In a new episode of the Ottoman Podcast, CMES Associate Director for Research Jesse Howell (PhD '17) discusses the history of the early modern caravan route between Ragusa (modern-day Dubrovnik) and Istanbul. In attending to the long-distance connections between the early modern Ottoman state and the Mediterranean world, he reveals the multi-ethnic communities that came together on the caravan route, the ways that the Ottoman state...

Now Accepting Applications – DEADLINE May 31, 2023

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University invites applications for two Postdoctoral Fellowships in Disaster Studies. The fellowships extend for 12 months, from September 1, 2023, to August 31, 2024. These fellowships and the activities organized by and with the fellows are intended to launch a long-term project, triggered by present concerns arising from the recent devastation in Turkey and Syria as well as the urgent need to develop our understanding of the history of seismicity in the region.

In the summer of 2022, after a two-year hiatus due to Covid-19, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies’ five-week Arabic language program in Tunis made its long-awaited return. Led for a fifth time by the Gordon Gray Research Professor of Arabic and outgoing CMES Director William Granara, the program synthesized modern Tunisian history, literature, and culture through various texts dating from the early-twentieth-century pre-Independence period to the contemporary, post-Revolution setting. Nicolas Pantelick ’24, a joint NELC and government concentrator pursuing a concurrent AM degree...

In the last decade, Kurdish history has become an exciting arena of scholarly inquiry in Ottoman and Middle Eastern studies. Showcasing this emerging literature was the main goal of the New Horizons in Kurdish History lecture series that Cemal Kafadar, Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies, and I organized for spring 2022. Professor Kafadar and I initially formed the idea in his basement office at Robinson Hall during one of our regular meetings in fall 2021, when I worked as a Teaching Fellow for his Ottoman history survey course. Over the course of the semester, we brainstormed about...