LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

(BRISMES) British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Annual Conference 2012
Event date: 26 March, 2012 - 28 March, 2012
Location: Middle East Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science

Islamic Studies provision in UK higher education

Middle Eastern Studies in the United Kingdom

The study of the Middle East in UK universities dates back at least to the seventeenth century. The Middle East is taught and researched by scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines and student numbers studying Middle Eastern languages and area studies have substantially increased in the last few years.

Call for papers - special issue of Language Learning Journal

Papers are invited for a forthcoming special issue of the Language Learning Journal, the official journal of the Association for Language Learning (ALL), on Languages of the Wider World: Valuing Diversity.

Middle Eastern Studies research materials in Arabic and Persian
The aim of this project is to assist researchers to locate, in UK university libraries, works written in Arabic and Persian. At present tracing such material can be difficult, particularly as much of it is still only represented in local manual catalogues. Under this project, the participants will add records for around 60,000 Arabic and Persian items to local, national and international catalogues. The records will be created on RLIN, the bibliographic database of the U.S.-based Research Libraries Group, with the bibliographic description entered in both romanised (transliterated) script and in the original Arabic script. Not all libraries are currently able to make use of the Arabic script in their local system, but the aim is to 'future proof' the conversion work at a time of rapid change in the area of computer handling of non-Roman script. Records for over 38,000 Arabic and Persian items had been added to local catalogues. Two of the partner libraries, Durham and SOAS, have recently implemented the Innopac Arabic script module, and so are able to display records in the original script.