2021-22

by Jesse Howell, PhD ’17, CMES Academic Programs Manager and Associate Director of the AM Program Certain dates stand out in the collective historical consciousness. On May 29, 1453, Ottoman forces under the command of the twenty-one-year-old Ottoman...

William Granara, Professor of the Practice of Arabic on the Gordon Gray Endowment, Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Director of the Modern Languages Program in his own Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and a member...

After the Egyptian army lost the 1948 war to Israel, a popular narrative — that the monarchy sold out its soldiers — paved the way for the successful July Revolution four years later. CMES alum Chloe Bordewich (History and MES PhD '22) explores the...

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...

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...

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...

Professor Ahmad Mahdavi Damghani, who taught part-time as an associate at Harvard University from 1987 to 2014, died on June 17, 2022 (13th of Shahrivar, 1305). He was born on September 5, 1926, in the shrine city of Mashhad, where his father, Ayatollah...

by Hacı Osman Gündüz, PhD Candidate, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations After two years of dormancy due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Hamilton A. R. Gibb Lecture Series was back in action in March 2022. The series is the tāj (crown) of...