Projects & Initiatives

CMES supports an array of research initiatives, driven by faculty and student interests that are as diverse and evolving as the politics, cultures, and history of Middle East region. These initiatives bring together scholars from throughout the Harvard community to engage in long and short-term projects that often include preeminent regional and global experts. Many of these projects are interdisciplinary in scope and gain insights from the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences, and professions.

CMES research initiatives take a variety of forms: some arise due to the particular interests of individual or groups of faculty, visiting researchers, research associates, and students, and some develop in response to a crisis or event in the region. Others are conceptualized during the leadership of CMES’s incumbent faculty director. All are fostered and supported at CMES.

Disaster Studies Initiative
The Disaster Studies Initiative examines catastrophes in the Middle East and North Africa from an interdisciplinary perspective, with special focus on the history of seismicity. The initiative was founded by Cemal Kafadar at the Center for Middle Eastern...

Byzantine Studies Initiative
The Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Byzantine Studies Research Center (BSRC) at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul have been awarded a three-year research grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund a joint initiative providing enhanced and...

Critical Landscapes Design Lab
Critical topics of our age from climate change, to social inequality and political ecology, require critical landscape architectural approaches. Through various forms of fieldwork, the Critical Landscapes Design Lab, affiliated with the Aga Khan Program...

Iranian Oral History Project
The Iranian Oral History Project was launched at Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies in the fall of 1981 and continues to provide scholars studying the contemporary political history of Iran with primary source material consisting of personal...

Past Projects

Some projects that are incubated at CMES evolve and move onto other host institutions where they more naturally reside. A sampling of CMES’s rich history of projects includes those devoted to issues of transnational migration, women and gender issues, Middle East legal and constitutional frameworks, the historical role of religion in society, and cultural resource mobilization during the Arab Spring.

Past CMES projects that are no longer active or have moved to other host institutions include: