Near Eastern Studies

College of Literature, Science, and the Arts

The University of Michigan: An Encyclopedic Survey was first published beginning in 1942. For its 2017 Bicentennial, the University undertook the most significant updating of the Encyclopedia since the original, focusing on academic units. Entries from all versions are compiled in the Bicentennial digital and print-on-demand edition. Contents

1. Near Eastern Studies (1975) 1 Ernest N. McCarus

2. Near Eastern Studies (2017) 5 Michael Bonner and Piotr Michalowski

[1]

Near Eastern Studies (1975)

Ernest N. McCarus

Known as the Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures since 1930, the department over the years has accumulated numbers of valuable Babylonian, Aramaic, Coptic, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Ethiopic manuscripts, tablets, papyri and artifacts, still today the basis for research, teaching, and museum exhibits. World War II saw the permanent addition of Chinese and Japanese to the department’s offerings. With the retirement of Chairman Leroy W. Waterman in 1945 and of Chairman William H. Worrell in 1948, the department underwent a major restructuring resulting in its transformation into two new departments: Far Eastern Languages and Literatures, with Associate Professor Joseph K. Yamagiwa as chairman, and Near Eastern Studies, under George G. Cameron, a scholar of ancient Near Eastern history and languages who was brought from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago to serve as its head. When Dr. Cameron arrived in February 1949, he alone was the entire faculty of the department. He had been granted leave for the Fall 1948 term to be Annual Professor of the 2 Near Eastern Studies

Baghdad School of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) and to do his famous archaeological research on the inscriptions on Darius’ Bisitun Monument in Iran. When he retired as Department Head twenty-one years later there were eighteen faculty members in the department and another fourteen Near Eastern specialists in other departments, constituting one of the premier programs in the nation dealing with the Near East and North Africa. The department’s goals were to cover Biblical Studies and the ancient, medieval, and modern languages and civilizations of the present-day Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew (Israeli) lands, with at least a linguistics and a literature specialist for each of these fields. Between 1948 and 1956 Cameron was able to recruit both established and budding scholars to cover most of the basic needs of the department: Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical Studies, medieval and modern Near Eastern History, and Arabic, Persian, and Turkish Studies. He was able as well to bring distinguished visitors during the academic year and in extensive summer programs in 1950 and in 1953 (co-sponsored with the Linguistic Society of America). This initial period, during which basic department programs were established, included the beginnings of the second phase in the development of Near Eastern Studies at Michigan: the broadening of coverage of the area on an ambitious interdisciplinary basis. In the 1950s permanent faculty were brought in to deal with the area of the Near East in anthropology, economics, geography, history, history of art, political science, and the Graduate Library. Because of the increasing complexity of interdisciplinary coordination and funding in 1961 the University established the Center for Near Eastern and North African Studies under the directorship of William D. Schorger. After that date the Center was responsible for all interdepartmental aspects of Near Eastern Studies. Departmental programs were also greatly strengthened and Modern Hebrew Studies were added. The growth of Near Eastern Studies at Michigan during this period was greatly aided by outside funding from a variety of sources in support of faculty expansion, student fellowships, instructional programs, and research projects. In 1951 George Cameron led an Near Eastern Studies (1975) 3 interdisciplinary expedition to Iraq and Iran supported by Carnegie, Rockefeller, and University of Michigan funds. The Carnegie Corporation funded three summer sessions devoted to the Near East (1951-53), staffed with outstanding scholars from across the nation. In 1952 Ford Foundation gave a five- year grant of $100,000 for faculty and research development, the first to an “area program” on the Near East at any institution. This and additional Ford Foundation support enabled the University to make several important permanent staff additions, to begin building a Near Eastern library collection second only to those of Harvard and Princeton, and to conduct research and training in the field, including the innovative year-long interdisciplinary field session in Aleppo, Syria, 1953-54. In 1960-62 the department received a National Defense Education Act (NDEA) grant totaling over $500,000 from the U.S. Office of Education for the development of instructional materials for Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, and Pashto; sixteen textbooks resulted from this effort. Additional instructional materials for Arabic, Modern Hebrew, and Turkish were later produced under department and Center auspices. With George Cameron’s retirement as Head of Department in 1969 Ernest McCarus was appointed chairman. The major addition between 1969 and 1975 was that of David Noel Freedman as Director of the new Program on Studies in Religion. With George Cameron’s retirement in 1975, Matthew W. Stolper was appointed as Assyriologist and, as in the case of his predecessor, Stolper spent his first official term at Michigan on leave at an archeological dig at Tepe Malyan in Iran. This period also saw continued concern with effective language teaching. Courses in language pedagogy and practice teaching were instituted for prospective language teachers, as enrollments in Near Eastern language courses rose to all-time highs. In 1974 the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA), the prestigious federally-funded program for intensive advanced- level training in Arabic language at the American University in Cairo, was transferred from the University of California at Berkeley to Michigan under the directorship of Ernest McCarus. The department has distinguished itself not only in teaching but also in scholarship. Recognition has come to members of 4 Near Eastern Studies

the faculty in the form of honorary degrees, election as officials of professional societies and of national research and training institutes and centers, research grants from the federal government and prestigious foundations, invitations to participate in national and international conferences and committees, mention in biographical references such as Who’s Who, journal editorships, and others. The Department of Near Eastern Studies has built for itself solid programs in Ancient and Biblical Studies and in Arabic, Hebrew, Iranian and Turkish Studies. Not the least of its achievements has been its success in maintaining a spirit of mutual respect and harmonious cooperation and strictly professional attitudes toward the study of the Near and Middle East without yielding to the emotions of the political conditions in the area. Ernest N. McCarus [2]

