CMES | Program in Islamic Law

Winter Excursion to Tunisia: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, November 17, 2023

Posted on November 06, 2023

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies offers a study excursion to Tunisia in January 2024. This year’s expected dates are January 2 – 19. A predeparture meeting for accepted students will be held during reading week.

This three-week itinerary, based in the city of Tunis, focuses on thehistory and culture of Tunisiaand how they intersect with landscape and urbanism. The field-based programis intended for students whose primary focus is on North African and Middle Eastern Studies. The program is open to graduate students across Harvard’s schools. Undergraduates who are concentrating on fields relatedto North Africa and the Middle East are also eligible to apply, with priority given to students in their junior or senior year. Participants must be enrolled as students at the time the program takes place.

One letter of reference, a transcript/grade report, and a one-page statement of purpose are required. The reference letter should come from a Harvard faculty member, ideally one whose work relates to the MENA region.

Lodging, food, airfare, and meals will be covered by CMES.

In order to comply with Tunisian regulations, all students must be fully vaccinated. Non-US citizens are responsible for arranging any needed visas.

This winter excursion to Tunisia is available to full-time, registered Harvard graduate students and upperclassmen. Preference is given to graduate students with MENA interests.

One letter of recommendation, transcript (unofficial accepted), and personal statement required.

The deadline for applications is November 17, 2023.

For more information, visit here.

Talk: “The ‘Khitat’ of al-Maqrizi: Narrating History on the Tempo of ‘Kharab’” by Nasser Rabat, CMES, Harvard University, November 28, 2023

Posted on September 29, 2023

From the CMES website:

Date: Tuesday, November 28, 2023, 5:00pm to 6:30pm; Location: CMES, Rm 102, 38 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138

The CMES Disaster Studies Initiative presents Nasser Rabbat Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, MIT

Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. His interests include Islamic architecture, urban history, heritage studies, Arab history, contemporary Islamic art, and post-colonial criticism. He teaches lecture courses on Islamic architecture, the architecture of Cairo, and Islamic architecture and the environment and seminars on Orientalism and colonialism; Issues in Islamic Urbanism; Historiography of Islamic Architecture; Late Antiquity and the foundation of Islamic architecture; Reading Ibn Khaldun; (Re)constructing Memory; Urbicide; and Balancing Globalism and Regionalism in the Arabian Gulf cities.

Professor Rabbat has published more than a hundred scholarly articles and several books on topics ranging from Mamluk architecture to Antique Syria, 19th century Cairo, Orientalism, and urbicide. His most recent books are Writing Egypt: Al-Maqrizi and His Historical Project (2022); ‘Imarat al-Mudun al-Mayyita (The Architecture of the Dead Cities) (2018), and an online book, The Destruction of Cultural Heritage: From Napoléon to ISIS, co-edited with Pamela Karimi (2016). His co-edited book, Construction as Destruction: The Case of Syria will be published in 2023 by AUC Press. He is currently editing a book on the cultural history of Syria to be published by Edinburgh University Press. His next book project is a history of Mamluk Cairo, which is under contract with AUC Press.

For more information, visit here.

Talk: “Locusts of Power” by Samuel Dolbee, CMES, Harvard University, November 29, 2023

Posted on September 29, 2023

From the CMES website:

Date: Wednesday, November 29, 2023, 6:00pm to 7:30pm; Location: CMES, Rm 102, 38 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138

The CMES Environmental Studies of the Middle East Speaker Series is pleased to present Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor of History, Family Dean’s Faculty Fellow in Studies of the Middle East, Vanderbilt University

Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University, is an environmental historian of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East, with interests in agriculture, disease, and science. He teaches courses in the Department of History and as part of the Climate Studies major.

His first book from Cambridge University Press is entitled Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (June 2023). The book offers a new account of the end of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the states of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey grounded in the ecology of the Jazira region, its mobile people, and distinctive locusts. It unearths what borders meant in the lives of not only locusts but also Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees. His next project is an environmental history of the microbe in the late Ottoman Empire. It is concerned at once with new treatments and spatial controls established against ailments like phylloxera, rabies, and rinderpest—which devastated the empire’s grape vines, street dogs, and cattle—as well as the way the language of germs infected the language of politics in the empire’s final years.

