Research Fields

EUME supports and rests upon five interconnected research fields that are associated at universities and extra-university institutions in Berlin:

Perspectives on the Qur'an: Negotiating Different Views of a Shared History

directed by Angelika Neuwirth (Seminar for Arabic Studies, Freie Universität Berlin) and Stefan Wild (Universität Bonn) situates the foundational text of Islam within the religious landscape of Late Antiquity and combines a historicization of its genesis with its reception and perception in Europe and the Middle East;

Travelling Traditions: Comparative Perspectives on Near Eastern Literatures

directed by Friederike Pannewick (Centrum für Nah- und Mitteloststudien/Arabistik, Philipps-Universität Marburg) and Samah Selim (Rutgers University) reassesses literary entanglements and processes of canonization between Europe and the Middle East.

Cities Compared: Urban Change in the Mediterranean and Adjacent Regions

directed by Ulrike Freitag and Nora Lafi (both Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin) contributes to the debate on cosmopolitanism and civil society from the historical experience of conviviality and socio-cultural, ethnic, and religious differences in the cities around the Mediterranean.

Islamic Discourse Contested: Middle Eastern and European Perspectives

directed by Gudrun Krämer (Institut für Islamwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin) analyzes modern Middle Eastern thought and discourses in the framework of theories of multiple or reflexive modernities;

Tradition and the Critique of Modernity: Secularism, Fundamentalism and Religion from Middle Eastern Perspectives 

directed by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva) tries to rethink key concepts of Modernity like secularity, tradition, or religion in the context of the experiences, interpretations, and critiques of Jews, Arabs, and Muslims in the Middle East and in Europe.

All five research fields contribute to our knowledge of Middle Eastern cultures and societies and their relations to Europe. At the same time they attempt to re-center the significance of academic disciplines for the study of non-European contexts, in this case the Middle East. EUME thus supports historical-critical philology, rigorous engagement with the literatures of the Middle East and their histories, the social history of cities and the study of Middle Eastern political and philosophical thought (Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and secular) as central fields of research not only for area or cultural studies, but also for Europe and the academic disciplines.