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 Middle East, today’s understanding of gay relationships as abnormal or unnatural relies on concepts invented less than a century ago. In an essay in New Lines magazine, CMES Visiting Fellow Sultan Alamer, a political science doctoral student at George Washington University explores this complicated history. Read the full story on the New Lines website.

Herbert C. Kelman, the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics emeritus at Harvard and the director of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (1993-2003), died March 1 in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home. He was 94. Read the full story in the Harvard Gazette.

Rosie Bsheer, Assistant Professor of History, and Cemal Kafadar, Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies, both core faculty members of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, recommend the following English-language materials and resources to contextualize current events in Palestine. These resources offer analyses and histories of expulsion, occupation, settler colonialism, forced evictions, home demolitions, and annexation that situate the current struggle as...