Julia Hauser

On various occasions, AGYA has offered me the opportunity to explore the potential for collaboration between the humanities and the arts, allowing me to overcome certain limits and conventions of academic work to explore my creative potential and connect with a broader audience at the interface of science and society.

I was one of the first cohort of AGYA members and a co-founder of the Working Group ‘Common Heritage and Common Challenges’. In 2015, I organized the group’s first major conference on Malta as a site of cultural and natural encounters with my fellow AGYA members Jens Scheiner and Kirill Dmitriev. Papers were presented at relevant sites rather than in conference venues, which brought us into contact with local partners like the Heritage Malta agency, a local saltwater plant, and an NGO working with refugees.

In 2016, I co-convened an interdisciplinary conference on food as a cultural signifier with Bilal Orfali and Kirill Dmitriev at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and the Orient Institut Beirut (OIB). At the end of the conference, Brigitte Caland, a scholar and cook, prepared an Abbasid dinner. In 2019, with Konstantin Klein and Lena-Maria Möller, I co-organized a conference on Cultural Heritage in Conflict, again at AUB and OIB. In this context, I chaired a panel discussion with artists Ali Cherri, Abed al-Kadiri and Alfred Tarazi, as well as writer Hoda Barakat, on the role of the arts in reflecting the destruction of cultural heritage. This discussion offered fascinating insights into how scholars, writers, and artists can enter into dialogue.