Dear friends,

As the new director of the Center for Middle East Studies, I extend a warm welcome to our community within and outside of Brown University. I thank my friend and colleague, Professor Nadje Al-Ali, for her four years of service as director, during which time she grew the center’s research profile in the study of gender and race, expanded our outreach and programming through a rich webinar series, all the while leading CMES through the global pandemic. Thanks to Nadje’s vision and leadership, CMES is thriving as it approaches its tenth anniversary. 

For those of us with scholarly and familial ties to the Middle East and North Africa, the coming year promises to be full of challenges. The war in Gaza has produced a humanitarian catastrophe, allegations of genocide brought before the International Court of Justice, and the threat of a regional war. The upcoming U.S. presidential election and its implications for world affairs have only added to the uncertainty that the MENA region faces.

For these reasons, academic institutions have never been as vital as they are today. The mission of CMES is to promote research, teaching, and public engagement about the Middle East in a historically and culturally grounded manner. Over the coming year, we will host or co-sponsor upwards of 40 lectures, conferences, colloquiums, language round-tables and other events, while supporting student research through our award programs. Among the highlights of the fall semester are visits by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese (Sept. 16); the Palestinian poet and novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah, winner of the 2018 Arabic Booker Prize (Oct. 1); and the author and journalist Nathan Thrall, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize (Oct. 22). We will host a range of lectures on topics as diverse as modern Arab kingship, intellectual masculinity in Iranian cinema, the music of Darius Milhaud, and medieval Manichaeans under Muslim rule. 

For those of you whom I have not yet met, I am an associate professor of Comparative Literature and History. I teach courses on a range of topics, from the history of encyclopedic knowledge, to The 1,001 Nights, to the reception of the Quran in world literature. I have been closely involved with CMES since I came to Brown twelve years ago, and this community has been a source of great intellectual fulfillment and camaraderie for me. I look forward to deepening these connections over the next few years.

Elias Muhanna
Director, Center for Middle East Studies