As the study of modernity continues to move beyond diffusionist models that treat it as a singular project radiating outward from Western Europe, the comparative study of regional and alternative modernities has acquired renewed urgency. Recent scholarship on multiple temporalities and entangled histories has reframed modernity as a plural and contested condition produced through uneven encounter, translation, and adaptation. This seminar takes up that impetus to examine the distinctive trajectories of modernity in the Middle East, placing them in comparison both with each other and with the modernity of the West.

Challenging the persistent tendency to read Middle Eastern modernity as belated, derivative, or reactive to European models, we seek to foreground the region as a site where the modern was actively negotiated, reinterpreted, and reinvented. From the Ottoman Tanzimat and the Arab Nahda to the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, writers, reformers, jurists, translators, and artists engaged with modernity through innovation as much as imitation, navigating rapid political, legal, religious, and linguistic transformation.

The seminar aims to stimulate comparative inquiry into the asymmetries and convergences between Middle Eastern and Western experiences of the modern, debating issues such as: the politics of translation and the circulation of ideas, books, and periodicals across the Mediterranean and beyond; contested relations among secularism, religion, and tradition; competing philosophies of time and the trope of "catching up"; the role of the state, constitutionalism, and reform; and the reshaping of gender, the public sphere, and selfhood.

I invite proposals that examine modernity in the Middle East from a comparative and transregional perspective across literature, intellectual history, law, music, medicine, and beyond and that interrogate Eurocentric narratives by treating Middle Eastern and Western modernities as mutually constitutive. For any questions, please reach out to [email protected].