Near Eastern Studies (2017)

Michael Bonner and Piotr Michalowski

Plans for the introduction of “Oriental studies” into the University of Michigan curriculum first arose in 1869, in the course of discussions among the regents. In the United States of that era, a project of this kind involved two more or less separate traditions. First, many older American colleges and universities had typically taught Hebrew (specifically, biblical Hebrew) and “Chaldean” (meaning biblical Aramaic) from the time of their foundation, integrating these subjects into a curriculum that focused mainly on Latin and Greek and that aimed to produce candidates for the Protestant ministry. Meanwhile, “Oriental studies” came to refer specifically to a modern, secular discipline, founded on philology and linguistics, which during the 19th and early 20th centuries achieved a series of spectacular successes, including the recovery of “lost” ancient languages such as Egyptian, Akkadian, Sumerian, Elamite, and Hittite, as well as remarkable progress in the study of languages and cultures that had never been “lost” at all, such as Arabic, Persian, Hebrew (including but not only biblical Hebrew), Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, and so on. At the time in question (the mid- 6 Near Eastern Studies

to-late 19th century), this work on the “Orient” in all historical periods took place primarily in European universities. And it was to “Oriental studies” in this latter sense that the regents of the resolutely secular University of Michigan probably felt drawn, though we do not know the particulars of the discussion among them. The history of this Department doesn’t begin until 1889, when Carl William Belser arrived at Michigan with an appointment as instructor in German and French. This unrevealing title was changed in the following year to instructor in German and Hebrew, and finally to assistant professor of Oriental Languages. Belser was an Ann Arborite who had completed a Ph.D. at Leipzig under the famous Friedrich Delitzsch. In the heroic style of those days, Belser taught German, Hebrew, Sanskrit, “Assyrian” (i.e., Akkadian), and Greek. Meanwhile James Alexander Craig, who also held a degree from Leipzig, took over as professor of Oriental Languages in 1893, although his title was soon changed to professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures and Hellenistic Greek. Craig was an important pioneer in the fields of Assyriology and biblical studies, and published many new texts. This focus on ancient languages continued in 1915, when Leroy Waterman succeeded Craig as professor of Semitics. Since 1894 the unit had been called the Department of Semitics. Course offerings were expanded under Waterman’s leadership, with the addition of subjects into a curriculum in which language instruction had prevailed. Waterman himself conducted fieldwork in the Middle East, including archaeological excavations in Seleucia on the Tigris, a landmark event for the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology as well as the Department. Meanwhile, other faculty joined the Department, including William Hoyt Worrell in 1925, who taught Coptic and Arabic, and Caroline Williams, appointed in 1927 to teach the ancient Egyptian language as well as archaeology and art. In 1930 the unit changed its name again, to Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures. Now a small cluster of scholars taught a bewildering array of languages, including Sumerian and Hittite and then, during the Second World War, Chinese and Japanese. Writing in the early 1940s, Waterman Near Eastern Studies (2017) 7 expressed pride in the achievements of his small unit: “Special research activities by members of the department have resulted in the publication of thirteen volumes.” He also called attention to the manuscript collections under the Department’s purview, including Babylonian, Aramaic, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Arabic. Waterman retired in 1945 after 32 years of leadership. Worrell, his immediate successor as chair, retired two years afterward. At this point, the College of Literature, Science and the Arts wisely decided to separate the unit into two departments, called Near Eastern Studies and Far Eastern Languages and Literatures. In 1948 the College appointed George Cameron of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago as professor of Near Eastern Cultures. Cameron spent the fall semester of 1948 in Iraq and Iran as annual professor of the Baghdad School of the American Schools of Oriental Research; during this time he performed his famous epigraphical research on the inscriptions on the Bisitun Monument of Darius in Iran. Then, when Cameron arrived in Ann Arbor in early 1949, he was startled to hear from the dean: “I forgot to write you; you are not going into a Department of Oriental Languages, nor into History either; we have set up a new department—Near Eastern Studies.” When Cameron asked who would be joining him, he received the reply: “No one, we thought that you would like to tell us what we should do about the Near Eastern field; you’re the Chairman.” At that moment, in fact, Cameron was not only the chair, but the Department’s entire faculty. In any case, he rose to the occasion and announced his intention of not imitating the Oriental Institute that he had just left at the University of Chicago, with its exclusive focus on things ancient. “Our goal, instead,” he wrote, “should be to find a small nucleus of staff which would attempt to cover the ancient, medieval, and modern Near East in all its aspects.” This brief statement, which sets out the Department’s mission down to the present day, was unique at the time: no one until then had tried to build a fully interdisciplinary Near Eastern area studies department, and Cameron faced a daunting task. At the national level, Cameron soon became chairman of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on the Near East, with a vision encompassing the entire United States. Long 8 Near Eastern Studies

