Center for Middle East Studies
Research Areas
As an agenda-driven center with a multi-disciplinary faculty, Middle East Studies organizes several signature initiatives and projects, spearheaded by annual conferences, that sustain ongoing research, programming, and teaching initiatives.
Research Areas
As an agenda-driven center with a multi-disciplinary faculty, Middle East Studies organizes several signature initiatives and projects, spearheaded by annual conferences, that sustain ongoing research, programming, and teaching initiatives.
Research Areas
New Directions in Palestinian Studies aims to shape scholarly works in this field through an annual workshop, an endowed post-doctoral fellowship, and a book series with the University of California Press.
Through an annual conference, lectures, and a book series, Islam and the Humanities explores the relationship between Islamic studies and larger debates in the disciplines of history, religious studies, comparative literature, philosophy, contemporary art, the humanistic dimensions of anthropology and sociology.
This research project, led by Nadje Al-Ali, Robert Family Professor of International Studies, and professor of anthropology and Middle East studies, is based on the recognition that a gendered intersectional lens is central, not marginal, to a deeper analysis and understanding of political mobilizations, social developments and cultural expressions in the Middle East.
This initiative, co-organized and led by professors Nadje Al-Ali and Beshara Doumani, and supported by Africana Studies, is committed to to initiating internal conversations and dialogue within Brown and Middle East studies more broadly and to organizing activities which engage with the global issues of structural racism and exploitation.
In conversation with artists from the Middle East and North Africa as well as its diasporas, the Gender and Body Politics: Arts in the Middle East and its Diasporas series examines intersecting inequalities and body politics expressed, represented and transgressed in both visual and performance art.
The aim of this project led by Nadje Al-Ali, Robert Family Professor of International Studies, is to support and contribute to critical and original Kurdish studies that combine theoretically cutting-edge and empirically grounded work while highlighting creative approaches (films, art, literature) to the study of Kurds and Kurdish societies.
Through annual workshops, curated exhibits and performances and visiting professorships and lectures, this research initiative cultivates a network of scholars passionate about the relationship between the arts and social agency. The aim is to support, innovate, work and shape research agendas in the fields of Islamic art and architecture, Middle Eastern cinema and photography, fine arts, visual culture, music and dance.