Yale Council on Middle East Studies

We are excited to introduce our second alumni spotlight of the year: Michael A. Zanger-Tishler.

Michael graduated from Yale with a double major in Modern Middle East Studies and Ethics, Politics, and Economics in 2018. He is currently a PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard.

Hear more about Michael's most memorable experiences at Yale's MMES program and his journey towards becoming a scholar of transnational carceral and judicial systems here: https://macmillan.yale.edu/middleeast/stories/alumni-spotlight-series-michael-zanger-tishler-18

As the semester approaches its end, we are excited to announce we will be hosting our final CMES colloquium of the school year next Tuesday, Apr. 28th.

Join us in celebrating Yale's own Visiting Professor, Chander Shekhar—an expert in Indo-Persian archival materials—who will talk about early modern Persian manuals for secretaries. We hope to see you there!

Please join us next Thursday for a discussion about possible ways forward amidst the Israeli genocide in Palestine.

Hear from speakers Michael Omer-Man and Sarah Whitson, who work for the organization DAWN to expose human rights abuses in the Middle East and North Africa.

We are delighted to present our first Modern Middle East Studies alumni spotlight of the year: Eda S. Uzunlar.

Eda graduated from Yale College in 2023. Since then, she has completed a master’s degree in International Development from the London School of Economics and worked in the Caribbean on state development and climate change policy. She is currently based in Istanbul, conducting research and journalism as a Fulbright Scholar. Hear more about Eda's time at Yale and her adventures after graduating here: https://macmillan.yale.edu/middleeast/stories/alumni-spotlight-series-eda-s-uzunlar-yc-23

We are so excited to host Jeffrey Sacks, a scholar of poetics, critical theory, and Arabic Studies, on Thursday, March 26th.

Come join Sacks and Yale historian Omnia El Shakry for a discussion of Sacks' new book, titled Poeticality: In Refusal of Settler Life—a conversation especially worthwhile for our present moment. We look forward to seeing you there.

We are very excited to welcome Stefano Di Pietrantonio, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton, to discuss his translations of Ottoman Greek-Arabic texts in Early Modern Syria alongside Yale historian Joe Glynias.

Di Pietrantonio is an interdisciplinary scholar who combines philology, codicology, and translation studies to understand the transfer of knowledge from Europe to the Levant. We hope to see you there!

Next Wednesday, we will be hosting our first Iran colloquium of the semester! Please join us in welcoming the historian of Islam, Usman Hamid, whose work on devotional aesthetics across South Asia and Iran is interdisciplinary yet richly historical.

The event will be hosted by Jane Mikkelson, a Yale professor who specializes in literary and intellectual cultures of South Asia and the Near East. You won't want to miss this conversation...

In the spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration, we are joining other Yale departments in welcoming religious studies scholar Jamal Elias for a discussion of his most recent work: "After Rumi."

Join us next Tuesday to hear Elias' examination of how the Mevlevi Sufi order deployed literature and social networks to build community in the post-Rumi era. And make sure to snag a copy of this beautiful text!

Please join us in welcoming political scientist Marc Lynch for our first CMES colloquium of the semester.

What is the Middle East? Is it a concrete and unified space? How does it become an American political project?

We hope to see you next Thursday for this lively (and timely) discussion with Lynch and Yale's own Rob Malley.

Welcome back Yalies! We hope you've had a good start to the semester and we have some news to make it even better...

Our spring series colloquium will feature speakers from a diverse array of schools nation-wide to address an even more diverse array of topics. These include settler colonialism, the Mughal empire, and sociopolitical rhetoric on an international scale, just to mention a few. We hope to see you there!