EUROPE IN THE MIDDLE EAST – THE MIDDLE EAST IN EUROPE integrates research fields and topics that address fault lines of national, religious or cultural preconceptions. From different disciplinary perspectives (anthropology, Islamic studies, philology, history, literary studies, political science), EUME aims to highlight the importance of research on non-European cultures and societies for the differentiation of the humanitites and social sciences under conditions of global interdependence and fragmentation.

Travelling Traditions: Comparative Perspectives on Near Eastern Literatures
represented by Friederike Pannewick (Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies/Department for Arabic Studies, Philipps-Universität Marburg) and Samah Selim (Rutgers University – New Brunswick) reassesses literary entanglements and processes of translation and canonization between Europe and the Middle East.

Cities Compared: Governance, Participatory Mechanisms and Plurality
represented by Ulrike Freitag and Nora Lafi (both Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin) contributes to the debates on civil society, participation, deliberation, opinion formation, citizenship, migration and mobilization from the experience of cultural and religious differences in cities around the Mediterranean and beyond.

Tradition and the Critique of Modernity: Secularism, Fundamentalism and Religion from Middle Eastern Perspectives 
represented by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva) tries to rethink key concepts of modernity like secularity, tradition, and religion in the context of experiences, interpretations, and critiques from the Middle East in order to contribute to a more inclusive language of culture, politics and community.

Politics and Processes of Change, Archaeologies of the Present, and Imaginations of the Future
are research themes that emerged during the last years and are represented by the work of several EUME Fellows and members of the Collegium (e.g. Cilja Harders, Friederike Pannewick, Rachid Ouaissa, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin).

The Prison Narratives of Assad’s Syria: Voices, Texts, Publics (SYRASP)
is a project that EUME Fellow Anne-Marie McManus is pursuing at the Forum Transregionale Studien in the framework of a five-year ERC Starting Grant since April 2020. The project collects and analyses Syrian prison narratives of the left and the Islamic movement since the 1970s, and thus deal with narratives of resistance and survival that are of particular importance to the political culture of Syria and its diaspora.

Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge (BEYONDREST)
is an interdisciplinary research project headed by EUME Fellow Banu Karaca at the Forum Transregionale Studien. It is funded within the framework of a five-year ERC Consolidator Grant and has started in July 2022. On the backdrop of ongoing debates to decolonise museums, BEYONDREST takes restitution not as an endpoint but as the point of departure to explore what kind of loss dispossessed artworks engender, and how this loss has shaped the knowledge production on heritage.

The research fields and topics form the framework of EUME, which focuses on a postdoctoral program that invites fellows, particularly from the Middle East, but also from the USA, Africa, South Asia and other European countries, to Berlin every year, usually for the duration of an academic year, to work on their research projects. In recent years, researchers have increasingly come to the Forum for longer periods as EUME Fellows, supported by scholarships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Minerva Foundation, the Doha Center or other funding bodies.