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Moving Stories: Sectarianisms in the Global Middle East

Project description

An ‘archive of sectarianism’ for the Middle East

How did new forms of sectarianism develop within the Middle East? How did these sectarianisms become so powerful in the volatile history of a decolonising Middle East? To answer these questions, the ERC-funded Moving Stories project will draw on macro narratives and microhistories of individuals and communities. It will investigate the global circulation of Middle Eastern sectarianism and its varieties found across the Middle East, as well as the Americas and Europe. It will focus on emotive forms of storytelling to explain sectarianism. The project will reconstitute an ‘Archive of Sectarianism’ spanning four continents, more than half a dozen Middle Eastern and Western languages and a variety of records, documents, and literary sources from the 18th to the 20th century.

Objective

The emergence of sectarianism forms a key element of the impact of modernization and globalization on Middle Eastern history. Yet we still lack a full picture of how new forms of sectarianism developed within the region, and in exile, and how these sectarianisms became such a powerful force in the volatile history of a decolonizing Middle East. The Moving Stories project concentrates on two areas of research. First, the project will explore the global circulation of Middle Eastern sectarianism and the variety of sectarianisms that developed in specific localities across the Middle East, the Americas, and Europe. Second, the project will focus on what it calls the ‘moving stories’, or emotive forms of storytelling, used by individuals to describe, explain, and represent sectarianism as much to themselves as to multiple publics in local, national, and international contexts.

At the heart of the project lies an activist strategy of outreach aimed at identifying sources that remain even now hidden away in private, family, and communal archives. Using these sources, the project will reconstitute an ‘Archive of Sectarianism’ spanning four continents, more than half a dozen Middle Eastern and Western languages, and a wide variety of records, documents, and literary sources from the 18th to the 20th twentieth century. The project’s main objective is to write a global history of sectarianism that pays as much attention to the microhistories of individuals and communities as it does to macro narratives of political, social, and religious change. Looking beyond the Middle East, however, the project will also provide a model for understanding how other modern forms of sectarianism have developed through complex shifts in identity in which émigré and diaspora communities have often played a formative role. In this way, the project will open avenues for future research into the comparative study of sectarianism among historians, social scientists, and literary scholars.

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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ERC-COG - Consolidator Grant

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2020-COG

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Host institution

THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 999 482,00
Address
WELLINGTON SQUARE UNIVERSITY OFFICES
OX1 2JD Oxford
United Kingdom

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Region
South East (England) Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Oxfordshire
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 999 482,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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