On behalf of my colleagues at the Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES), I am delighted to welcome you to our center. CNES is a vibrant research hub where over 100 faculty members from the humanities, social sciences, arts, engineering, and the Law School collaborate on diverse research and pedagogical projects. Established in 1957, it stands as one of the oldest and most distinguished U.S. centers for interdisciplinary research on the Near East, broadly encompassing Iran, the Persianate world, Turkey, the Arab world, and North Africa. Our center serves as a forum for the exchange of ideas and dissemination of information both within and beyond the campus. We offer cutting-edge research and fresh perspectives on the challenges and cultural richness of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Our center supports graduate and undergraduate instruction in over a dozen academic departments, facilitate research by faculty, students, and visiting scholars, and foster interchange among scholars from around the world. Our public programming addresses the challenges facing the MENA region while celebrating its cultural and social achievements, drawing diverse audiences including those of MENA heritage living in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
In recent years, my colleagues and I have brought a new vision to the center’s research and teaching about the MENA region, focused on three key areas: cultural diversity, interdisciplinary collaboration, and curricular innovation. More particularly, we have spearheaded a reframing of how the MENA region has been traditionally represented, approached by many scholars, and taught as a subject in higher education. The MENA region has often been viewed through a narrow political lens that imposes a reductive binary of crisis and stasis as the primary analytic frame. From popular media accounts to area studies scholarship, topics like terrorism, civil war, youth uprising, religious conflict, and official corruption have been given center stage. This approach risks misrepresenting inevitable processes of social change as symptoms of underlying pathology. Moreover, a myopic focus on moments of political crisis can obscure the rich cultural traditions, histories, and practices that have produced not only conflict in the region but also cultural and political movements that have questioned and, in significant ways, redefined the meaning of progress itself.
Implementing this vision, we have been able to transform the center into a leading venue for scholars, students, and the general public to address glaring gaps in current representations of the region. Through a series of initiatives, funded by the Mellon Foundation, the NEH, and two Department of Education Title VI grants, we have sought to expand public discourse about MENA beyond socio-political analysis to include more sustained engagement with the complexities of this culturally dynamic region. Highlighting diverse scholarship that draws on innovative analytic approaches from fields such as critical historiography, humanistic social science, imaginative literature, and visual culture, our initiatives aim to challenge static views of the region and to advance nuanced understandings of the new MENA. In doing so, we have created a blueprint for the study of the MENA region at UCLA, providing a model for other academic institutions.
Committed as we are as a National Resource Center to collaboration, we regularly co-sponsor events with other academic units at UCLA, such as the Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, the Center for European and Russian Studies, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Center for Middle East Development. We also co-organize the bilingual Iranian Lecture Series with the Pourdavoud Center for the Study of the Iranian World, the quarterly Averroes lecture series with the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, and the Historiography of the Middle East lecture series with the History Department. Additionally, we provide financial and logistical support to students and colleagues in the departments of Near Eastern Languages and Culture, Anthropology, History, Sociology, and European Languages and Transcultural Studies to organize lectures and workshops.
In addition to our academic programming, we provide funding opportunities to our students and engage in public outreach. We offer the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships to meritorious graduate and undergraduate students to train and perfect their Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish, as well as other grants including Mosafter travel grants and the Ann Kerr fellowships. To serve the larger community of teachers in the Los Angeles area, in collaboration with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the UCLA History-Geography Project, CNES organizes an ongoing K-12 teacher training initiative during the month of June. This initiative includes lectures by faculty, workshops, and course materials for LAUSD teachers.
Please browse our website for more details on our events, programs, and fellowship opportunities. All our events are free and open to the public, and we encourage you to attend. Your support in our scholarly, pedagogic, and outreach efforts is greatly appreciated.
Welcome to CNES!
Ali Behdad, CNES Faculty Director
John Charles Hills Professor of Literature