Forum Transregionale Studien | Veranstaltungen

Global Hijra: A Modern History of Muslim Refugee Migration

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:00:00 +0200

In this talk, Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky will present an outline of his new book manuscript, Global Hijra: A Modern History of Muslim Refugee Migration. This project focuses on the history of Muslim displacement between the 1850s and today. Specifically, it explores how various refugee communities and national governments engaged with the idea of hijra. Hijra is the journey of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE, and later in Islamic history came to denote a migration from a non-Muslim country to a Muslim country to save one’s faith. Muslim refugees conducting hijra are known as muhajirs. This project considers several displacements in modern history that utilized this language from early Islamic history, including forced migrations from the Caucasus, Crimea, and the Balkans to the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic, from early Soviet Central Asia to Afghanistan, and from India to Pakistan amid the partition. This talk is an invitation to think together through the evolution of this vocabulary, the stakes of a transnational historical framework, and ways of writing a global history of migration.

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Associate Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024), which received nine book prizes in the fields of global history, migration studies, Middle Eastern history, and Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian history. He is currently a EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien.

Claudia Derichs is Professor of Transregional Southeast Asian Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She has studied Japanese and Arabic in Bonn, Tokyo and Cairo, holds a PhD in Japanology (1994, U Bonn, Germany) and in Political Science (2004, U Duisburg-Essen, Germany). She assumed professorships in Political Science at the universities of Hildesheim and Marburg before moving to HU Berlin and fully committing to the field of Area Studies. Her research covers gender, religion, and political violence in Japan, Southeast Asia and the Middle East/West Asia, looking particularly at transregional connections in and beyond the “long 1960s”. She is a board member of the Forum Transregionale Studien, and works towards new orientations in Area Studies.

Please register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.

Something is Passing in the Night: Iranian Hyphenates in the World

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:00:00 +0200

Something is Passing in the Night is a work of creative nonfiction tracing the Iranian diaspora in Berlin — from the intellectuals who gathered around Kaviani Press in Charlottenburg to the exiles who built "Little Tehran," to the activists who flooded the streets after the death of Mahsa Amini. Drawing on the mythology of the "city upon a hill," the work asks what freedom means to those who have left Iran behind, and what it costs to dream of it from a distance. Woven through with the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad, it asks whether belonging is something inherited, or something built.

Armita Mirkarimi is a writer and post-baccalaureate student. A graduate of Dartmouth College, she studied Government and Creative Nonfiction and completed dual honors theses. She has reported for WMUR-TV, The Vermont Standard, and The Granite Post, along with working in Congress and humanitarian policy. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Europe in Middle East Institute, where she is writing a collection of essays on nationalism and nostalgia in the Iranian diaspora. She writes in English and Farsi.

Zoya Masoud works at the intersection of postcolonial studies and post-foundational theory. Employing qualitative research methodologies, her work engages in critical inquiry into identity, architecture, heritage, commemoration, violence, and knowledge production. Her first book Dislocated. Heritage Construction through Experience of Loss in Aleppo is forthcoming with De Gruyter/Brill. Currently, she is conducting her postdoctoral project, Irrestitutable. Inquiries into Hauntings of Absent Cultural Heritage. Since Fall 2024, Zoya has been a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project BEYONDREST at the Forum Transregionale Studien. She has worked and studied at several Universities and institutions in Damascus, Hamburg, Dar es Salaam, and Berlin.

Social Cage: Syrian State Building and Atrophy, and Civil War in the long durée

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 16:00:00 +0200

This session is part of the SYRASP Online Workshop Series “Syria After the Assad Regime: Community Voices, Research Methods, and Digital Tools”, organized in cooperation with The Lab for the Study for Violence. A description of the workshop series is avaible on SYRASP's website, including information on other sessions.

The session will take place online via Zoom. Participation upon prior registration via syrasp[at]trafo-berlin.de.