West Asia and the “Middle West”: Asian Studies Today

Please join The Australian Society for Asian Humanities for the 2026 A. R. Davis Memorial Lecture, to be delivered by Associate Professor Jumana Bayeh.

From the vantage point of a West Asian city like Beirut or Jerusalem, London and Paris are located in the Middle West, and New York and Washington are in the Far West. These labels, even if geographically accurate, are almost empty signifiers. They are not in use in scholarship and are not easily associated with the sites they refer to in the same way a requisite phrase, the Middle East, does. This lecture proposes that West Asia should be our default term for a region we have too long called the Middle East, not just because West Asia moves us away from the colonial imposition that is inherent to “the Middle East”. Embracing West Asia signals the adoption of methods and approaches that reorient research of the region to Asia. In this mode, West Asia is the centre and starting point of our research and teaching of the region, as well as a lens through which to assert an understanding of a global cartography that provincializes London and Paris as the Middle West.

A/Professor Jumana Bayeh's expertise lies in Middle East Studies, in particular Arab diaspora literature and culture. She is an interdisciplinary researcher crossing the fields of politics and literary studies. Her publications include The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora, Writing and the Literary Archive (co-edited with Profs Helen Groth and Julian Murphet) and numerous articles on Arab diaspora fiction. She is currently completing an ARC-funding project called "Precarious Borders: The Nation-State and the Arab Diaspora Novel".

Organised by the Australian Society for Asian Humanities with support from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. The A. R. Davis Memorial Lecture is held annually to commemorate A. R. Davis, Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Sydney and an important scholar for Asian Studies in post-war Australia.

This event is also available online. Register here: https://tinyurl.com/ardavis2026online