An integral part of the Elite Graduate Program “Cultural Studies of the Middle East” is the annual workshop, organized and held by students under the guidance of the respective visiting professor of the program in Bamberg. In July 2018 the workshop was entitled “Travelers in and from the Orient and their literature”.
The participants (i.e. students, faculty and external guests) exchanged information and opinions about current research projects focusing on travellers in the Ottoman Empire, their narrative strategies and the textual presentation and perception of borders. The variety of the sources presented on this occasion ranged from letters of a Nuremberg merchant to records of a Frisian physician and to Persian pilgrimage reports and memoirs from Aleppo’s upper class citizens in the 18th century.
The students of the Elite Graduate Program “Cultural Studies of the Middle East” were not only busy with their own research paper, but also with the organisation of the workshop. They had to consider very practical issues e.g. it is not an easy task to find overnight accommodation for the participants in the world heritage-city Bamberg, which is in summer a very popular destination for tourists.
The convivial final round compensated the students for their efforts: They established personal contacts to researchers of various disciplines, developed together new ideas and received a lot of positive feedback for the organizing team.
“The students of the Graduate Elite Program did an extraordinarily good job. I think it is a wonderful thing that this graduate program conveys not only methodological skills, but also very practical competences like conference organization”, says Prof. Dr. Elke Hartmann, Visiting Professor in Bamberg.
Text: Elite Graduate Program "Cultural Studies of the Middle East"
