Organizer: Aviad Moreno (Ben-Gurion-University of the Negev and University of Florida); Heather Sharkey (University of Pennsylvania); Matthias B. Lehmann (University of Cologne); Raanan Rein (University of Florida)
ZIP: 50923
Location: Cologne
Country: Germany
Takes place: In Attendance
From - Until: 24.05.2027 - 25.05.2027
Deadline: 01.10.2026
What makes a diaspora? Not every population on the move becomes one, and not every dispersed community claims the term. This workshop is designed to bring three fields into conversation: American studies, Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) studies, and Jewish studies.
For more than a century, Middle Eastern and North African peoples—Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze, and others; Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, and more—have moved to and within the Americas in ways that transformed both the regions they left and the societies they joined. In many cases, these migrations complicated what it has meant to be a minority. Some migrants came from dominant religious or ethnic communities in their countries of origin but became minorities—small in number and relatively lacking in power—upon arrival in the Americas. In recent years, a substantial body of scholarship has examined these migrations through commercial networks, religious institutions, racial formations, and transnational attachments.
Building on this research, the workshop asks more nuanced questions about how migration and transnationalism produce diasporic formations. Who mobilizes people, through which institutions and infrastructures, for what purposes, and with what consequences for communal authority, hierarchy, solidarity, and division? The workshop seeks to explore how diasporic formations depend on collective consciousness—on people seeing and accepting themselves as members of a group—rather than understanding migration primarily as an individual project of autonomy and reinvention in lands of migration.
In short, the workshop approaches diaspora not as the automatic result of migration, but as a field of practices, institutions, infrastructures, memories, and struggles, subject to negotiation and contestation by both individuals and groups. Recent scholarship has emphasized that diasporas are at once social formations, political claims, historical memories, infrastructures of connection, and sometimes categories of practice with meanings must be explained, not assumed. Scholarship on diaspora politics has shown that transnational mobilization depends not on homeland attachment alone, but also on context, position, leadership, resources, and institutional capacity. Some scholars have gone further by suggesting that a diaspora is not simply “any” scattered migrant group, but one qualitatively shaped by a shared sense of trauma or loss, or alternatively, by a shared sense of network, as in diasporic business communities. Still others have pointed to longevity—that is, long-term group memory retention, or memory-making, including the potential invention of tradition—as a sine qua non for diaspora status.
How do concepts such as exile, return, imagined homeland, peoplehood, and long-distance nationalism—long central to Jewish studies and increasingly important in Middle Eastern studies, too—travel across Jewish, Armenian, Palestinian, Maronite, Coptic, Assyrian, Druze, Kurdish, Muslim, and other MENA diasporic formations? Where do they illuminate, and where do they distort? How do non-Jewish Middle Eastern and North African migrants in the Americas unsettle inherited Jewish-studies categories such as exile and return? What becomes visible when Jewish studies, MENA studies, and scholarship on the Americas are brought into conversation, and how might such dialogue sharpen our understanding of diaspora as both a regional and global formation?
We have three goals for the workshop. We want to bring fresh insights to consider, first, what Jewish history and historiography can contribute to current scholarship on modern and contemporary diasporic and minority communities; second, and reciprocally, what the study of Middle Eastern and North African migration to the Americas can bring to Jewish history; and third, how we can study diasporas and Middle Eastern communities in the Americas while setting new directions for scholars to follow.
Questions for Discussion
- What qualifies as a diaspora, and who claims—or refuses—the term?
- Who claims the authority to speak for the diaspora, and how are such claims accepted, challenged, or rejected within self-defined diasporic communities?
- How does homeland attachment generate solidarity, political mobilization, and communal continuity across distance? How can the same attachments produce internal disagreements, rival leaderships, ideological splits, or competing visions of belonging?
- How do diasporic networks connect multiple sites across the hemisphere and beyondin order to forge, contest, or revise shared diasporic stories?
- How do migration, return migration, circular mobility, and onward migration shape—or unsettle—the making of multilayered diasporas?
- How have the Americas functioned not merely as destinations for Middle Eastern and North African migrants, but as arenas where diasporic identities are remade through local racial regimes, minority politics, religious pluralism, and intercommunal encounters?
- What institutions, infrastructures, and media help produce diasporic formations—including religious organizations, communal associations, schools, newspapers, philanthropic networks, political committees, cultural initiatives, digital platforms, and family networks?
- How have diasporic identities become entangled with race as migrants have moved across imperial, colonial, mandate, and nation-state contexts into the Americas?
- What terminologies have communities used to describe themselves—“diaspora,” “exile,” “community,” “nation,” “minority,” “refugees,” “immigrants,” “returnees,” “Arabs,” “Jews,” “Sephardim,” “Maronites,” “Armenians,” “Assyrians,” “Middle Easterners,” “Latinos,” or “Hispanics”—and how have these terms shifted across languages, generations, and political contexts?
- How have concepts such as homeland, exile, return, peoplehood, martyrdom, minority rights, indigeneity, and belonging been translated across Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Ladino, Turkish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and other diasporic languages?
- What has been lost, gained, or transformed when communal categories have been translated into the racial, ethnic, religious, and legal vocabularies of the Americas?
- How have hierarchies within diasporic communities—class, gender, generation, religious authority, ethnicity, sect, language, region of origin, and proximity to communal institutions—shaped who has participated in diaspora-making and who has been left out?
- How have gendered forms of labor, memory, education, kinship, philanthropy, and cultural transmission sustained diasporic life, even when formal leadership structures have remained male-dominated?
- How have generational gaps reshaped diasporic attachment, especially when younger generations have inherited homeland memories, languages, political commitments, or traumas they did not experience directly?
- How have diasporic communities negotiated tensions between preserving inherited traditions and adapting to new racial, religious, national, and cultural environments in the Americas? When have rival memories of displacement, persecution, migration, or homeland politics become sources of cohesion in some contexts and division in others?
- How have relations with other minority groups in the Americas—Jewish, Arab, Armenian, Black, Indigenous, Latino, Muslim, Christian, and others—reshaped diasporic self-understandings?
- When has the concept of diaspora become a political strategy, a moral claim, a cultural identity, a communal infrastructure, or a field of internal struggle?
Format
The workshop will take place in person at the University of Cologne over two full days, 24–25 May 2027. Participants will receive pre-circulated papers four weeks in advance and will discuss them in plenary sessions. Selected papers may be considered for a peer-reviewed special issue and/or an edited volume.
Submission Guidelines
- An abstract of up to 400 words, outlining the paper’s argument, sources, and contribution to the workshop themes.
- A short academic CV of one to two pages.
Please send materials to: m.lehmann@uni-koeln.de and moreno.av@ufl.edu
Deadline for proposals: October 1, 2026
Notification of acceptance: November 1, 2026
Pre-circulated papers due: Late April 2027
Paper length: 5,000–7,000 words
Accommodation and conference meals in Cologne will be covered for accepted participants. A limited number of travel subsidies will be available, with priority given to early-career scholars. We especially encourage submissions from early-career scholars, scholars based in Middle Eastern, North African, and Latin American institutions, and researchers working with Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Turkish, Armenian, or other relevant sources.
The working language of the workshop will be English. The methodological frictions of multilingual and multi-sited research are not a problem to be solved, but a resource to be used.
The Consortium for Jewish Studies Across the Americas (CJSA) is a joint initiative of the Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida, the Initiative on the Jews in the Americas at Brandeis University, the Martin Buber Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Cologne, the Azrieli Center for Israel Studies at Ben-Gurion-University of the Negev, the Jewish Studies Program at Universidad Hebraica of Mexico, and the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University.
Contact (announcement)