The Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at Harvard University is pleased to announce a call for papers for a workshop and special issue journal publication examining the theme of inter-Asian Cold War linkages, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Over the past three decades, the study of the Cold War moved away from a narrow focus on the Soviet-US struggle toward one embracing a more holistic and global scope. Growing scholarship on the “Cold War in Asia” as well as the variegated ideational and political linkages—anti-colonial, pan-Asianist, Marxist,...

Read more about Call for Papers for CMES Workshop: Inter-Asian Cold War Linkages, November 12-13, 2021

During spring 2020, Gavin Moulton '20 worked in Harvard's Fine Arts Library with the newly acquired Binney Collection of Orientalist Prints, a group of prints, drawings, lithographs, and other ephemera related to perceptions of the Ottomans in Western and Central Europe. Moulton, who has studied Turkish with Precepter Meryem Demir and Senior Preceptor...

Read more about Late Ottomania in the Fine Arts Library’s Binney Collection

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies is pleased to become a research partner with the Critical Landscapes Design Lab, affiliated with the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Directed by CMES Steering Committee member ...

Read more about CMES Partners with Critical Landscapes Design Lab at Harvard Graduate School of Design

On July 10, 2020, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed an order which would allow the disintegration of Hagia Sophia’s museum status and turn it back into a mosque. Read an analysis in the Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy at Harvard Kennedy School by CMES AM student and JMEPP...

Read more about Turkey’s Hagia Sophia Decision as Foreign Policy Signal

This January, Selina Xu (Harvard College '21) participated in CMES's fifth annual winter term excursion to Turkey. Read about and see photographs of her experience on her website, Selina Xu, Telling Life Like a Story. Read more about I, Istanbul

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...

Read more about Harvard Librarian Puts This War Crime on the Map

“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...

Read more about Reflecting on the Many Faces of Mecca, the Lived City