Day 1: Saturday, March 29, 2025, 10:00am to 6:00pm,
CGIS South Bldg, Rm S030, Concourse level, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA

Day 2: Sunday, March 30, 2025, 10:00am to 5:15pm, CGIS South Bldg, Rm S020, Belfer Case Study Rm, Concourse level, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies presents a two-day conference: “Disasters in and of the Middle East: Event, Place, Intensity”

To center the Middle East in scholarly discourse on disasters, the Disaster Studies Initiative at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, is pleased to announce an international conference, scheduled to take place from March 29 to 30, 2025. We thank the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs for their generous support.

In this day and age, under the shadow of debates surrounding the intensifying climate crisis, is it still possible to think of disasters such as earthquakes, floods, fires, and wars as significant events? Are they political events at all? For whom are they non-eventful, and for whom are they still experienced as shocks and ruptures? If they are no longer analytically or politically relevant events, what are we to make of the landscape, trauma, pain, and avenues of desirable change that disasters often generate? How, then, should we deal with disasters—both past and present?

The Middle East has been the site of earthquakes, famine, floods, wars, conflicts, genocides, massacres, and other environmental, industrial, and technological catastrophes. However, within disaster studies, the region is rarely the focus of discussions on changing environments or diverse responses to superlative events.

Link to Day 1 of the conference: https://cmes.fas.harvard.edu/event/disasters-and-middle-east-event-place-intensity
Link to Day 2 (Mar 30) of the conference: https://cmes.fas.harvard.edu/event/disasters-and-middle-east-event-place-intensity-day-2.

Speakers include
Onder Akgul, Northwestern University, E. İrem Az, Harvard University, Christina Banalopoulou, University of Milan, Tylor Brand, Trinity College Dublin, Jordan Cannon, Harvard University, Ali Çapar, Çankırı Karatekin University, Christopher Dole, Amherst College, Begum Ergun, Boston University, Kim Fortun, UC Irving, Matthew Ghazarian, Yale University, Peter Habib, Emory University, Zuhal Ibidan, Bogazici University, Leila Khodabaksh, Catholic University of Eichstäett-Ingolstadt
Cyntia Kreichati, McGill University, Evangeline McGlynn, Harvard University, Soha Mohsen, UC Davis, Nathaniel Moses, Harvard University, Moad Musbahi, Princeton University, Burcu Ozdemir, Graduate Center CUNY, Eda Ozel, Postdoctoral Researcher, Istanbul, Aidan Seale-Feldman, Notre Dame University

Co-sponsor: Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
Contact: Liz Flanagan<mailto:eaf073@fas.harvard.edu>