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Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies Exeter

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Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies Exeter

IAIS is a leading centre for teaching and research in the UK and internationally. Email [email protected] for more info

With the largest concentration of Middle East Studies scholars at a British university, we offer the broadest range of Arabic and Middle East Studies programmes. The University of Exeter's Institute or Arab and Islamic studies is a world-leading provider of degree, postgraduate and PhD programmes in fields relating to the Middle East is culture, history and anthropology.

01/09/2026

New exhibition coming soon!

Digital Archive of the Middle East retrospective 2021-26

Private View 15 September 2026 3-4.30pm
IAIS Street Gallery, Stocker Road, Exeter

28/08/2026

The IAIS Street Gallery is nearly ready for our next Digital Archive of the Middle East (DAME) exhibition. Watch this space...

27/08/2026

Dr Farangis Ghaderi, Director, Centre for Kurdish Studies, recently contributed to the Fifteenth Biennial Iranian Studies Conference at Utrecht.

She organised and chaired a panel titled, 'Language, Power, and Resistance: The Kurdish Struggle Through Translation' and also presented her paper titled ''Erased from the Margins': Reclaiming Kurdish Women's place in the Canon' at a panel on 'Modern Kurdish Literature Between Different Languages, Genres and Countries'.

She also served on the selection committee of the inaugural Nemati Book Award that honours exceptional monographs on Iran’s minoritized ethnic and religious groups.

26/08/2026

We are very excited to share with you MERIP’s new summer issue. The issue explores culture not as an escape from politics, but as a space where struggles over power, identity and belonging are continually negotiated.

From songs circulating through Iran and northeast Syria to theatre in the Golan, cultural practices become counter-archives, preserving experiences and histories that official narratives seek to erase.

Artists in Lebanon grapple with what it means to look at death and destruction day after day through their phone screens.

A Gazan artist confronts the Israeli surveillance he has lived with throughout his life, while in Amman, musicians and performers navigate state repression, foreign funding and the commodification of solidarity.

Other contributions examine the institutions and markets that shape what counts as art, from the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Gulf’s cultural economy to the gendered boundaries between art and craft and the precarious labour behind AI-generated spectacles.

Across these diverse contexts, the issue asks who gets to produce culture, who controls its circulation and value, and what happens when artists challenge imposed categories.

The issue is particularly close to IAIS, with Sabiha Allouche serving as one of its editors, alongside Kevin Schwartz, Hatim el-Hibri and Hanan Toukan. It also features two excellent contributions from our wider research community, by Nafiseh Sharifi and Heidi Sarah Affi. MERIP's Executive Editor is Billie Jeanne Brownlee and the Managing Editor is Marya Hannun.

You can read it here or via the link in our bio: https://tr.ee/PrJB8xB_SP

25/08/2026

Maziyar Ghiabi recently wrote a script for a comic that was published on The Public Source - a Beirut-based investigative journalism outlet, which won the National Press Club's 2026 Arthur E. Rowse Award for Examining the News Media.

The graphic journalism piece is in collaboration with Gianluca Costantini, an Italian artist of international standing who recently illustrated Ai Weiwei’s, Zelinsky’s, and Xi Jiping’s biographies.

You can read the comic here or via the link in our bio: https://tr.ee/jP4GMlgeuZ

20/08/2026

New article published in International Journal of Nautical Archaeology:

Reflections on a Strategy of ‘Mixed’ Hull Construction – The Case of a Ngwanda, Zanzibar, Tanzania

by John P Cooper, Lucy Blue, Alessandro Ghidoni & Abdallah Ali

This article challenges some of the fundamental tenets of maritime archaeology with respect to the building of wooden boats and ship hulls.

It also questions the epistemic authority that sustained these tenets for so long by way of an ethnographic collaboration with a wonderful boatbuilder (fundi) in Zanzibar, Fundi Hamdan Ali Ibrahim Ayoub.

You can read the article here or via the link in our bio: https://tr.ee/QinzGur7Fk

19/08/2026

New volume published by BRILL

Humanities in Iran
Volume Editors: Majid Daneshgar, Mohsen Feyzbakhsh, Azar Mirzaei, and Sajjad Rizvi

The study of the humanities is a truly global endeavour as cultures seek to make sense of the category of the human and its locations. What gives that inquiry colour, vibrancy, and dynamism, are the local and embedded expressions of the study of the human.

Iran, both in premodern tradition and in the modern period, has been one of the leading Asian countries contributing to knowledge production and Muslim literatures and humanities.

This volume, Humanities in Iran, offers a fresh voice about the structures, developments, receptions, and marginalization of the humanities (ʿUlūm-i Insānī) as a discipline in the Iranian academic context, particularly following the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Humanities in Iran is a series of reflections upon the connection between the classic and modern subjects in the humanities in relation to Eurocentrism, processes of Islamisation, and beyond the classic insider-outsider approaches to the field.

https://tr.ee/reHwoFboac (or via link in bio)

18/08/2026

New article published in BRILL

Theologising Stewardship in Contemporary Shīʿī Exegetical Discourse
How Hermeneutical Method Shapes Environmental Ethics

by Dr Bianka Speidl, Honorary IAIS Fellow

You can read the article here or via the link in our bio: https://tr.ee/Pf3oeTS9WR

14/08/2026

Public event at The Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World, University of Edinburgh

3rd September 2026
3pm UK time
Room G.06, 50 George Square, Edinburgh (and online)

From Palestine to Scotland: Celebrating the Raja Shehadeh Archive

Join internationally acclaimed Palestinian writer, lawyer and activist Raja Shehadeh as he marks the accession of his extraordinary personal archive to the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Research Collections.

In this special event, Raja will read from his diaries which form the majority of the archive, discussing their significance for literature, history and the study of Palestine alongside members of the team who helped preserve, digitise and transport the archive safely to Scotland.

This event will be hybrid with attendance possible both online and in-person. The event will be followed by a reception.

Register for online or in-person attendance here (or via link in bio): https://tr.ee/gshsIo2NOq

13/08/2026

Breaking news from IAIS: WE HAVE BANANAS.

Address

Stocker Road
Exeter
EX44ND

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 5pm
Tuesday	9am - 5pm
Wednesday	9am - 5pm
Thursday	9am - 5pm
Friday	9am - 5pm

Website

https://arabislamicstudies.exeter.ac.uk/, https://linktr.ee/exeteriais

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