OIB-COSIMENA Research Colloquium III on History as Concepts, Conflicts, and Solutions
This lecture series will present twelve lectures about history from different perspectives and will be divided into three interdisciplinary clusters. The first cluster will discuss history as concepts, meaning history and historiography as such, as well as from below and from within and the different ways to study history. The second cluster will discuss conflicts in history, as in conflicting narratives, narratives leading to conflict, deconstruction and reconstruction, and different ways to deal with smoothing over such conflicts. The final cluster will provide the positive end, namely, solutions in various ways. Solutions to historical problems, solutions to conflicts in historical views, and solutions to mining history’s secrets.
Target Group
Researchers and scientists working in all science fields and the public.
1st Public Lecture: History, Herstory or Their stories? Intersectional Feminist Perspectives
Biography of the Speaker
Dr. Friederike Beier is a political scientist and research associate at the Margherita-von-Brentano Center for Gender Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. In her research, she focuses on feminist state theory, theories of time and time politics as well as the combination of theoretical, decolonial, and materialist feminist perspectives.
Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/889523?lang=en
Deadline for Registration: 30 August 2025
Key information
Date: Wednesday, 3rd September 2025
Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)
Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)
This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives
- Exploring a feminist approach to history.
- Describing the complex intersectional power relations that determine whose stories are told and which remain untold.
- Showcasing the problem behind history and its underlying understanding of time.
- Presenting marginalised knowledge and proposing intersectional genealogies against the dominant and Eurocentric perceptions of history.
2nd Public Lecture: Affective Imaginings in the Archive: A Feminist Perspective
Biography of the Speaker
Hoda Elsadda is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University, and co-founder of the Women and Memory Forum (www.wmf.org.eg). She is author of Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt: 1892-2008 (EUP and SUP, 2012); co-editor of Oral History in Times of Change: Gender, Documentation and the Making of Archives (Cairo Papers, 35:1, 2018); and Humanities in the Arab World in Times of Conflict and Change (ACSS, 2024).
Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/111686?lang=en
Deadline for Registration: 10 September 2025
Key information
Date: Wednesday, 24th September 2025
Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)
Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)
This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives
- Rethinking the boundaries of archival research
- Engaging with feminist critiques of objectivity and legitimacy
- Exploring how feminist affective imaginings can re-envision masculinist historical narratives
3rd Public Lecture: Fault Lines in the Conflicting Views of Early Islam
Biography of the Speaker
Andreas Görke is a Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD from the University of Hamburg in 2001 and his Habilitation from the University of Basel in 2010. He has published widely on the biography of the Prophet Muhammad, Hadith and Qur’anic exegesis.
Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/821778?lang=en
Deadline for Registration: 30 September 2025
Key information
Date: Wednesday, 8th October 2025
Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)
Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)
This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives
- Examining the origins of conflicting views in Islamic history
- Understand how narratives developed and continue to influence discourse today
- Explore whether reconciliation between differing perspectives is possible
4th Public Lecture: Women and Gender in the History of Political Violence
Biography of the Speaker
Claudia Derichs is a professor for Transregional Southeast Asian Studies at Humboldt University (HU) in Berlin. She has studied Japanese and Arabic in Bonn, Tokyo and Cairo and holds a PhD in Japanology (1994). She held professorships in Political Science at the universities of Hildesheim and Marburg before fully committing to the field of Area Studies at HU.
Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/543264?lang=en
Deadline for Registration: 08 October 2025
Key information
Date: Wednesday, 22nd October 2025
Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)
Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)
This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives
- Exploring the differences between “his-tory” and “her-story”
- Hearing about the lived experiences of female fighters who are still alive today
- Discovering how past struggles connect to present political goals
5th Public Lecture: Conflicting Perspectives: Colonial Knowledge, Local Agency, and the Emergence of Middle Eastern Modernity
Biography of the Speaker
Gudrun Kraemer is a Professor Emerita of Islamic Studies and a historian by training. She formerly directed the Institute of Islamic Studies and the Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies at Freie Universität Berlin. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and an executive editor of the Encyclopedia of Islam Three.
Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/999868?lang=en
Deadline for Registration: 22 October 2025
Key information
Date: Wednesday, 5th November 2025
Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)
Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)
This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives
- Exploring the interplay of agents, notions of time, productivity, and statehood in the late and post-Ottoman Arab Middle East
- Understanding the core components of Middle Eastern modernity
- Examining postcolonial theory and the conflict between Western and local knowledge, and agency
6th Public Lecture: Can Policies Last? Governmental Experience between Transmission and Oblivion as in the Dealings with Nomads, Islamic to Modern
Biography of the Speaker
Prof. Dr. Kurt Franz is an historian of the Islamic Early and Middle Periods. He has notably published on social and political history, scholarship, and geography in the lands of Islam between 600 and 1600, including Historical Cartography on a GIS basis. PhD Hamburg, professorship Tübingen, now private scholar.
Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/422388?lang=en
Deadline for Registration: 15 November 2025
Key information
Date: Wednesday, 26th November 2025
Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)
Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)
This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives:
- how pre-modern rulers and officials struggled to preserve and transmit governmental knowledge across generations.
- how issues like succession crises and disrupted knowledge transfer led to the short-lived impact of past political and administrative solutions
- modern institutions and how they can learn from historical shortcomings to ensure solutions to structural problems endure over time
7th Public Lecture: From Ideology to Critique: History in the Thought of the Iraqi Philosopher ʿAbd al-Ǧabbār al-Rifaʾī (b. 1954)
Biography of the Speaker
French Dominican, Dr Emmanuel Pisani is an Islamologist and has been Director of the Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies (IDEO) in Cairo since June 2020. Holding a doctorate in philosophy and theology, he received the Mohammed Arkoun Prize in 2016 for his dissertation on al-Ghazali. A specialist in the question of otherness in Islam, he is also a professor at the Vice-Rectorate for Research of the Catholic Institute of Paris.
Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/294592?lang=en
Deadline for Registration: 18 November 2025
Key information
Date: Wednesday, 3rd December 2025
Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)
Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)
This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives:
- Exploring ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Rifaʾī’s critical examination of why the renewal of Islamic theology has stalled since the nineteenth century.
- Learning how Rifaʾī distinguishes between ideological and critical approaches to history — and why the latter is essential for freeing collective memory from idealized, conflict-generating narratives.
- Gaining insights into how a critically grounded reading of Islamic history can open new horizons for intellectual and spiritual reform within contemporary Islam
8th Public Lecture: Hegel's Concept of Dialectical Sublation, applied to the History of Islam
Biography of the Speaker
Prof. Dr Patrick Franke is full professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Bamberg. Among his research focuses are Islamic conceptual history, Islamic doxography and early modern history of Mecca. Since 2013, he is engaged in building up a novel online reference work on the history of Islam integrated in German Wikipedia.
Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/717296?lang=en
Deadline for Registration: 06 December 2025
Key information
Date: Wednesday, 17th December 2025
Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)
Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)
This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives:
- Exploring an innovative model of Islamic historiography
- Understand a fresh theoretical framework to interpret Islamic history as a continuous process of resolving and transforming internal antagonisms
- Exploring how this research-driven model can serve as a powerful teaching and learning tool for presenting Islam’s complex 1,400-year history in a concise and engaging way
Additional Information
After your registration, you will receive a confirmation email with all the necessary information 3 days before the event.
For further information about the COSIMENA project and to subscribe to the COSIMENA network, please visit: https://www.daad-egypt.org/en/about-us/cosimena/
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to send us an email at: cosimena@daadcairo.org
