Alumni News

Naghmeh Sohrabi is the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History and the Associate Director for Research at the Crown Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. She completed her PhD in History and Middle East Studies at CMES...

Chloe Safier works for Oxfam International where she is the Gender Justice Coordinator. She graduated with an AM in Middle Eastern Studies in 2010. What brought you to CMES and to an AM in Middle Eastern Studies? While I was an undergraduate at Wesleyan...

Kyle McEneaney graduated with an AM in Middle Eastern Studies in 2007. Since graduating he has worked in consulting and investment banking, specializing in Iraq’s emerging economy. He is currently based in Dubai and works with an Iraqi group of companies...

The Senate voted overwhelmingly on April 10 to confirm retired four-star general John Abizaid, an alumnus of the CMES AM program in Middle Eastern studies, as the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, filling an important diplomatic post that has been vacant for...

Asher Orkaby is a 2014 graduate of Harvard’s joint PhD program in History and Middle Eastern Studies. He is currently a research associate at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and a lecturer at Harvard Extension School. His book...

Eugene Rogan is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and Director of St. Antony’s Middle East Centre at the University of Oxford. He is the author of The Arabs: A History , which has been translated into ten languages and was named one of the best...

Emrah Yildiz is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University. He completed his PhD in Anthropology and Middle East Studies at Harvard in 2016. How was your first term on the faculty at...

We often regard print as a motor of social change, leaving revolutions in its wake. For historians of the Middle East, this line of thought leads to the (predictable) question: why didn’t Muslims or Ottomans or Arabs adopt print? In a new episode of the...

Hassan Al-Damluji, CMES AM ’08, is Head of Middle East Relations at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He is responsible for the foundation’s Middle East strategy across program areas and serves as the lead Middle East adviser to Bill and Melinda Gates...

When Karen Leal (’89, AM ’94, PhD ’03) packed her bags for a summer at the Intensive Ottoman Turkish Summer School (IOTSS) in 1998, the instructions from the school’s co-founder, the late Harvard professor Şinasi Tekin, included “bring cat food.” Many...