Crown Center for Middle East Studies

08/12/2026

THERE'S STILL TIME TO ENROLL IN CROWN CENTER COURSES FOR FALL 2026

Explore the Middle East this fall with Crown Center faculty across politics, sociology, history, architecture, and more. From peacemaking to migration to the historic foundations of modern Middle Eastern history, our courses offer an exciting range of ways to dive in.

This semester, students have the opportunity to take courses with Shai Feldman, Muna Guvenc, Nihal Kayali, Khalil Shikaki, Amy Singer, Naghmeh Sohrabi, and Neil Swidey.

Students can visit Workday to enroll.

08/07/2026

Looking for your next summer read?

Check out the newly released "Jewish Iran: Modern Nationalism in Print" by Daniel Amir, the Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center (2023-2025). His book explores the twentieth-century history of Iranian Jews as they grappled with global political movements and Iranian national identity.

Click here to read Daniel's new book:

Iran is home to one of the largest Middle Eastern Jewish communities outside of Israel, numbering around 10,000 people today. This book explores the twentieth-century history of Iranian Jews as they grappled with global political movements and Iranian national identity. Over the course of the centur...

08/04/2026

New: Crown Center now has a Substack. Receive a preview of every Brief and Conversation delivered straight to your inbox, the moment it's published.

Subscribe here: https://substack.com/

07/30/2026

NEW THREE-PART CROWN CONVERSATION:
The Iran War: What Has Changed and What Comes Next for the Middle East?

In this three-part Crown Conversation, nine regional experts analyze the ongoing war from the perspectives of Iran, Israel and the United States, and the Gulf. Together, they assess how the conflict is reshaping the Iranian state and society, nuclear diplomacy and Israeli politics, the U.S.–Israel relationship, and the evolving regional security order in the Gulf, including the future of the Strait of Hormuz.

Featuring Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch, Shai Feldman, Nader Habibi, Hadi Kahalzadeh, Arang Keshavarzian, Gary Samore, Naghmeh Sohrabi, and Sanam Vakil.

Click here to read the full conversation: https://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/crown-conversations/cc-32-1.html

Crown Conversations draw on the wealth of regional expertise at the Crown Center in order to focus on recent developments in the Middle East with two goals: to draw attention to aspects of ongoing events that are overlooked in the U.S. news media and to provide insights into the wider regional and g...

07/27/2026

Beth Derderian, the Renée and Lester Crown Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies, contributed an article to the most recent edition of the Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (JSAMES).

Dr. Derderian's piece "[offers] reflections centered around three areas where the reorientation of JSAMES can make a significant impact in terms of the following: method, audience, and partnerships."

Full article here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/article/992664.

07/20/2026

MEET THE FELLOWS: Kerem Uşşaklı

Kerem Uşşaklı is a Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies. He is a political anthropologist, writing on the possibilities of inter-ethnic sociality in the light of histories of war and dispossession in the racialized and securitized contemporary Middle East.

His current book project, tentatively titled “Civility After Dispossession: Politics of Decolonization in the Kurdish-Iraqi Borderlands,” is an ethnography of the performances of civility displayed by formerly dispossessed Iraqi Kurds and displaced Iraqi Arabs after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. This is a work that investigates how the history of political violence in the Garmiyan Region and the disputed territories of Iraq is lived out in the present. He is also researching the nexus of digital sovereignty, authoritarian populism, and practices of evasion from the state in Turkey.

He received his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University.

Click here to read Kerem's Crown Center publications: https://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/search/authors.html -z

07/13/2026

CLASS OF 2030 Fall Course Registration:

Course registration for incoming Brandeis class of 2030 students begins today at 10 am.

Explore the Middle East this fall with Crown faculty across politics, sociology, history, architecture, and more. From peacemaking to migration to the historic foundations of modern Middle Eastern history our courses offer an exciting range of ways to dive in.

In this video Crown Center faculty, Nihal Kayali, Naghmeh Sohrabi, Neil Swidey, Khalil Shikaki and Shai Feldman, discuss their respective courses:

SOC/IGS 119B — Migration and Displacement in the Middle East
POL 164A — Seminar: Arabs and Israelis: Conflict and Peacemaking
HIST/JOUR 163A — The Road to September 11th and Beyond: History and Media

Visit workday to enroll.

07/03/2026

Following dramatic penalty-shootout victories, Egypt and Morocco are the last two remaining Middle East and North African teams remaining in the FIFA World Cup. Egypt and Morocco remain the last two Middle East and North African teams in the World Cup.

Before the start of the round of 16, revisit our latest Middle East Brief, “Sportswashing or Statecraft? The Politics of Football in the Arab World.”

Ibrahim El Houdaiby examines how football has become a tool of statecraft, shaping political, economic, and security agendas in Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

Click Here to Read the Brief:

FIFA president Gianni Infantino and Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani hand the FIFA Arab Cup 2025 trophy to Mohamed Hrimat of Morocco. (Photo by Noushad Thekkayil/NurPhoto via AP)

07/01/2026

On July 2, at 2:00pm EST, Naghmeh Sohrabi, the Director for Research and the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History, will take part in an online panel on Politics and Counter-Politics in Contemporary Iran. She will be joined by Ali Kadivar and Paniz Musawi Natanzi.

Click here to register for virtual attendance: https://www.brismes.ac.uk/events/outreach-and-pedagogy/merip-brismes-sesamo-iran-event-series-2?brid=YWdncwECVixZer5ApPIxyJCuPoDy

07/01/2026

Following the United States' strikes on Iranian targets near the strait of Hormuz, Gary Samore, the Crown Family Director and Professor of the Practice of Politics, joined CNN on Sunday to discuss the strikes, their implications, and the role of Iran's nuclear stockpile.

Watch the full interview below.