Each year, Middle East Medievalists welcomes applications for panel sponsorship at the MESA conference.
2019
Geographical Cognizance of the Indian Ocean in West Eurasian Scientific and Political Practices, 700 – 1700
Chair & Discussant: Zayde Antrim
Organizer: Kaveh Hemmat
- Hyunhee Park, “Mapping India in West Asia during the 7th through 14th Centuries”
- Kaveh Hemmat, “The Geography of Kingship in Persian Epics, 1000 – 1400”
- Malika Dekkiche, “A world of kings and realms”: Mamluk Diplomacy and the Spatial Turn”
- Pinar Emiralioğlu, “Indian Ocean in Early Modern Ottoman Geographical and Imperial Consciousness”
Slavery, Power, and the State in the Premodern Islamic World
Chair: Matthew Gordon
Organizer: Hannah Barker
- Craig Perry, “Nubia, the Buja, and the Slave Trade at the Frontiers of Medieval Egypt”
- Thomas Carlson, “Enslaving Dhimmis: Rulers, Fiqh, and Religious Diversity in Late Medieval Türkmen States”
- Hannah Barker, “Flight, Apostasy, Murder: Resistance by Elite Slaves in the Mamluk Era”
- Baki Tezcan, “Empowering the Emasculated: Arabic and Turkish Literary Sources on African Eunuchs”
Transitions in 7th–9th century Iraq and Syria: Muslims and non-Muslims
Chair: Alison Vacca
Discussant: Luke Yarbrough
Organizer: Pamela Klasova
- Jessica Mutter, “Syriac Christian Responses to Islam: Conversion and Apostasy in the Legal Literature”
- Pamela Klasova, “The Foundation of Wasit: History and Memory”
- Michael Payne, “Zandaqa, Race, and the Reactionary Politics of al-Jahiz”
- Simcha Gross, “From Local Community to Transregional Authorities: The spread of Babylonian Rabbinic Influence between the Sasanian and early Islamic periods”
2018
“Macht” and “Herrschaft” in Persianate Chronicles from medieval and early modern India
Organizer & Chair: Tilmann Trausch
- Stephan Conermann, “Narratological Approaches to Abd al-Malik Isami’s (fl. 1350) Epic Futuh al-salatin”
- Blain Auer, “Islamic Genealogies of Prophets and Persian Kings”
- Florian Saalfeld, “How to herald a future ruler: The depiction of Ghiyāth al-Dīn Balban (r. 1266–87) in the Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī of Minhāj al-Sirāj Jūzjānī”
- Anna Kollatz, “Communicating Macht and Examples from the early Shāh Jahānī period”
Constructing and Contesting Scholarly Authority in Syria and Egypt 1200 – 1400
Organizer: Jon Hoover
Chair & Respondent: Zayde Antrim
- Rodrigo Adem, “Mamluk Syria as Arabo-Islamic Archive: Urban Spaces, Scholarly Networks, and Manuscript Cultures“
- Mariam Sheibani, “From Khorasan and Iraq to Damascus: Fault Lines in Shafi’ism in Ayyubid Damascus”
- Mohammed Al Dhfar, “Sustaining Shafi‘i precedence: Taqi al-Din al-Subki on the punishment for cursing the Prophet”
- Jon Hoover, “Ibn Taymiyya’s confession of Ash‘ari doctrine to procure release from prison in 1307”
Frontier Myth Making in the eastern lands of the early Islamic world
Organizer: Robert Haug
- Christine Baker, “Conflict and Exchange on the Frontier: Paper Making and the Myth of the Battle of Talas”
- Robert Haug, “Heroics and Rebellion in the Stories of `Abdallah b. Khazim and the Conquest of Khurasan”
- Brian Ulrich, “Al-Muhallab and the al-‘Ilafis: The Historiographic Problem of Muslims Who Didn’t Conquer”