecocide, death drive as slow death
  • Cancer and Women, Feminist Cancer Journals
  • Ecology and intuition
  • Extinction as Survival through the other end of the telescope
  • Biopolitics and Population Management
  • Indigeneity and Sovereignty in the Anthropocene
  • Reproduction: sexual, viral, and social
  • Environmental Management’s unintended effects
  • The Feminist “Anthropo/s/cene”
  • The Feminist Untimely
  • The art of Survival
  • Survivalism and gender
  • Environmentalism and unequal sacrifice
  • Apocalypse, climate and otherwise
  • Legal vestiges, protectionism’s afterlives
  • Holdouts and forgotten remains/relics
  • Precarity, disease, women
  • The violence of the social production of gender/sexuality
  • Genetic property and feminized “body” parts
  • Feminist generations/genealogies
  • Living fossils
  • Sleeping Beauties, Old Boys, and Rip Van Winkles
  • Utopias, feminist or otherwise
  • Aging Feminism, Old Feminists
  • Contemporary Plagues: Cancer, HIV/AIDS, Ebola
  • Epidemics/Pandemics
  • Hauntology
  • Genetics, species, and gender essentialism
  • Environmental management as Disaster/ Capitalism

Submission:

Scholarly articles and inquiries should be sent to guest issue editors Frances Bartowski, Elena Glasberg, and Taylor Black at WSQsurvivalissue [at] gmail.com.

We will give priority consideration to submissions received by March 1, 2015. Please send complete articles, not abstracts. Submissions should not exceed 6,000 words (including un-embedded notes and works cited) and should comply with the formatting guidelines at http://www.feministpress.org/wsq/submission-guidelines.

Fiction, essay, and memoir submissions should be sent to WSQ’s fiction/nonfiction editor, Asali Solomon, at WSQCreativeProse [at] gmail.com by March 1, 2015. Please review previous issues of WSQ to see what type of submissions we prefer before submitting prose. Please note that prose submissions may be held for six months or longer. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if the prose editor is notified immediately of acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been previously published. Please provide all contact information in the body of the e-mail.

Email: wsqeditorial@gmail.com

TEACHING

Call for Summer Seminar & Institute proposals  
Deadline: February 24, 2015
Auspices:  [USA] National Endowment for the Humanities
Call:
These grants support faculty development programs in the humanities for school teachers and for college and university teachers. NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes may be as short as two weeks or as long as five weeks.
NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes

  • extend and deepen knowledge and understanding of the humanities by focusing on significant topics and texts;
  • contribute to the intellectual vitality and professional development of participants;
  • build communities of inquiry and provide models of civility and excellent scholarship and teaching; and
  • link teaching and research in the humanities.

An NEH Summer Seminar or Institute may be hosted by a college, university, learned society, center for advanced study, library or other repository, cultural or professional organization, or school or school system. The host site must be suitable for the project, providing facilities for scholarship and collegial interaction. These programs are designed for a national [US] audience of teachers.

Website: http://www.neh.gov/grants/education/summer-seminars-and-institutes

PERFORMING ARTS RESOURCES
Drama Chapbook Contest
Deadline: 5/15/2015
Auspices: Palooka Press
Call:  

We consider manuscripts of all types, styles, and genres and aren’t looking for a particular aesthetic; we’re wiling to give anything a fair chance. Please send your best fiction, poetry, nonfiction, drama, graphic narrative, or mixed-genre (any combination of genres). Manuscripts should be roughly 35-50 pages, but we’re flexible with this in either direction.
Entry Fee: $10 entry fee [and receive an e-Edition of our newest issue, Palooka #5.]

