Dear colleagues and friends,

This has been a momentous year for the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown. We have welcomed new faculty and staff, produced a rich program of scholarly events and supported the educational aspirations of our students. It has also been a challenging year, but we have navigated the uncertain landscape that faces all academic institutions by facilitating informed discussion, building bridges across our campus community and fortifying our commitment to the values of academic freedom, inclusiveness and respectful discourse.  

Perhaps the most significant news item of the year was Provost Doyle’s announcement that CMES would become an independent center at Brown beginning in July 2025. Following an extensive self-study and external review process that began in the summer of 2024, the CMES Steering Committee proposed a strategic move toward independence, with the aim of maintaining the Center’s multidisciplinary identity and the broad chronological coverage of its research initiatives and programming. Given that the mission of the new Watson School of International and Public Affairs will be focused primarily on contemporary policy and governance matters, such a move seemed only natural to our faculty, staff and students. I am confident that this important step will only bolster CMES’s ambition to be a place that serves the whole Brown community.  

Over the past year, CMES has hosted or co-sponsored several dozen lectures, conferences, readings and performances, including visits from prizewinning authors and leading scholars. The range of topics featured at CMES events has been characteristically broad, exploring everything from Islamic stained glass windows to medieval Persian poetry, Dubai’s entrepreneurship ecosystem, Iranian cinema, and the wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Meanwhile, we have expanded outreach to our alumni network and begun to build employment and internship pipelines for current students. Next year, we will be joined by two new postdoctoral fellows and will launch a year-long research initiative titled “American-Islamic Exchanges in the Long 19th Century,” which will coincide with Brown 2026, a campus-wide initiative to demonstrate the important role of research and teaching universities in fostering open and democratic societies. 

In closing, let me thank our wonderful staff for their tireless efforts in supporting Middle East studies at Brown. An exciting new chapter is about to begin. Join us! 

Elias Muhanna
Director, Center for Middle East Studies.
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and History