Call for Papers

44th Annual Meeting of the
Middle East Studies Association

November 18-21
San Diego CA

Submission Deadlines

Participation Requirements/Restrictions
***THE RULES!***

1. You must be a MESA member for 2010 to submit a proposal. The system will not let you submit if your membership is not current. If you qualify and would like to request a membership waiver, please go here.
2. You must pre-register for the meeting by no later than May 3 if you have been accepted on the program. After that date, you will be dropped from the program without the chance to join later and without notification.
3. You can submit ONLY ONE paper abstract, whether for a pre-organized panel, a put-together panel, or a poster presentation. One and only one!
4. You may participate in NO MORE THAN TWO sessions, and while we will try really hard to make sure those sessions are not scheduled at the same time (!), we cannot guarantee that they won't be scheduled back-to-back or on the first and last day.

Electronic Submission

All participants must submit electronically via MESA’s website by logging into myMESA. The submissions system is now available.

The Middle East Studies Association calls for submissions from members for its 44th annual meeting, November 18-21, 2010, in San Diego, CA.

In addition to the information appearing on this page, we have broken the instructions into a couple of categories:

1. Programmatic requirements, including the all-important criteria the program committee uses in its review, should be read before beginning your submission.

2. Electronic submission instructions provide step-by-step guidance on how to navigate myMESA.

What Should I Do First?

You should make sure you can access your myMESA account (set one up if you need to), update or complete your profile, and renew your membership for 2010. If you wait until February 15 to do everything–set up your account, complete your profile, pay your dues, and complete your submission–and you have problems, it's unlikely the MESA staff will have enough time to help you solve the problem before the deadline passes!

MESA's Purview

MESA is primarily concerned with the area encompassing Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, Israel, Pakistan, and the countries of the Arab World from the seventh century to modern times. Other regions, including Spain, Southeastern Europe, China and the former Soviet Union, also are included for the periods in which their territories were parts of the Middle Eastern empires or were under the influence of Middle Eastern civilization. Comparative work is encouraged.

MESA 2010 Theme

The theme for MESA 2010 is Gender Roles, Sexual Identity and Family Dynamics in Social and Legal Contexts in the Middle East and the Diaspora. We encourage MESA members to organize sessions that consider the political, social, and cultural dimensions of the theme from historical and contemporary perspectives and from the standpoint of different regions of the broadly defined Middle East.

Paper and panel proposals on other topics are of course welcome as usual.

Categories of Submission

Pre-organized panel
Pre-organized roundtable
Individual paper for panel placement
Individual paper for poster presentation
Thematic conversation
Special session

New This Year

MESA has added a new submission category for papers: poster presentation. A poster presentation is a visual presentation of a paper at an interactive session. Most papers can be presented effectively in a poster format, and some, such as those with a visual component, lend themselves especially well in this format. Persons submitting individual papers can now choose their method of presentation: panel or poster presentation.