Why Yemen Matters: The Heritage of a Land in Crisis

Wednesday, February 19, 2020
5-6:30 pm, White-Levy Room
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ

Yemen’s war and humanitarian crisis are in the news, but very little is known about the rich cultural heritage of the southwestern corner of Arabia throughout history. Also largely unknown are Yemen’s geographic and economic diversity or their impact on recent events. Yemen’s diversity owes much to conquest, trade, and migration between Yemen and Christian Ethiopia, Sassanian and Islamic Iran, Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt, Ottoman Turkey, the African coast and Southeast Asia. In this panel experts on different periods of Yemeni history and its diverse contemporary contexts probe beyond current politics to share their insights and discuss potentials for future scholarly research on Yemen.

Panelists, currently scholars at IAS, include: historians of antiquity, Glen Bowersock (IAS) and Christian Robin (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris), and of the Islamic era, Hassan Ansari (IAS), Sabine Schmidtke (IAS), Daniel Varisco (American Institute for Yemeni Studies), and anthropologists Najwa Adra (IAS) and Nathalie Peutz (New York University Abu Dhabi).

This event is part of the Near Eastern Studies Workshops sponsored by Professor Sabine Schmidtke (IAS). RSVP to nitschke@ias.edu.