Knowing about Earthquakes in the Mandatory Levant I Sarah Irving I October 2022

When an earthquake shook Palestine, Transjordan and the south of Lebanon and Syria in 1927, terms such as the Richter scale or plate tectonics which we now use to talk about seismic events were still a thing of the future. In global science, scholars were debating what caused earthquakes and were trying to work out how to measure their power and impacts. This lecture looks at how local scientists, journalists and government officials in the 1920s Levant thought about and reacted to earthquakes and how they fit into the broader cultural and political discourses of the day. About the speaker: Sarah Irving is Lecturer in International History at Staffordshire University in Britain and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow researching the social and cultural history of the 1927 earthquake. Her recent publications include an edited volume, The Social and Cultural History of Palestine: Essays in Honour of Salim Tamari, due in January 2023 from Edinburgh University Press, and ‘The House of the Priest’: A Palestinian Life (1885-1954), an edition of the memoirs of the Palestinian Orthodox priest and nationalist Niqula Khoury, edited and introduced with Charbel Nassif and Karène Sanchez Summerer, and available in open access from Brill. She is also editor-in-chief of the CBRL journal Contemporary Levant.