CBRL's 2020 Annual General Meeting is taking place on 18th November at 4pm UK time and we're looking forward to meeting members virtually. If you're a CBRL member please register to attend using the invitation details sent to you earlier this month. If you're interested in attending the AGM, but not yet a member, please consider joining. Following the AGM, Gerasimos Tsourapas, Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics and CBRL Trustee, will be giving an online talk on 'Migration diplomacy in the Levant'. This is open to anyone and you can register here.

On 13th and 14th October, the Mapping Digital Cultural Heritage in Jordan (MaDiH) project held a webinar to gather feedback on their online data repository. Cultural heritage academics, professionals and students gave the MaDiH team insights on the datasets and user-experience of the repository, and there were many interesting discussions on Jordan's rich and diverse cultural heritage. You can watch the live stream of the webinar here and read more about it here.

We're pleased to see in the Jordan Times an interview with Claudine Dauphin, long-term CBRL member and affiliated project director. As COVID-19 continues its spread across the world, Claudine recalls the Plague of Amwas that afflicted the Palestinian village in 639AD and spread towards neighbouring regions. Read more here.

Thanks again to those who took the time to respond to our membership survey. Over the next few months we will be exploring how to make CBRL membership more accessible and valuable to all those who work on, or are interested in, the scholarship of the Levant. We're running another survey currently, this time on our libraries, and would very much value your feedback again - please see below.

Throughout the autumn we will continue to bring you a varied programme of online webinars featuring the latest world-class research on the Levant and if you’ve missed any of our webinars, you can catch up via our YouTube and SoundCloud pages – more details below.

The latest volume of Contemporary Levant is now fully published online. Read some of the fascinating articles (including several open access) on Palestinian refugees, the meaning behind Jordan's 'national dish' and the politics of knowledge in Lebanon.

Nominations for our two master's dissertation prizes in the field of Levantine studies for the academic year 2019/2020 are still open! We invite UK based heads of departments or chairs of departmental examination boards to nominate one final year dissertation in either: Levantine archaeology or history, or contemporary Levantine studies. Deadline for nominations is 30th November. Find out more here.

If you've used either the CBRL libraries in Amman or Jerusalem, we would be grateful for your feedback. These short surveys take no longer than five minutes and will help us improve our library services in future: Amman survey; Jerusalem survey. Thank you to those who have already completed the surveys.

In our latest research blog, Disney Professor of Archaeology Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and CBRL Trustee, Graeme Barker, explores the earliest encounters between Neanderthals and our ancestor Homo sapiens at the Shanidar Cave in Iraq. Read the blog here.