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Featuring a keynote address by Marie-Ève Thérenty and closing dialogue with Martine Delvaux, this two-day colloquium brings together scholars from around the world to expose, discuss, and debate the issues that inform the representation and reception of French and Francophone women writers in the media, from the nineteenth century to the present day, in light of their diverse social and political realities. Insofar as it implies the analysis of strategies of visibility, and even self-promotion, the study of representations of women writers in the media extends a significant current of contemporary literary analyses – that of posture and auctorial scenography – while also including perspectives on issues of gender and identity building, understood broadly, within the study of the reception and representations of women authors.
 

Melding the rural and the urban with the local, regional, and global, Levantine cuisine is a mélange of ingredients, recipes, and modes of consumption rooted in the Eastern Mediterranean. Making Levantine Cuisine provides much-needed scholarly attention to the region’s culinary cultures while teasing apart the tangled histories and knotted migrations of food. Akin to the region itself, the culinary repertoires that comprise Levantine cuisine endure and transform—are unified but not uniform. This book delves into the production and circulation of sugar, olive oil, and pistachios; examines the social origins of kibbe, Adana kebab, shakshuka, falafel, and shawarma; and offers a sprinkling of family recipes along the way. The histories of these ingredients and dishes, now so emblematic of the Levant, reveal the processes that codified them as national foods, the faulty binaries of Arab or Jewish and traditional or modern, and the global nature of foodways. Making Levantine Cuisine draws from personal archives and public memory to illustrate the diverse past and persistent cultural unity of a politically divided region.

This essay is a contribution to a roundtable that brings together the work of gender historians whose research collectively ranges from Morocco to Afghanistan, and traces a variety of connections across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Collectively, we demonstrate the many ways that women in the Middle East and North Africa collaborated with one another and with women in other world regions in the name of national independence, women’s rights, and economic justice, often shaping gender norms in the process. This contribution demonstrates that multiple generations of Moroccan women activists engaged with ideas and movements circulating through the Middle East and beyond as they advocated for liberation. It examines how the nation-state sets up particular barriers to narrating these vital transnational dimensions of women's history in Morocco.

Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 17:3, November 2021