In his new book, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State, CMES faculty affiliate Gareth Doherty, assistant professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, captures the tension between staying green and being sustainable. Read a Q&A with Doherty in the Weatherhead Center's Epicenter blog.

March 9, 2017. Maribel Fierro, Research Professor, Centre of Human and Social Sciences, Higher Council for Scientific Research, Madrid, delivers the second lecture of the 2017 H.A.R. Gibb Arabic and Islamic Studies Lecture Series. Also see a video of Fierro's first lecture in the series, and read Arafat Razzaque's coverage of both talks. Read more about Scholars and Rulers in Al-Andalus: A Christian Emperor for the Muslims? Heraclius in Al-Andalus

March 7, 2017. Maribel Fierro, Research Professor, Centre of Human and Social Sciences, Higher Council for Scientific Research, Madrid, delivers the first lecture of the 2017 H.A.R. Gibb Arabic and Islamic Studies Lecture Series. Also see a video of Fierro's second lecture in the series, and read Arafat Razzaque's coverage of both talks. Read more about Scholars and Rulers in Al-Andalus: Averroes' Disgrace in Context

Maribel Fierro, Research Professor at the Centre for Human and Social Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council, and Visiting Scholar at CMES and Senior Scholar at the Islamic Legal Studies Program at HLS in spring 2017, was the distinguished speaker this year for the H.A.R. Gibb Arabic and Islamic Studies Lecture Series, established in 1964 in honor of Sir Hamilton A.R. Gibb, who was a director of CMES as well as University Professor and James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard. Arafat Razzaque, PhD candidate in History and Middle East Studies, covered the Read more about The Middle East and the Islamic West: Maribel Fierro's View of Medieval Spain

Roger Owen, A.J. Meyer Professor of Middle Eastern History Emeritus and a former CMES director, first encountered the Middle East as a young soldier during his national military service in Cyprus from 1955 to 1956, during which time he visited Cairo, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Beirut. He has lived and traveled throughout the region, and spent his academic and professional life at Oxford and Harvard, where he taught, studied, made friends, and tried to understand the Middle East through its politics, economic life, history, and popular culture. He kept an almost daily journal recording his thoughts and feelings, and since 1986 wrote a regular op-ed column for the Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat. Read more about The Book of Roger

In summer 2016, Margaux Fitoussi, an MTS candidate at Harvard Divinity School, curated a multimedia exhibition in Tunis about the Hara, the city’s historic Jewish neighborhood, centered around a collection of photographs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In November at CMES, she assembled a smaller version of the exhibition, premiered EL HARA, a short documentary film about the Hara co-directed with her friend Mo Scarpelli and featuring an interview with the celebrated writer Albert Memmi, and gave a talk about the original exhibition in Tunis and viewers’ reactions to it. Read more about Nostalgia, Memory, Place: Margaux Fitoussi on the Hara of Tunis

In this episode of the Fares Center Podcast at the Fletcher School, Roger Owen, A.J. Meyer Professor of Middle East History Emeritus at Harvard and former director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, discusses his recently published volume of memoirs outlining his study of and perspectives on the Middle East, beginning with his first visits to Cairo, Beirut, and Jerusalem in 1955-1956.