Lucia Admiraal is an Assistant Professor in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Groningen. Her research focuses on the modern intellectual history of the Middle East, the Nahda, Arabic historiography and literature, using global and entangled history approaches. Her PhD, which she obtained at the University of Amsterdam (2021) and which was funded by the Dutch Research Council, examines Jewish intellectual responses to Fascism in the Middle East. Focussing on the Arabic Jewish press, it studies the ideas of its editors and contributors and their trans-regional intellectual networks. Her current research examines Nahda historiography and representations of Jews and Judaism in the modern Middle East, using an entangled history approach. During her stay at OIB, she will be working on her current project and conduct archival research. 

Project description:

Histories and Historiography of Jews and Judaism in the Middle East (1880s-1940s): Intellectual Encounters and Colonial Entanglements

This project studies how intellectuals in the Middle East during the late 19th and early 20th centuries studied and conceived of a Jewish past. During the Nahda, reformist aspirations went in tandem with historical scholarship and popular explorations of the past, which included studying Jews and Judaism as part of defining self and community. The project examines how both ‘canonical’ and ‘non-canonical’ or unstudied Nahda intellectuals have envisioned the past, and how they have used the past to express confessional, communal, national and regional senses of belonging. The project uses an entangled historical approach to examine trans-regional knowledge production and circulation.