In 1992, when he read about the burning of the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina, András Riedlmayer, bibliographer in Islamic Art and Architecture at the Harvard Fine Arts Library, knew it was an attack on more than physical objects. It was what he later testified to being “cultural heritage destruction”: intentional and unnecessary destruction of sites and records that act as a community’s collective memory. Read about his years of research into this cultural destruction and his expert testimony against Serbian nationalist Slobodan Milosevic during the International Criminal...

On September 16, CMES welcomed Syrian-Armenian-American stage and film actress Sona Tatoyan and artist and puppet master Ayhan Hülagü to speak about finding her Armenian grandfather's Karagöz puppets in the abandoned family home in Aleppo, Syria. Ayhan then presented some of Sona's family's puppets in a short puppet show to close the event. For more on Sona and Ayhan and the event: https://bit.ly/2potIVR.

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“Mecca is lived, experienced, and documented differently by different people,” began Rosie Bsheer, Assistant Professor of History at Harvard and author of the forthcoming “Archive Wars: Spectacle, Speculation, and the Politics of History in Saudi Arabia,” in her keynote address to the colloquium Mecca: The Lived City, hosted in May by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and organized by CMES Director William Granara and Gareth Doherty, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture Program at the Harvard Graduate School of...

Jocelyne Dakhlia, Director of Studies, Center for Historical Research, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, delivers the second lecture of the 2019 H.A.R. Gibb Arabic and Islamic Studies Lecture Series. Also see a video of Dakhlia's first lecture in the series, and read Youssef Ben Ismail's coverage of both talks.... Read more about Video: Undesired Bodies: Figures of Continuity and Discontinuity in the Mediterranean of Lady Montagu