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IAS Book Launch: Finding Antiquity, Making the Modern Middle East

13 May 2025, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm

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Join editors Guillemette Crouzet and Eva Miller for the launch of their book Finding Antiquity, Making the Modern Middle East. Archaeologies, Empires, Nations

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Institute of Advanced Studies

Location

IAS Common Ground
G11, ground floor, South Wing
UCL, Gower St, London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

ABOUT THE BOOK
This volume presents innovative studies of how the emerging disciplines of archaeology and ancient history shaped the modern Middle East, and how they were in turn shaped by competing visions and agendas of empires and new nations. The Middle East was a region constructed through its putatively unique relationship to the whole world's past-and its special relevance for the destiny of empires and nations. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European empires fought for influence and control over this 'cradle' of civilization, empire and monuments, and local powers and people in the Middle East worked with and against these historical and heritage frameworks in their own quests for self-determination.
In this volume, contributors from the fields of history, archaeology and heritage explore how historical consciousness about the Middle East was contested in the nineteenth and early twentieth century through excavation and interpretation of the past. Chapters span West Asia and North Africa, covering Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Egypt and Tunisia, and the imperial history of Britain, France, Germany and the Ottoman Empire. The result is an original contribution to our understanding of the origins and influence of Middle Eastern archaeology, which resonates today in contemporary discussions on heritage discourses and practices.

Finding Antiquity, Making the Modern Middle East. Archaeologies, Empires, Nations will be published on 12 June 2025 by Bloomsbury.

ABOUT THE EVENT
The editors, Guillemette Crouzet and Eva Miller, will be in conversation with Eugene Rogan (Modern Middle Eastern History, University of Oxford) and Erhan Tamur (Art Curating, University of York). The evening is co-hosted with the Centre for Transnational and Global History.

About the Speakers

Guillemette Crouzet

Postdoctoral Fellow in History at European University Institute, Florence

Guillemette Crouzet's research interests include European empires and the Middle East, with a particular focus on the Indian Ocean World. She is the author of the award-winning book Genèses du Moyen-Orient. Le Golfe Persique à l'âge des impérialismes (c.1800-1914) (2015), which was also published in English as Inventing the Middle East: Britain and the Persian Gulf in the Age of Global Imperialism (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).

More about Guillemette Crouzet

Eva Miller

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLHistory

Eva Miller's research interests span a wide range of topics in intellectual and cultural history, with a focus on museums, archaeology, and the construction of the past. She is the author of Early Civilization and the American Modern: Images of Middle Eastern Origins in the United States, 1893–1939 (UCL Press, 2024).

More about Eva Miller