CMES professor Afsaneh Najmabadi’s latest book, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, December 2013), examines state regulation and subsidization of sex reassignment surgery in Iran....

The Harvard Gazette recently interviewed Steven C. Caton, Khalid Bin Abdullah Bin Abdulrahman Al Saud Professor of Contemporary Arab Studies and former director of CMES (2004–2009), on his work studying water issues in Yemen from an anthropological perspective, and on how he came to the subject:

After leaving Yemen in 1981, Caton completed his doctoral work at the University of Chicago and began teaching. He published three books, including 1990’s “Peaks of Yemen I Summon,” on the nation’s poetry, and 1999’s “Lawrence of Arabia: A Film’s Anthropology...

Afsaneh Najmabadi is the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University and is a CMES Steering Committee member. Professor Najmabadi and a team of Qajar historians received a NEH grant to develop a comprehensive digital archive and website that will preserve, link, and render accessible primary...

Professor Steve Caton presents some insights from his recent research on water in the Arabian Penninsula, and Yemen in particular in this opinion piece in Aljazeera.

Steve Caton is Professor of Contemporary Arab Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. He is also author of Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation (Hill and Wang 2005) and Peaks of Yemen I Summon: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe (University of...

Steven Caton, Professor of Contemporary Arab Studies, wades into the current debate on the feasibility of Yemen being a failed state in a recent Foreign Policy blog posting. In the post, he adds a historical dimension to the discussion and argues that history, and innovations by the government since 1978, make it less likely that Yemen is on the road to implosion or takeover by a hostile force. Among Professor Caton’s books are Yemen Chronicle: An Anthology of War and Mediation (2006...