Hosted in partnership with the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies, Newnham College
The 2026 International Conference of the Syrian Academics and Researchers' Network (SARN UK) brings together Syrian and Syria-focused scholars from across disciplines to reflect on the challenges and possibilities of knowledge production during a period of profound transformation.
This year's conference explores how research, memory, culture, and everyday experience shape understandings of Syria's past, present, and future. The programme features over thirty presentations alongside thematic roundtables on anthropology and urbanism, and a keynote lecture by the distinguished Syrian writer and intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
The conference provides a space for dialogue between established and early-career researchers working across the humanities and social sciences, while strengthening academic collaboration within the Syrian scholarly community and beyond.
Knowledge production and intellectual life
Memory, archives, and historical narratives
Everyday life, displacement, and return
Governance, civil society, and reconstruction
Education and higher learning
Anthropology, urbanism, and cultural production
Gender, identity, and social transformation
The conference is supported by the The Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, and the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge.
Further details, including the conference programme, will be published here shortly.