The winner receives…
*Publication by Palooka Press
*20 free copies of the book
*$150 honorarium
*A bio and photo featured on our website with an author interview about the winning manuscript
*Chapbook will be sent out for review and promotion, and author (if you’re up to it) may participate in podcast/radio/online interviews to get the word out
*All the praise and social media benefits Palooka can offer (Facebook page with over 2,000 followers)
Website: http://palookamag.com/palooka-press

Artist Grant:  [For US citizens or permanent legal residents only]
Deadline:  Application window opens February 2015
Auspices: Creative Capital
Genres: Emerging Fields, Literature and Performing Arts projects
Website: http://www.creative-capital.org

EVENTS

Spring Love: A Musical Love Story. A prelude to Nowruz. (In English)
By Ziba Shirazi.  (Iranian-American artist.)
Saturday, February 21, 2015.
Soka Performing Arts Center, Aliso Viejo, California, USA
Through a splendid blend of music, dance and imagery, Spring Love celebrates the dynamic traditions of Nowruz through the story of three generations of a family experiencing love at first sign.
URL: www.zibashirazi.com
Tickets & Information: http://www.ticketor.com/event/spring-love-1606?utm_source=PersianWeekly+14%2f11%2f18+12%3a50&utm_medium=email&utm_cid=1&utm_eid=809293

Freedom Bus Ride.
Auspices:  Jenin Freedom Theatre, West Bank, Occupied Palestine.
Call:
During March 19-30, 2015, people from across Palestine and abroad will join communities in marginalized areas of the occupied West Bank, in a solidarity ride that will include volunteer work, guided walks, interactive workshops and cultural events. Through Playback Theatre, community members will share personal accounts about the realities of life and struggle under military occupation and structural apartheid. Endorsers of the Freedom Bus include Alice Walker, Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Judith Butler, John Berger, Peter Brook, Omar Barghouti, Ramy Essam, Maya Angelou and Mairead Maguire.  Note: a $25 registration fee.

Registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Ldd_7EpRI59f27xT4AaKQqjmyDDx3crwyga_gxLzP7I/viewform
URL: https://freedombuspalestine.wordpress.com

Kate (Katherine) Wilson, a former playwright and theatre artist, has a PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She researches aspects of Arabic Theatre, including festivals and “applied” or “theatre for social change” in Palestine and Jordan, alongside her primary subject, a sociology of theatre documents, while teaching Arabic Theatre and other courses as an adjunct in New York area campuses.

Logo_Publications

Arab Stages
Volume 1, Number 1 (Fall 2014)
©2014 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications

Founders: Marvin Carlson and Frank Hentschker

Editor-in-Chief: Marvin Carlson

Editorial and Advisory Board: Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Dina Amin, Khalid Amine, Hazem Azmy, Dalia Basiouny, Katherine Donovan, Masud Hamdan, Sameh Hanna, Rolf C. Hemke, Katherine Hennessey, Areeg Ibrahim, Jamil Khoury, Dominika Laster, Margaret Litvin, Rebekah Maggor, Safi Mahfouz, Robert Myers, Michael Malek Naijar, George Potter, Juan Recondo, Nada Saab, Asaad Al-Saleh, Torange Yeghiazarian, Edward Ziter.

Managing Editor: Joy Arab

Table of Content
Essays

  • Brecht’s Theatre and Social Change in Egypt (1954-71) by Magdi Youssef
  • Re-orienting Orientalism: from Shafik Gabr’s “What Orientalist Painters Can Teach Us about the Art of East –West Dialogue” to Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced by Fawzia Afzal-Khan
  • ‘Now I will believe that there are unicorns’: The Improbable History of Shakespeare in Yemen by Katherine Hennessey
  • Radhouane El Meddeb’s Experiments With Gender: In Search of New Bodies by Omar Fertat
  • Coptic Christian Theatre in Egypt: Negotiations Between The Minority and The Majority by Mohammed Musad
  • A New Perspective on Mikhail Ruman’s Smoke in A President of His own Republic?by Anwaar Abdelkhalik Abdalla
  • Kheireddine Lardjam, Traveller Between Two Shores by Marina Da Silva
  • Where Theatre has failed Syrians by Rolf C. Hemke
  • The Arab Aristophanes by Marvin Carlson

Plays

  • Solitaire by Dalia Baisouny
  • The Imam and the Homosexual by Jamil Khoury

Review

  • Struggling Against Insurmountable Odds: Theatre in the Arab World/Theater im Arabischen Sprachraum A Book Review by Michael Malek Najjar

Malumat/Information

  • Malumat: Resources for Research, Writing/Publishing, Teaching, & Performing Arts compiled by Kate C. Wilson

www.arabstages.org
arabstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director

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