2026 Research News
Syria: The Fall of Eternity
For Syrian Ghada Alatrash, Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University in Qatar, who left Syria at age 12 as the daughter of a diplomat, growing up in North America meant reading the truth of her homeland’s ongoing tragedy between the lines of Western commentary.
So when the opportunity arose to co-edit a special issue of ArabLit Quarterly dedicated to Syria alongside award-winning Syrian author and poet Fadi Azzam, the assignment felt like a moral imperative: to create a protected space for Syrian voices to tell their own stories.
New CIRS Research Projects
Publications Through October 2026
Books
Acharya, Amitav, Philippe De Lombaerde, Beatrix Futák-Campbell, Lynda Chinenye Iroulo, and Juliana Peixoto Batista, eds. 2026. Essays on Global Regionalism I. United Nations University Series on Regionalism, Vol. 30. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-13642-8
Al-Arian, Abdullah and Karine Walther, eds. 2026. Global Histories and Practices of Islamophobia. Hurst. https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/global-histories-and-practices-of-islamophobia/
Chamssedine, Abdul Rahman, ed. 2026. The Many Mansions of the House: Kamal Salibi’s Studies on Medieval Lebanons: In Honor of the Legacy of Historian Kamal Salibi on the 15th Anniversary of His Passing. [Manazil al-Bayt al-Kathira: Dirasat Kamal al-Salibi hawla Lubnanat al-‘Asr al-Wasit «منازل البيت الكثيرة: دراسات كمال الصليبي حول لبنانات العصر الوسيط»].
Googasian, Victoria. 2026. Animal Minds, Other Minds: Nonhuman Intelligence and Narrative Form in American Fiction. University of Virginia Press. ISBN: 9780813955162
Haddad, Youssef A. 2026. Vocatives in Lebanese Arabic Forms, Types and Functions. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN: 9781399547673 https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/isbn/9781399547673/html#bibliographicData
Kamrava, Mehran, ed. 2026. Iran’s Look East Policy: New Directions. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501784545/irans-look-east-policy/
Laude, Patrick. 2026. L’oeuvre de Frithjof Schuon: Orientations et éclairages [The Work of Frithjof Schuon: Orientations and Insights]. Paris: L’Harmattan. ISBN: 978-2-336-60129-8
Pappa, Valentini, Antje Danielson, and Aaron S. Weber, eds. 2026. Energy Education in a Transitioning World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009249324
Walther, Karine, and Oli Charbonneu, ed. 2026. The Gospel of Work and Money: Industrial Education and its Global Legacies. University of Pennsylvania Press. https://www.pennpress.org/9781512828931/the-gospel-of-work-and-money/
The Gospel of Work and Money
Co-edited by Karine Walther, this book is the first collection to explore forms of coercive labor education as connected global phenomena across modern history and foreground the many ways that ‘work’ remains the primary pedagogical lens of capital in our present era. It is an outcome of a multiyear CIRS research initiative of the same name, and includes a chapter co-authored by Zahra Babar.
Journal special issues
Alatrash, Ghada and Fadi Azzam, eds. 2026. “Syria: The Fall of Eternity.” Special Issue. Arablit Quarterly. https://arablit.org/product/00-arablit-quarterly-spring-2026-syria-fall-of-eternity-digital/
Griffin, Thomas Ross and Abdullah Al-Arian, eds. 2026. “Sport in the Arab World,” Special Issue. International Journal of the History of Sport, 43, no. 2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09523367.2026.2640766
Journal articles
Abusharaf, Rogaia. 2026. “‘Goolo Korr’: Mama Kookie and the Politics of Public Intimacy in a Sudanese Livestream.” Hawwa 24, no. 1-2: pp. 220-247. (mar. 30) https://brill.com/view/journals/haww/24/1-2/article-p220_8.xml
Almond, Ian, and Adile Aslan. 2026. “Islam, Turks, and Armenians in The Forty Days of Musa Dagh: A postcolonial approach to Franz Werfel.” Orbis Litterarum 81, no. 2: pp. 173-183. (March)
Brodeur, Abel, Derek Mikola, Nicolai Cook, Lenka Fiala, Lamis Kattan, et. al., 2026. Reproducibility and robustness of economics and political science research. Nature 652: pp. 151–156. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10251-x (April)
Brodeur, Abel, Lamis Kattan, and Marco Musumeci. 2026.“Job Market Stars: Statistical Significance and Academic Hiring in Economics.” European Economic Review, 187, July 2026, 105353. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2026.105353
Caivano, Dean, and Nandini Deo. 2026. “Students Matter: Comparative Reflections on Decolonial Pedagogy in Political Science.” Journal of Political Science Education, 22, no. 3: pp 1–19. May 5, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2026.2667812
Grigoli, Francesco, and Damiano Sandri. 2026. “Monetary Policy and Credit Card Spending.” European Economic Review, 185, May 2026, 105294: pp 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2026.105294
Kamrava, Mehran. 2026. “Iranian Support for Palestine: The Clash of Idealism and Realism” International Politics, April 27, 2026, pp. 1-21. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41311-026-00768-3