Dolbee’s scholarship has appeared in the American Historical Review, Past & Present, and International Journal of Middle East Studies. He has also contributed chapters to edited volumes on the history of food and disease, respectively. He is the editor in chief of Ottoman History Podcast.

Prior to coming to Vanderbilt, Dolbee was a lecturer on History & Literature at Harvard. He previously held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale’s Program in Agrarian Studies, Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center, and Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. Dolbee completed his PhD at New York University in the joint program in History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, and has an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a BA in History and International Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

For more information, visit here.

Talk: “Chasing Floods: the Ottoman Introduction of Rice in the Balkan Peninsula” by Aleksandar Shopov, CMES, Harvard University, November 15, 2023

Posted on September 29, 2023

From the CMES website:

Date: Wednesday, November 15, 2023, 6:00pm to 7:30pm; Location: CMES, Rm 102, 38 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138

The CMES Disaster Studies Initiative is pleased to present Aleksandar Shopov, Visiting Scholar, CMES; Assistant Professor, History, SUNY Binghamton University.

For more details, visit here.

Book talk: Nathan Thrall’s “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” – A Book talk with Kenneth Roth, CMES, Harvard University, October 23, 2023

Posted on September 29, 2023

From the CMES website:

Date: Monday, October 23, 2023, 6:00pm to 7:00pm; Location: Wasserstein 1010, Harvard Law School campus

Join the HKS Carr Center for Human Rights Policy for a book talk with author Nathan Thrall as he discusses his latest book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, with Carr Center Senior Fellow, Kenneth Roth.

Milad is five years old and excited for his school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem, but tragedy awaits: his bus is involved in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, rushes to the chaotic site, only to find Milad has already been taken away. Abed sets off on a journey to learn Milad’s fate, navigating a maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must face as a Palestinian.

Interwoven with Abed’s odyssey are the stories of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and pasts unexpectedly converge: a kindergarten teacher and a mechanic who rescue children from the burning bus; an Israeli army commander and a Palestinian official who confront the aftermath at the scene of the crash; a settler paramedic; ultra-Orthodox emergency service workers; and two mothers who each hope to claim one severely injured boy.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a deeply immersive, stunningly detailed portrait of life in Israel and Palestine, and an illumination of the reality of one of the most contested places on earth.

Nathan Thrall is the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, Guardian, New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was Director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College, New York. He lives in Jerusalem.

Kenneth Roth is the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading international human rights organizations, which operates in more than 90 countries. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch in 1987, Roth served as a federal prosecutor in New York and for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington, DC. A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigations and missions around the world. He has written extensively on a wide range of human rights abuses, devoting special attention to issues of international justice, counterterrorism, the foreign policies of the major powers, and the work of the United Nations.

This event is co-sponsored by the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative (Harvard Divinity School), Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy (Northeastern), Human Rights Program (Harvard Law School), the Program in Law and Society in the Muslim World (Harvard Law School), and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (Harvard University).

For more details, visit here.

Book talk: “Taming the Messiah: The Formation of an Ottoman Political Public Sphere, 1600-1700” by Aslihan Gurbuzel, CMES, Harvard University, October 3, 2023

Posted on September 29, 2023

From the CMES website:

Date: Tuesday, October 3, 2023, 5:00pm to 6:30pm; Location: CMES, Room 102, 38 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138

Aslihan Gurbuzel, Assistant Professor of Ottoman history, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University; Discussant: Hannah Marcus, John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences; Interim Faculty Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University

In the history of the Ottoman Empire, the seventeenth century has often been considered an anomaly, characterized by political dissent and social conflict. In this book, Aslıhan Gürbüzel shows how the early modern period was, in fact, crucial to the formation of new kinds of political agency that challenged, negotiated with, and ultimately reshaped the Ottoman social order. Taming the Messiah offers a new method of studying public political life by focusing on the variety of religious visions and lifeworlds native to Ottoman society and the ways in which they were appropriated and repurposed in the pursuit of new forms of civic engagement.

Aslıhan Gürbüzel is an assistant professor of Ottoman history at the McGill Institute of Islamic Studies in Montreal. She completed her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University in 2016. Her research and teaching interest include History of the Ottoman Empire, Islamic Political Thought, Religious Movements to 1800, and Manuscript Studies.

For more details, visit here.