CMES affiliates make the most of summer

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies’s home at 38 Kirkland Street enjoys relative quiet over the summer, but the absence of many faculty and students belies a great deal of activity for the Center and its affiliates. Events in the Middle East, and especially the Arab region, have kept CMES faculty, students, staff, and research affiliates busier than ever this summer, with travel to the region for conferences, research, and language study; summer programming on campus and abroad; and preparation for the Fall 2011 semester.

Second-year AM student George Somi travelled to Beirut, Lebanon, this summer to conduct research for his master’s thesis on the history of the ongoing relationship between Solidere, a Lebanese joint-stock company in charge of planning and redeveloping Beirut Central District, and the landowners and tenants of downtown Beirut. Based on modern day legal case studies and interviews, his research seeks to determine whether Solidere has committed social injustices and whether they continue to do so.

Ayse Deniz Lokmanoglu, another second-year student in the CMES master’s program, spent the summer months traveling between Ankara, Istanbul, and Mersin, Turkey, to research the impact of the 1980 coup d’état on first- and third-grade religion and ethics classes for her master’s thesis. She interviewed several retired public school teachers who taught these courses between 1983 and 1989, and a Ministry of Education official. Other CMES students participated in intensive language programs in Arabic and Persian, presented papers at conferences, and continued research projects based in Cambridge. These summer activities were supported with funding from CMES as well as FLAS and other external fellowships.

In addition to supporting its graduate students in travel, research, and language study, CMES supports summer study for a number of Harvard undergraduates each year through three funds: the Henry Rosovsky Fellowships for Undergraduate Research in Israel, the CMES Grant for Undergraduate Arabic Language Study in the Middle East, and Moroccan Studies Summer Awards. CMES provided funding to a total of eight undergraduates this summer, for language study and research in Jordan, Morocco, Israel, France, Egypt, and Washington, DC.

The undergraduate who went to France was participating in the first year of a Harvard Summer School program based at the Sciences Po campus for Arabic and Mediterranean studies in Menton, France. Taught in English, French, and Arabic, to students from Harvard as well as Sciences Po, the program focused on the historical, literary, and cultural aspects of Arab and European interactions in the modern era. Professor of the Practice of Arabic William Granara, who developed and headed the program, commented that “the program was highly successful in bringing together in a unique environment students in Francophone and Arabophone studies.” Arabic Senior Preceptor Khaled Al-Masri and CMES grads Allison Blecker (AM ’10) and Ben Smith  (AM ’04) also taught in the program, which received great feedback from its students. Junior Nadine Rubinstein is a social studies concentrator focusing on urban America. She enrolled in the Menton summer program for the opportunity to add another dimension to her education by studying France and North Africa. “I found postcolonial theory fascinating and I feel like I have a much better understanding of the modern world as a whole, now that I have taken the time to study the colonial moment and the ways that today's world was shaped by European imperialism,” Rubenstein said. Julia Kete, also a junior, was inspired by the experience to change her concentration to Romance Languages and Literature. She appreciated the international and multi-lingual makeup of the classes, which included students from Morocco, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Barcelona.

CMES faculty and affiliates including Paul Beran, Steve Caton, William Graham, Susan Kahn, Lenore Martin, and David Roxburgh also traveled over the summer to deliver lectures and present at conferences. Here in Cambridge, Steve Caton also taught a newly developed course on the anthropology of Arabia, introducing students to tribal organization and its continuing importance, gender relations, varieties of Islam and their influence, and old and new forms of urbanism in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Oman, and Yemen. Primary readings for the course were all ethnographic. Feryal Hijazi and Mostafa Atamnia taught Arabic language courses at Harvard Summer School as well.

In July, the Outreach Center co-sponsored a popular series of summer talks on themes related to the Arab Spring. Originally targeted to Harvard staff and faculty, the speaker series attracted Summer School students and members of the wider Cambridge community as well, pulling in over 50 attendees per talk. The first three talks were by Harvard faculty: on Yemen by Steve Caton, professor of contemporary Arab studies; on energy by Meghan O’Sullivan, professor of the practice of international affairs, Harvard Kennedy School; and on Egypt by Tarek Masoud, assistant professor of public policy, Harvard Kennedy School. The fourth event was a talk on Ramadan by Nuri Friedlander, Harvard Muslim Chaplain and PhD candidate in Study of Religion, followed by a cooking demonstration by Samira’s Homemade. The series was co-sponsored by the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program.

The Outreach Center also held two summer workshops on the Middle East region for K-12 teachers. The first, Using Film and Literature to Further a Global Studies Agenda in the Humanities Classroom, was held in partnership with the Outreach Program of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Committee on African Studies, both of which are Title VI National Resource Centers like CMES. For the second workshop, Unraveling the Contemporary Middle East, the Outreach Center partnered with local education provider Education Collaborative.

CMES and Outreach Center staff members were hard at work throughout the summer, preparing for what is already proving to be an especially busy fall. In addition to its usual line-up of ongoing lecture and seminar series, which recently grew to include informal Mideast Newsreel talks and graduate student presentations, CMES is organizing a senior faculty working group led by CMES Director Baber Johansen on the transformative movements of the Arab world, a three-part lecture series on Arab immigration, and three two-day fall conferences. The Outreach Center is launching a Virtual Learning Initiative to bring Harvard resources and expertise to a wider audience, and expanding its series of educator webinars with a focus on topical themes such as the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and art and political protest in the Arab Spring. We hope the CMES and Harvard community will join us for these programs as we explore and engage with the history and ongoing development of transformative events in the Arab world.