2019-20

Derek Penslar, William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University, has long studied modern Jewish history from a global perspective. In his new biography of Theodor Herzl, Penslar examines how the founder of modern Zionism’s personal life...

In October 2019, CMES Director William Granara spent part of his sabbatical year convening the first international symposium organized by the Tunisia Office of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies: Mediterranean Cousins: Tunisia and Italy on Opposite...

The original script made it look easy. I was going to be Acting Director for a year, while Bill Granara would enjoy his hard-earned sabbatical leave. The first eight months were indeed smooth, thanks above all to our administrative staff, working with...

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...

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...

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...

While conducting dissertation research in Italy during the 2019-20 academic year, Maryam Patton, PhD candidate in History and Middle East Studies, has had the unusual fortune to experience both severe flooding in Venice and quarantine in Florence. Here is...

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 World (I.B. Tauris, 2019). Granara...

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...

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies endorses the June 29 statement by the Board of the Middle East Studies Association condemning systemic racism and anti-Blackness: "We stand in solidarity with our Black American members, as well as with Black and Afro...