About Our Program
The Middle East Studies degree is designed to provide students with language and cultural competence in the region of the Middle East that can become the foundation for careers in public affairs, public service, business, and many other fields. Students are strongly encouraged to combine the Middle East Studies Major with a major in another discipline so that upon graduation they have acquired a foundation of career-oriented skills as well as a high degree of global competency.
Information & Announcements
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Why Study the Middle East?
Middle East Studies News & Featured Events
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Lamia Balafrej
Medieval Siri: Replicating Histories of Gender, Automation and Representation - April 17 - 4:30-5:30 - ART 158
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Gaming the Middle East: History and Humanists in the Gaming Industry
Tuesday, April 16, 2pm-3:30pm, Gould Auditorium, Level 1, J. Willard Marriott Library
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2024 Dolowitz Lecture in Human Rights - Writing History in a Time of War: Afterlives of Israel's 1982 Lebanon Invasion - March 21, 2024 - 12:30-2:30 - UMFA
Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon was a pivotal moment in global history, transforming the fate of Palestinian self-determination, Lebanese and Israeli politics, Israel's regional relationships, diaspora Jewish perceptions of Zionism, and western policy across the Arab world. Yet it has often been elided in public discourse and scholarshipâa result of selective amnesia, political convenience, and the difficulty of research across national divides. In a contemporary moment of profound ruptureâand especially in light of the ongoing war in Gazaâhow can we make sense of this contested past and its multiple legacies?
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Asad Q. Ahmed - The Logic of Impossibles and Islamic Theology
February 29, 2024 - 12pm-1pm - Hinckley Caucus Room Postclassical logic in the Islamic world was deeply concerned with the celebrated Avicennan (d. 1037) distinction between essence and existence, which, in part, was meant to explain the fact of a contingent world. A major issue related to the distinction is that the conceptualization of an essence or of existence posited it as an individuated mental existence; this led to an infinite proliferation of existences or the existence of non-existent essences. This same intuition about mental existences led to various paradoxes that challenged the semantics of affirmative propositions, some of which had significant theological import. This paper begins with an exploration of the essence-existence distinction and the paradoxes it generated; it then explores how the idea that conceptualization indicated mental existence both produced and resolved certain paradoxes in the field of logic; the paper ends with some reflections on the theological import of these discussions in logic.