In 1998, the OIB summoned over two dozen junior and senior scholars to host the first Summer Academy of the Wissenschaftskolleg’s “Working Group Modernity and Islam.” The intensive two-week long meeting on “Crisis and Memory” and its eponymous book generated a level of scholarship that, over 25 years on, has not lost any of its salience and pertinence in the MENA region and in Europe. Our proposed conference takes stock of how the field of memory studies has metamorphosed and expanded internationally in light of the war on Lebanon and on-going genocidal warfare against the Palestinian people.

This international conference was originally planned for 20-22 May 2024 under the title “Crisis, Memory & Critique” to mark the 25th anniversary of the foundational “Crisis & Memory” Summer Academy at the OIB. We decided to postpone and reconceptualize the conference’s framing. The conference now takes place at the OIB from the evening of 3. to the evening of 5. June 2025.

We have replaced the concept “crisis” with “catastrophe” in the event’s title to encourage our participants to consider what happens to our analysis if we adjust the scales of history and the stakes of our inquiry to the unchartered nature of our present. “Catastrophe, Memory & Critique” still aims to take stock of how the field of memory studies has metamorphosed and expanded internationally since the landmark OIB summer academy in 1998.

But we sense that the experiences and horizons of the 1990s were so utterly different and, indeed, much more stable than the experiences and horizons we inhabit in early 2025, that we call for new analytical registers, genealogical approaches and comparative angles to comprehend the present moment of history.

In times of genocide, war, economic collapse and fascist resurgences, our conference aims to interrogate the relationship between memory and critique in relation to three contested fields of research: (1) migration and memory politics in Europe and the MENA region (2) archives of catastrophe and critique in the Arab intellectual tradition; (3) overcoming genocide, war, and dictatorship.

The conference is generously sponsored by the German Research Council (DFG) and gathers scholars of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, France, Germany and the Holocaust to explore collectively particularities and connections, new insights from the past and the very validity of past paradigms.
 

This in-presence conference is open to the academic public. Please register online at sek@dont-want-spam.orient-institut.org.
 

This conference was made possible with the generous support of the DFG (the German Research Council).

Organised by: Sami Khatib & Jens-Peter Hanßen

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