The Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University is pleased to invite academic essays from graduate students and early career scholars from across universities and departments for the 2026 Graduate Conference to be held on the 23rd and 24th of April 2026.

Full Call for Papers

Call for Papers: (Re)Tracing Land. The Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University is pleased to invite academic essays from graduate students and early career scholars from across universities and departments for the 2026 Graduate Conference, to be held on the 22nd and 23rd of April 2026. The annual MESAAS graduate conference has been an enriching space for scholars, activists, and artists to confront and examine issues of political, social, and ethical concern that connect regions of the Global South. This year, our conference invites abstracts for the theme “(Re)Tracing Land” in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. We are excited to have Rosie Bsheer, Associate Professor of History at Harvard University, as the keynote speaker for this year’s conference.

The tangible presence of land is constantly subjected to narratives that define jurisdiction of political powers, identities of displaced peoples, and ecologies of innovation and adaptation. This conference aims to think through and with land in the myriad of these geographic, conceptual, and emotional meanings. Bridging our department’s geographical and interdisciplinary spaces, we welcome approaches that engage land as dynamic, malleable, and creative, but unmistakably rooted in the pressing questions of land around the world today. We invite abstracts from across the humanities and social sciences, and encourage cross-disciplinary perspectives on the topic.

The questions we hope to engage with include, but are not limited to, the following:
How do individuals, institutions, and arts retrace land, and what do these new geographies look like? Why and how does land capture the essence of major narratives across the globe? What are different meanings of land across languages, histories, and cultures, and how do bodies move through these spaces differently? How do individuals root themselves to land they do not or cannot touch? Amid migration, how does one decide when they have landed? How does arrival and departure from land signify the beginning or end of a journey, and which land represents a liminal space? How does land define the statuses of those in movement and those who are settled?

As in previous years, the conference will be hybrid (in-person and online via Zoom), and we especially encourage scholars from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa to apply, and, if possible, to attend in person.

Unfortunately, we will not be able to support with funding for travel or accommodation. The abstracts should be no longer than 300 words. Please include a short 100-word biography with your
submission. Notification of paper acceptance will be sent by March.

Deadline for abstracts is February 23rd, 2026. Please submit them here (https://forms.gle/ds5ZG13ZRvrg1S237). If accepted, final papers are due April 1st.

You can follow the conference on our Twitter page: https://twitter.com/MESAAS_GSA

Please direct any questions to the following email: [email protected]