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...

In the latest program in the New Books Network’s Middle East Studies Series, History and Middle Eastern Studies PhD candidate Deren Ertas talks with Ayfer Karakaya-Stump (PhD 2008), Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary, about her recently published monograph, The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics, and...

Nana-Korantema Koranteng is a second-year student in the CMES AM Program in Middle Eastern Studies. ... Read more about Q&A With Nana-Korantema Koranteng

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

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...

CMES Director William Granara, Gordon Gray Professor of the Practice of Arabic, has been awarded a 2020 Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship for his book Narrating Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean...

It should not have taken a string of tragic and highly visible incidents of police brutality in the middle of a suffocating pandemic to sharpen the need to recognize and reckon with anti-Black racism and the legacy of slavery, but it did. Watching or reading about the horrifying final moments of the murder of George Floyd, some of us were immediately reminded of Radio Raheem—how is that for a name with "Middle Eastern" resonances?—and his tragic end, "fictionalized" more than thirty years ago in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989).*

At least, on this occasion, Floyd...

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 books on race and slavery that have special relevance for Middle East studies. For information on locating books at a library near you, visit www.worldcat.org...

"COVID-19 has shown that atypical, transnational security issues need to be taken seriously. Man-made threats are not the only forces that can devastate the globe and fundamentally disrupt daily life," writes second-year Center for Middle Eastern Studies AM student Margaret Dene, in an article for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, where she is a summer Research Associate. Read the complete article on the Foreign Policy...