CMES News

Little Amal ART

Amal Walks Across America

August 3, 2023

Little Amal, whose name means “hope” in Arabic, is an internationally celebrated 12-foot-tall puppet of a 10-year-old Syrian refugee girl. She has been welcomed by more than 250 uniquely created artistic events across the globe since her initial 5,000-mile trek across Europe in 2021. Amal carries her message of hope for marginalized people everywhere, especially children who have been separated from their families. As a public art project, among the largest ever produced, she has been heralded as “one of the most ambitious live artworks ever staged” (The Observer, 2021) and “an...

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Harvard CMES building

Part-time Position Available: Flask Developer for Digital Humanities Project

October 24, 2022

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University is seeking a highly motivated student to join a grant-funded digital archive project about the history of the Arabian Peninsula. A successful applicant for this position will be a skilled Flask Developer who is competent at writing Python code and has the knowledge to design and implement code using the Flask framework. The ideal candidate should be able to write modular, performant, and clean code; write unit testing with Python libraries to verify that the functionality of the application is correct; and acquire effective...

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Harvard CMES building

Part-time Position Available: Technical Writer for Digital Humanities Project

October 24, 2022

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University is seeking a highly motivated student to join a grant-funded digital archive project about the history of the Arabian Peninsula. A successful applicant for this position will be a professional technical writer to be responsible for creating documentation that clarifies the product’s design, features, and benefits. The ideal candidate should be able to work on requirements like content strategy or scoping out new products to ensure all necessary information has been included for stakeholder to understand the project...

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Harvard CMES building

Part-time Position Available: Arabic Language Specialist for Digital Humanities Project

October 24, 2022

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies is seeking highly motivated students to join a grant-funded digital archive project on the history of the Middle East. A successful applicant for this position will be fluent in Arabic and have a demonstrated ability to read and understand eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Arabic chronicles. The student will primarily work on enhancing the performance of the project’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool through verifying the accuracy of its rendered text contents against an original source material. The student will perform all administrative...

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At the El-Zitouna Mosque in the Medina of Tunis

In the Shadow of History: A Summer in Tunisia

August 15, 2022

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 outgoing CMES Director William Granara, the program synthesized modern Tunisian history, literature, and culture through various texts dating from the early-twentieth-century pre-Independence period to the contemporary, post-Revolution setting. Nicolas Pantelick ’24, a joint NELC and government concentrator pursuing a concurrent AM degree...

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Kurdish History Lectures thumbnail

New Horizons in Kurdish History Lecture Series

July 18, 2022

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, Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies, and I organized for spring 2022. Professor Kafadar and I initially formed the idea in his basement office at Robinson Hall during one of our regular meetings in fall 2021, when I worked as a Teaching Fellow for his Ottoman history survey course. Over the course of the semester, we brainstormed about...

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Cooperson Gibb 2022 group

The Gibb Lecture Series 2022: Two Talks by Michael Cooperson

May 27, 2022

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 the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, as CMES Director William Granara, Gordon Gray Professor of the Practice of Arabic, described it. The series was established in 1964 with funds provided by Mr. John Goelet, who was a student of Sir Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb (d. 1976), the former James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic and University Professor at Harvard University. This year’s guest speaker was Michael Cooperson, Professor of Arabic at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is the first speaker of the series to have completed all his higher education—AB ('87), AM ('91), and PhD ('94) —at Harvard..... Read more about The Gibb Lecture Series 2022: Two Talks by Michael Cooperson

Sihem Lamine with Yo-Yo Ma

Q&A with CMES Tunisia’s Sihem Lamine

May 9, 2022

Sihem Lamine is the Administrative and Program Manager of the Tunisia Office of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Prior to officially joining CMES, Sihem worked as a consultant for CMES and Harvard Global Research and Support Services and played a major role in the transformation of the office space in Tunis from an empty shell to a functional and beautiful multi-purpose facility. For over six years she has been welcoming students, faculty, and visitors to the office, the city of Tunis, and the country of Tunisia, facilitating research projects, organizing public events, and generally helping visitors navigate and enjoy the resources and opportunities that Tunisia has to offer.... Read more about Q&A with CMES Tunisia’s Sihem Lamine