London Middle East Institute At SOAS

London Middle EastInstitute at SOASAnnual Report 2017/2018andFinancial Report 2016/2017

LMEI ORGANISATION AND MEMBERSHIPStaff of the London Middle EastInstituteDirector & CEO: Dr Hassan HakimianExecutive Officer and Company Secretary:Ms Louise HoskingEvents and Magazine Coordinator:Mr Vincenzo PaciAdministrative Assistant: Mr Aki ElborziEditor (Middle East in London Magazine):Ms Megan WangDesigner (Middle East in London Magazine):Ms Shahla GeramipourLMEI Board of TrusteesBaroness Valerie Amos (Chair), Director, SOASDr Orkideh Behrouzan, SOASProfessor Stephen Hopgood, SOASDr Lina Khatib, The Royal Institute ofInternational AffairsDr Dina Matar, SOASDr Hanan Morsy, African Development BankProfessor Scott Redford, SOASMr James WattLMEI Advisory CouncilLady Barbara Judge (Chair)HE Mr Khaled al-Duwaisan, Ambassador,Embassy of the State of KuwaitMrs Haifa Al Kaylani, Arab InternationalWomen’s ForumDr Khalid Bin Mohammed Al Khalifa, President,University College of BahrainDr Alanoud Alsharekh, Senior Fellow forRegional Politics, IISSMr Farad Azima, NetScientific PlcDr Noel Brehony, MENAS Associates Ltd.Professor Magdy Ishak Hanna, British EgyptianSocietyHE Mr Rami Mortada, Ambassador, Embassyof LebanonLMEI Research AssociatesDr Alanoud Al-SharekhDr Hamid KeshmirshekanDr George JofféMs Helen LacknerDr Corinna MullinDr Sharri PlonskiDr Hamid PouranProfessor Tom SelwynProfessor John WaterburyProfessor Sami ZubaidaDonations, Sponsorship and AffiliationsFounding Patron and Donor of the LMEISheikh Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber,MBI Al Jaber FoundationInstitutional AffiliatesBICDO (British Iranian CommunityDevelopment Association)Bonyad Jaleh EsfahaniBritish Association for Turkish Studies (BATAS)The British-Yemeni SocietyForum IranGingkoLSE Middle East CentreNaghmeh EnsembleThe Petroleum InstituteInstitutional Affiliation is 250 per year.Institutional Affiliates are entitled to the samebenefits as Individual Affiliates, please see below,along with the free use of a room at SOAS for anevent lasting up to two hours, and up to four copiesof each edition of the magazine. They will also beacknowledged in LMEI publicity material, includingthe website: www.soas.ac.uk/lmei/.Individual Affiliates pay 30 per year, 20concessions and 10 for students, for which theyreceive an annual subscription to ‘The MiddleEast in London’ magazine, inclusion on e-mail andmailing lists for notification of upcoming events,and special rates for LMEI conferences andpublications.

The aim of the LMEI, through educationand research, is to promote knowledge ofall aspects of the Middle East including itscomplexities, problems, achievements andassets, both among the general public andwith those who have special interest in theregion.In this task it will build on two essentialassets. First, it is based in London, a citywhich has unrivalled contemporary andhistorical connections and communicationswith the Middle East: political, social, cultural,commercial, scientific and educational.Secondly, the LMEI is at SOAS, the onlytertiary educational institution in the worldwhose explicit purpose is to provide trainingand scholarship on the whole Middle Eastfrom prehistory until today.ContentsDirector’s ---------Event -------------Calendar of ---------Centre for Iranian ----------Centre for Palestine -------------------------Research -------------Summer ---------PhD Theses on the Middle --------------------------Financial ------------Directory of Academic -----------468141822263032363840

