Birmingham-Leiden Collab: Cultural heritage of the Mediterranean and Middle East

This partnership between the University of Birmingham and Leiden University provides opportunities for academic mobility for scholars and students researching the cultural heritage of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The collaboration extends to disciplines such as archaeology, (art) history, and philology in the regions of Egypt, the Levant, the wider Near East, and the Classical Mediterranean from prehistoric to medieval times.

Memory in Antiquity (2025)

This project seeks to create a research group to explore the uses and meanings of memory in ancient cultures of the Mediterranean and the Near East.

It capitalises on the broad interest in memory in the humanities and social sciences and provides a forum for researchers to reflect on the processes of remembering and forgetting, how these are identifiable in the ancient sources, and what role they play in the construction of ideas about the past. Related to contemporary experiences such as migration, this project speaks to various audiences and will translate the lessons from the past into an engaged dialogue about the future.

Overview

This project envisages two related workshops in which participants will explore the implications of two aspects of memory. First, the one-day workshop at Leiden, to be held in late March 2025 with ten speakers mostly from Leiden and the Netherlands who will engage in response to five keynote lectures, will centre around the concept of remembering. Iconographic representations and the construction of lived experience in ritual landscapes all provide productive case studies to illustrate approaches to this topic.

The second one-day workshop will take place in Birmingham in late April 2025 with a majority of discussants from Birmingham and the UK and will focus on material and linguistic aspects of the process of forgetting. Exploring themes such as iconoclasm, damnatio memoriae, and how events are ‘written out’ of historical narratives, forgetting will be characterised as a crucial practice to understand the past and the present.

Given the background and expertise of the two organisers, the initial workshops outlined will have a clear focus on Egyptological research, with the intention to act as a pilot project to test the feasibility of the group. Invited colleagues from neighbouring disciplines such as Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Ancient History, Archaeology, Art History and Middle Eastern Studies will contextualise the Egyptological cases studies. These workshops seek to establish a form connection between both universities with a view to develop joint research and teaching activities around the theme of memory in the ancient world.

A final activity will contribute towards further collaborations and relationship building in another strategic area, namely Egypt, in order to develop some trilateral activities. The Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC) is an academic centre based in Cairo but affiliated with the University of Leiden, hence providing an academic nexus between Birmingham, Leiden, and Egypt. The organisers will present the results of the two preceding workshops to a local audience at the NVIC, using their time in Cairo to pump-prime future research activities.

Research team

Events

Leiden workshop, Memory in ancient societies: the art of remembering, 27-28 March 2025
Birmingham workshop, Memory in ancient societies: the art of forgetting, 24-25 April 2025
Cairo workshop, Memory in ancient societies, 26-30 May 2025

Connectivity between East and West (2026)

The project “Memory in Antiquity”, funded by the Birmingham-Leiden Strategic Collaboration grant in 2025, served as a pilot to establish a network for the study of the cultural heritage of the ancient Mediterranean and the Middle East. Our project received follow-on funding in 2026 to explore the theme “Connectivity between East and West”.

In this second phase of the partnership, we have offered fully funded short-term research fellowships for scholars from Leiden University and the University of Birmingham. The scheme primarily targeted early career researchers, including postgraduate researchers and postdoctoral fellows, while also welcoming applications from senior academics.

The fellowships are supporting research stays of typically two to four weeks focused on the theme “Connectivity between East and West”, with particular attention to the material and manuscript cultures of the Southern Levant from 700 BCE to 700 CE. Funded projects draw on shared expertise and collections, including library, museum, and archival resources in Leiden and Birmingham to foster research synergies between the two institutions.

Fellowships covered travel, accommodation, visa costs, and a small budget for a research or networking activity such as a workshop or guest lecture. Fellows were expected to reside at the host institution and to participate actively in its academic life. Fellowships were awarded in January 2026 for research stays taking place later in the year.