In a special episode of the Ottoman History Podcast, Sam Dolbee and CMES Academic Programs Manager and Associate Director of the AM Program Jesse Howell, History and MES PhD '17, travel by bike along the Ćiro Trail from Dubrovnik in Croatia to Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where they meet fellow Ottoman historian Marijana Mišević, History and MES PhD '22. Along the way, they consider the legacy and traces of early modern Ottoman...

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...

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at Harvard University is pleased to announce a call for papers for a workshop and special issue journal publication examining the theme of inter-Asian Cold War linkages, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).... Read more about Call for Papers for CMES Workshop: Inter-Asian Cold War Linkages, November 12-13, 2021

During spring 2020, Gavin Moulton '20 worked in Harvard's Fine Arts Library with the newly acquired Binney Collection of Orientalist Prints, a group of prints, drawings, lithographs, and other ephemera related to perceptions of the Ottomans in Western and Central Europe. Moulton, who has studied Turkish with Precepter Meryem Demir and Senior Preceptor...

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies is pleased to become a research partner with the Critical Landscapes Design Lab, affiliated with the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Directed by CMES Steering Committee member ...

On July 10, 2020, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed an order which would allow the disintegration of Hagia Sophia’s museum status and turn it back into a mosque. Read an analysis in the Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy at Harvard Kennedy School by CMES AM student and JMEPP...

In 1992, when he read about the burning of the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina, András Riedlmayer, bibliographer in Islamic Art and Architecture at the Harvard Fine Arts Library, knew it was an attack on more than physical objects. It was what he later testified to being “cultural heritage destruction”: intentional and unnecessary destruction of sites and records that act as a community’s collective memory. Read about his years of research into this cultural destruction and his expert testimony against Serbian nationalist Slobodan Milosevic during the International Criminal...