The Program in Near & Middle Eastern Studies / African Studies/ The Graduate School of Social Sciences (G3S) at the University of Basel call for applications for this year's Annual SWANA Doctoral Workshop with Sherene Seikaly (University of California, Santa Barbara) on the “Global History of Palestine”.

The Annual SWANA Doctoral Workshop in Late- and Post-Ottoman Studies is a two-day workshop in Basel, Switzerland, designed for international doctoral students conducting research on the Near and Middle East. Formerly called the MUBIT workshop, it consists of a two-day, intensive program in which select students work closely with invited experts.

The workshop explores Palestine not only as a national territory but as a site where global histories of race, empire, capital, and displacement converge. Moving from the late Ottoman period to the present, the course follows the life of a Palestinian doctor whose journey illuminates the entangled histories of colonial medicine, slavery and its afterlives, racial formations, and imperial governance across the Mediterranean, the United States, and Africa. Through archival fragments, family histories, and critical historiography, students will explore how Palestinians moved through and shaped wider imperial worlds while also confronting the structures that produced statelessness and dispossession. By situating Palestine within global processes, the course invites students to center Palestine as an anchor of global history and to explore how personal archives, historical method, and political struggle reshape the writing of the past.

Deadline for applications: 5 June 2026