The Center for Middle Eastern Studies is pleased to welcome Salim Tamari as the Spring 2013 Shawwaf Visiting Professor. Professor Tamari is professor of sociology at Birzeit University, senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, adjunct professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and the editor of Jerusalem Quarterly and Hawliyyat al Quds. His recent publications include Year of the Locust: Palestine and Syria during WWI (UC Press, 2010), Ihsan's War: The Intimate Life of an Ottoman Soldier (IPS, Beirut, 2008), and The Mountain Against the Sea (University of California Press, 2008). Professor Tamari will teach two courses this spring at Harvard: Arabic 172 – Urban Landscapes: The City and Contemporary Arabic Literature and Culture, and Arabic 242br – Arabic Five, the second half of the Arabic program's new fifth-year Arabic class, which will be on “Writing self and other: (auto)biographies and the formation of modern identities.”
The Shawwaf Visiting Professorship is made possible by a gift of the family of the late Ambassador Ziad Mohammed Ali Shawwaf (1926–1990) which established the Ziad Mohammed Ali Shawwaf Fund in his memory. Ambassador Shawwaf was a distinguished Saudi Arabian career diplomat who became the first Saudi Arabian student to attend Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The Shawwaf Fund enables CMES and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations to bring a visiting professor to Harvard for one semester each year to teach courses on Arabic and Islamic studies.