Center for Middle East Studies
Research Areas
CMES hosts several signature initiatives and projects led by its multi-disciplinary faculty, which enrich ongoing research, programming, and teaching at Brown.
Research Areas
CMES hosts several signature initiatives and projects led by its multi-disciplinary faculty, which enrich ongoing research, programming, and teaching at Brown.
Research Areas
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.
This research initiative, 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 to a deeper analysis and understanding of political mobilizations, economic developments, social inequalities and cultural expressions in the Middle East and amongst diasporas of the region.
The Iranian Studies research initiative connects CMES with courses and programming in Brown’s Center for Language Studies and scholars specializing in the culture, history and politics of Iran and Persianate societies.
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. Led by Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities, Professor of History and Religious Studies
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.
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.
The Center for Middle East Studies (CMES) at Brown University promotes research, teaching and public engagement about the Middle East in a historically and culturally grounded manner. Its coverage is temporally and geographically expansive, extending from antiquity to the present, and it approaches the Middle East as a region with shifting boundaries as well as a conceptual entity within global discourses.