4LMEI ANNUAL REPORT 2017-2018Director’s Letter

LMEI ANNUAL REPORT 2017-20185LMEI is particularly proud of its interdisciplinary subcentres: the Centre for Iranian Studies (CIS) and theCentre for Palestine Studies (CPS). Since their inception(CIS was established in 2010 and CPS in 2012), they haveboth played a key role in inspiring and innovating teachingand academic interchange at SOAS. For example,CIS has provided a nucleus for the prestigious KamranDjam and Ehsan Yarshater annual lectures which attractacademic expertise from around the world, enhancingthe student experience at SOAS and benefiting the largenumber of members of the public who have a profoundinterest in Persianate culture and society. Anotherindicator of such interest has been the keen responseto the Persian calligraphy classes – taught by KeramatFathinia – that have continued to attract enthusiasticpractitioners throughout 2017/18.After a busy year in 2016/17 when much of the Institute’sendeavours focused on the SOAS Centenary year, by2017/18 we were back to normal business, working toenhance and promote Middle East studies at SOAS inmany ways and forms.This was a particularly busy year for conferences atSOAS: the thirteenth symposium in the Idea of Iranseries, ‘The Turko-Timurid Intermezzo’ co-convened byDr Sarah Stewart (SOAS) and Professor Charles Melville(Cambridge University) and the ‘Faces of the Infinite:Neoplatonism and Poetics at the Confluence of Africa,Asia and Europe’ conference, convened by ProfessorStefan Sperl (SOAS).LMEI also facilitated research networks, administeringa GCRF project on ‘Female Employment and Dynamicsof Inequality in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asiaand Southern Europe’ – whose Principal Investigatorwas Professor Massoud Karshenas of the EconomicsDepartment while I was a Co-Investigator. We also hostedLMEI’s Centre of Palestine Studies’ annual researchseminar for postgraduate students working on Palestine,organised as before by Dr Dina Matar. Such events arecrucial for SOAS academics, building networks betweenscholars inside and beyond the School, stimulatingresearch ideas and providing forums to discuss currentresearch and develop future research.CPS has also been able to attract senior statesmen andwomen and scholars of Palestinian affairs to the Schoolto deliver Annual Lectures: in the spring of 2018 our guestwas Elias Khoury, the Lebanese writer and intellectual.The Centre’s peer-reviewed publication series with I.B.Tauris continues to thrive with a fourth volume publishedin 2018. Having served the maximum of two three-yearterms Professors Arshin Adib-Moghaddam (CIS) andGilbert Achcar (CPS) have now stepped down as CentreChairs and Ms Narguess Farzad and Dr Dina Matar havetaken over new Chairs of CIS and CPS respectively. Wewish them every success in their new responsibilities.As a glance at the Events section of this report will show,the Institute continues to provide a wide range of eventsand activities, from its Tuesday Evening Lectures whichconcentrate largely on current political and economicaffairs to the many cultural events that enable studentsto engage with the cultural background of the societiesthat they study. The Middle East in London magazineencapsulates our outreach efforts, drawing on theexpertise of its editorial board and SOAS academicsand involving an extensive web of outside academics,journalists and cultural practitioners. Each of its five issuesacross the year gives an indepth insight into individualMiddle Eastern countries and themes.I hope you will acquire a deeper sense of our work as youread this Report. My team and I are very grateful to ourwide network of SOAS academic colleagues and externalpartners without whose support the LMEI would not beable to achieve its aims.

6LMEI ANNUAL REPORT 2017-2018Event Highlights

LMEI ANNUAL REPORT 2017-2018In 2017/18 LMEI again provided a wide range of events toreach out to large numbers of the public who are interestedin the Middle East while simultaneously enhancing thestudent experience at SOAS. The flagship TuesdayEvening Lectures programme was supplemented with awide variety of occasional lectures and book launchesand a series of seminars on Turkey. Outreach also tookthe form of bespoke briefing programmes, our MiddleEast Summer School in June/July and two new initiatives:support for SOAS’s Economics Department’s GlobalChallenges Research Fund project on ‘The Dynamicsof Gender Inequality in the Middle East, North Africaand South Asia’ and the Changing Lives programme inAmman, Jordan.Throughout the year speakers in the Tuesday EveningLecture series addressed a number of contemporaryissues whether in individual countries or across the MENAregion, drawing on current academic and journalisticexpertise to address matters of political turmoil, economicdevelopment and cultural identity. The series of occasionallectures has a wider historical remit. These lectures, insome cases organised in collaboration with colleaguesfrom other SOAS departments, ranged from religiousstudies with Hugh Kennedy’s seminal ‘Reclaiming theCaliphate’ to political ideology with Lahouari Addi’s ‘RadicalArabic Nationalism and Political Islam’ to economic theorywith Gilbert Achcar’s and Hassan Sherry’s ‘NeoliberalDogmatism: the IMF and the Arab Spring’. In December2017 LMEI welcomed its former Director, Professor RobertSpringborg, to launch his latest book Egypt, an analysis ofwhy the Egyptian political economy has underperformedso profoundly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.LMEI staff were involved in the delivery of several majorconferences in 2017/18. In November SOAS hostedthe third day of ‘Faces of the Infinite: Neoplatonism andPoetics at the Confluence of Africa, Asia and Europe’, athree-day conference convened by the British Academyand SOAS. Its ambitious aim was to generate the firstcomparative overview of the extent to which Neoplatonistphilosophy has permeated poetic forms, styles, themesand figurative language as well as poetic theory in sevenprincipal languages of the greater Mediterranean region,from late antiquity to the modern period. Later that monthwas the latest Idea of Iran conference. March was alsobusy with the fifth conference of the International IranianEconomic Association in Amsterdam and the 2018 BritishAssociation for Turkish Area Studies Spring Symposium.Throughout 2017/18 LMEI continued to provide bespokebriefing programmes, both in London and in the MiddleEast, for senior UNICEF regional staff and Médecins sansFrontières employees. These programmes are alwayswarmly received since they provide participants witha chance to step back from their – often hectic – dailychallenges to review their work from a wider intellectualperspective.LMEI’s summer school in 2017 offered studentscombinations of Arabic (at two beginners levels), Cultureand Society in the Middle East, Government and Politicsof the Middle East and Persian (also at two beginnerslevels). Once again students were drawn from a widevariety of backgrounds, from UK-based students to7students from Europe, the US and the Far East and frommature students to undergraduates, some of whom werealready at SOAS studying other subjects. In addition tothese academic courses LMEI continued to host practicalevening classes in Persian calligraphy taught by KeramatFathinia, classes which attracted a loyal following in allthree terms.

8LMEI ANNUAL REPORT 2017-2018Calendar ofEvents