What is the role and meaning of the state, citizenship, and the law (national, international, humanitarian) in times of crisis? Crisis – like catastrophy – has not only been a recurring description of and within Middle Eastern societies since the beginnings of the various renaissance movements in the region, but has also accompanied modernity in general. Today, crisis is diagnosed to be everywhere and plural. This panel discussion, moderated by Dalia Halabi, aims to open up a conversation on the challenges and prospects that contemporary societies, political communities and people of and in Europe and the Middle East are facing today.
Drawing on their respective research, Mohammed Bamyeh, Zeynep Türkyılmaz, Eli Osheroff, and Nahid Siamdoust will discuss the role of the state in generating exclusion, violence, and instability; the idea, practice and hope of citizenship and coexistence, and the situation of non-recognized people in plural societies within the legal, political and public frameworks in Middle Eastern societies.
Mohammed Bamyeh is professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh (USA), and the Einstein Fellow at Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. His areas of expertise include social movements, sociology of knowledge, Islam, and anarchism. In the academic year 2020/21, he has been a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
Eli Osheroff is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a focus on the history of Arab-Zionist relations. His first book, based on his doctoral dissertation, is forthcoming from the Van Leer Institute and deals with Arab political imagination from the late Ottoman period to 1948. The book focuses on Arab visions for an independent Palestine and the place of Jewish settlers in the future Arab state. Eli is also a regular contributor to the Forum for Regional Thinking, a think tank of Israeli Middle East scholars seeking to understand Israel’s place in the region from a critical perspective. In the academic years 2025-27, he is a Minerva Fellow at EUME.
Nahid Siamdoust is Assistant Professor of Media and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently a EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Humboldt University and Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, was the Yarshater Postdoctoral Associate in Iranian Studies at Yale University, and a Visiting Professor in Anthropology of Religion at Harvard Divinity School. Nahid is the author of Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran (Stanford, 2017), co-editor of Iran Amplified: One Hundred Years of Music and Society (Harvard, 2026), and has published in academic journals such as Iranian Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Cultural Anthropology. Previously, she was an Iran correspondent for Time Magazine and a Middle East correspondent for Al Jazeera International. Her recent commentaries have appeared in The New York Times, New Lines Magazine, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, BBC, and NPR. In 2023, she launched the podcast series Woman, Life, Freedom: All in on Iran, which captured and archived important knowledge on the uprising in Iran. It now runs as a series offering interviews with authors of new books on Iran, renamed IranCast. She’s delivered a TEDx Talk titled “Dance for Life.”
Zeynep Türkyılmaz received her PhD from the Department of History at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2009. After holding many fellowship and teaching positions, she is currently an associated EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien. Her research and teaching interests include state formation, gender, nationalism, colonialism, and religion with a focus on religious non-conformity and missionary work in the Middle East from 1800 to the present.
Dalia Halabi is a lecturer in the Department of Education at Oranim Academic College, and currently a EUME Fellow 2025/26 at the Forum Transregionale Studien. She holds a PhD in Leadership and Policy in Education from the University of Haifa. Her doctoral research examined the formation of elite identities among Palestinian students and alumni of private schools. Adopting a “study up” approach, her work interrogates social stratification, educational inequalities and class reproduction, with particular attention to elite formation among minoritized elites. She examines how marginalized communities navigate, negotiate, and reproduce elite status within unequal social structures. She previously served as the director of Dirasat – The Arab Center for Rights and Policy and has over two decades of experience in civil society and activism, with a focus on educational justice and social equity.
Please register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.