NPR's Sarah McCammon speaks with activist and recent CMES AM graduate Badriyyah Alsabah, a research and policy fellow with the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth, about Maha Al-Mutairi, a trans woman in Kuwait who was sentenced to two years in prison for "impersonating the opposite sex." Listen to the story or read the...

Rosie Bsheer, Assistant Professor of History, and Cemal Kafadar, Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies, both core faculty members of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, recommend the following English-language materials and resources to contextualize current events in Palestine. These resources offer analyses and histories of expulsion, occupation, settler colonialism, forced evictions, home demolitions, and annexation that situate the current struggle as...

Medhini Kumar is a 2016 graduate of the CMES AM Program in Middle Eastern Studies. She currently works as Communications Manager for UNRWA USA, an American nonprofit that is committed to bettering the lives of Palestine refugees through advocacy efforts in the United States and fundraising for United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) programs in the Middle East.... Read more about Q&A With Medhini Kumar

It should not have taken a string of tragic and highly visible incidents of police brutality in the middle of a suffocating pandemic to sharpen the need to recognize and reckon with anti-Black racism and the legacy of slavery, but it did. Watching or reading about the horrifying final moments of the murder of George Floyd, some of us were immediately reminded of Radio Raheem—how is that for a name with "Middle Eastern" resonances?—and his tragic end, "fictionalized" more than thirty years ago in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989).*

At least, on this occasion, Floyd...

Rosie Bsheer, Assistant Professor of History, and Cemal Kafadar, Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies, both core faculty members of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, recommend the following books on race and slavery that have special relevance for Middle East studies. For information on locating books at a library near you, visit www.worldcat.org...

"COVID-19 has shown that atypical, transnational security issues need to be taken seriously. Man-made threats are not the only forces that can devastate the globe and fundamentally disrupt daily life," writes second-year Center for Middle Eastern Studies AM student Margaret Dene, in an article for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, where she is a summer Research Associate. Read the complete article on the Foreign Policy...

In a recent joint statement, Harvard University Centers condemn recent police violence in the United States:... Read more about Center for Middle Eastern Studies Joins Other Harvard University Centers and Institutes Condemning Police Violence in the United States

The Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), whose Executive Director, Mandy Terc, is a 2004 graduate the Center for Middle Eastern Studies' AM program, has launched a new Q&A series called "Voices from the Middle East," including interviews with people on the ground describing how COVID-19 is threatening the MENA region's most vulnerable populations. There are interviews with an Iranian pharmaceutical executive trying to produce medicine under sanctions, an ER doctor in Gaza describing how the blockade makes medical resources scarce, a...

Social solidarity is a critical tool in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, as political leaders call for major disruptive changes to everyday life and sacrifices for collective well-being. In a white paper for the COVID-19 Rapid Response Impact Initiative of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, CMES faculty affiliate...