Kamrava, Mehran. 2026. “Iranian Foreign and Security Policies and the Twelve-Day War: Realism, Idealism, or Domestic Politics?” Siyasad Arabiya, 14, no. 79: pp. 9-23. https://doi.org/10.31430/ZYTG6550
Koons, Jeremy. 2026. “A Moderate Collectivist Reading of Sellarsian We-Intentions.” Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 15, no. 6, pp.1-36. https://doi.org/10.15173/jhap.v15i6.6010
Miller, Rory. 2026. “Qatar–Türkiye Relations During the Embargo of Qatar: A Case Study in Derivative Power.” International Politics 63, no. 1: pp. 141-160. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41311-024-00609-1
Musgrave, Paul. 2026. “Degrees of Rivalry: US Paradiplomacy and the Weaponization of Education Policy against Japan and China.” Foreign Policy Analysis 22, no. 1. https://academic.oup.com/fpa/article-pdf/doi/10.1093/fpa/oraf038/66128494/oraf038.pdf
Musgrave, Paul. 2026. “Pay Any Price? Measuring Americans’ Willingness-to-Pay for Sanctions on Russia and China.” Foreign Policy Analysis 22, no. 3: pp. 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1093/fpa/orag014
Zeng, Ka, Damian Raess and Paul Musgrave. 2026. “Friending or Blocking? U.S. Public Attitudes toward Restricting Foreign Social Media Apps.” International Studies Quarterly, 70, pp. 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqag073
Rossbach, Jack and Karl Widerquist, 2026. “The Falling Cost of Basic Income in the United States, 1967–2024: Estimates for a Plan Large Enough to Eliminate Poverty.” Basic Income Studies. https://doi.org/10.1515/bis-2025-0024
Scheiring, Gábor, Raymond Caraher, Eva Fodor, Gosta Esping-Andersen, and Lawrence King, 2026. “Commodification and Social Reproduction: Theory and Mixed-Method Evidence on the Effect of Privatization on Childbearing.” European Journal of Sociology, 9 February 2026, pp. 1-46. https://doi.org/10.1017/s000397562510024
Scheiring, Gabor, Anne-Marie Jeannet, and David Stuckler. 2025. “‘They Take Our Healthcare’: Health and Attitudes towards Immigration in Europe.” Comparative Political Studies, 59, no. 3: pp. 653-697. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00104140251342932
Khalil, Joe F., and Mohamed Zayani. 2026. “Platform Regulation and Digital Cultural Industries: the State–society Nexus in the Middle East.” International Journal of Cultural Policy: 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2026.2649785 (March)
Book chapters
Babar, Zahra. 2026. “Empowering Migrants: The Role of Sandigan and Grassroots Organizing in Advancing Migrant Rights in the Gulf.” In Routledge Handbook on Civil Society in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by James N. Slater, pp. 1-18. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/b23025-17
Babar, Zahra. 2026. “Female Domestic Workers in the Persian Gulf.” In Gender and Migration in the Arabian Gulf, edited by S. Irudaya Rajan and Divya Balan, pp. 53-69. Singapore: Springer Nature. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-95-5259-7_4
Babar, Zahra and Mishal Khan, 2026. “The Paradox of Technical Education and the Pakistani Migrant in the Gulf.” In The Gospel of Work and Money: Industrial Education and its Global Legacies, edited by Karine Walther and Oli Charbonneu, 254-284. University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi.org/10.9783/9781512828948-012
Iroulo, Lynda. 2026. “Essay 6: Interrogating the Divide—Evaluating the African Regionalism Scholarly Community.” In Essays on Global Regionalism I, edited by Amitav Acharya, Philippe De Lombaerde, Beatrix Futák-Campbell, Lynda Chinenye Iroulo, and Juliana Peixoto Batista, 53-69. United Nations University Series on Regionalism, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-13642-8_6
Williams, Heidi M., Laura Seroka, Abby Arnold-Patti, Nandini Deo & Cecilia Parnther. 2026. “Reimagined Productivity: Narratives of Academic Mothers Who Choose to Homeschool.” In Blurred Boundaries: Feminist Essays on Twenty-First-Century Academic Labor, edited by Jessica Edens McCrary and Lynée Lewis Gaillet, 135-150. University of South Carolina Press. https://uscpress.com/Blurred-Boundaries.
Williams, Leonard, and Clyde Wilcox. 2026. “The Christian Right in the United States.” In Routledge Handbook of Ideology Analysis, edited by Juliette Faure, Mathew Humphrey, and David Laycock, 504-518. Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003412007-38
Other publications
Miller, Rory, and Muez Ali. 2026. “Global Energy Dynamics and Implications for Africa.” Report. International Security Conference on Africa. Available at: https://www.iscafrica.org/publications/reports/global-energy-dynamics-and-implications-for-africa
Musgrave, Paul. 2026. “American paradiplomacy and Chinese power: Demystifying US–China Subnational Relations. Czeslaw Tubilewicz.” (2026): e7-e10. https://academic.oup.com/publius/article-abstract/56/1/e7/8304381
Scheiring, Gábor. 2026. Commentary on: “Industrial Legacies: A Population Survey Study of Mental Health Disparities Across Generations in Post-Coal Wales.” Journal of Epidemiol Community Health 80, no. 2: pp. 65-66. https://jech.bmj.com/content/80/2/65.abstract