before interdisciplinarity became the familiar (if not always crystal clear) concept of recent times, Cameron made a radical break with the way these kinds of studies were conceptualized and organized. In fact, he was the first to realize a truly independent, American concept of Near Eastern studies, rooted in comparative and theoretical humanistic scholarship while integrating the social science disciplines of anthropology, sociology, economics, geography, and political science. In the summer of 1953, Cameron announced the beginning of what he rightly claimed was the “first truly interdisciplinary program ever presented on the Near East.” Practically speaking, this meant, first of all, that Cameron sought (and eventually achieved) coverage of the ancient, medieval, and modern languages and civilizations of the present day Arabic-, Persian- , Turkish-, and Hebrew-speaking lands, with at least one specialist in language, literature, and/or history on hand for each of these. By 1956 coverage extended to biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies, medieval and modern Near Eastern history and archaeology. Meanwhile, faculty and curricular offerings were gathered under the headings of geography, anthropology, economics, history, law, linguistics and languages, philosophy and religion and political science. Faculty were allocated to various departments, but Near Eastern Studies took the lead and had its own specialists in several of these fields. A number of these faculty emerged as leading figures in their fields over the next decades. By way of example, within the Department itself in the 1950s and 60s, George Hourani and George Makdisi were preeminent scholars in Arabic and Islamic studies over the next decades. Outside NES but closely affiliated with it during the same two decades, Oleg Grabar was outstanding in the history of art. Cameron looked beyond Michigan to support his vision of the field, and as early as 1952 he convinced the Ford Foundation to make its first-ever award to what would later be called an area studies program—a five-year grant of $100,000 for development of faculty and research. Among other things, this grant contributed to building one of the best Near Eastern library collections in the U.S., and it enabled Cameron to conduct a year-long interdisciplinary field session in Aleppo in Near Eastern Studies (2017) 9

1953 and 1954. Cameron also obtained funds from the Carnegie Endowment and from Aramco, which provided support for students hailing from the Middle East itself. Cameron and others led groups on research trips overseas, including one to Iraqi Kurdistan. When a Sputnik-spooked Congress passed the National Defense Education Act in 1958, the Department took advantage of the opportunity and prepared a set of proposals.To begin with, NDEA motivated faculty at major American universities to create interdisciplinary area studies centers. Leading the effort at Michigan was William Schorger, one of Cameron’s early hires in NES, an anthropologist with experience in Morocco and a man of uncommon energy, skill, and determination. Schorger headed a University-wide planning committee and led the project of submitting a proposal to the Ford Foundation, which resulted in a decade-long grant for research and training at Michigan for almost $1 million—a very large sum in 1960. This led to the creation in 1961 of a number of area studies centers, with Schorger heading a Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies—later renamed Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies (CMENAS). NES faculty were charged, through NDEA, with the development of instructional materials for modern Arabic, Persian, Kurdish and Pashto. Sixteen textbooks and other instructional materials resulted from this effort. The target languages eventually included, in addition to the four just mentioned, Modern Hebrew, Turkish and Tamazight (a Berber language). These books and materials were used by generations of students. In particular, textbooks for Kurdish (authored by Ernest McCarus) and Tamazight (authored by Ernest Abdel- Massih)—languages very rarely taught in the United States—are still in demand in the 21st century. In the summer of 1963, University authorities, against considerable opposition and protest, changed the name of the Department from “Near Eastern Studies” to “Near Eastern Languages and Literatures.” More was at stake here than a name. Cameron, still chair at this time, had articulated a vision that featured the integration of Near Eastern Studies in its more traditional (or, if you like, its 19th- and early-20th-century 10 Near Eastern Studies

European) conception, with a focus on philological and literary studies, together with empirical and methodological research in such fields as anthropology, economics, geography, sociology, and political science. With this move the College showed that it intended to push things in a different direction. For the newly renamed Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures (NELL), this meant the imposition of a boundary between specialists in language and literature on one side and historians, geographers, economists, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists on the other. Of these two, the former would be posted in the Department of NES while the latter, scattered throughout various academic units, would gather to work together at the Center. The context for this move isn’t difficult to see. The University was known, then as now, as a powerhouse in the social sciences, and its growing, prestigious social science departments wanted to coordinate their curricula and the working agendas of their faculty. There is no doubt that the creation of the area studies centers in the early 1960s reflected the view of many social scientists that the coordinating authority for these endeavor centers ought to reflect the changing mix of disciplines. However, the “area studies” problem was destined to reemerge again and again during the next decades. To look ahead for a moment: in 1973, the Department’s faculty would vote unanimously to change the name of the unit from “Near Eastern Languages and Literatures” back to “Near Eastern Studies.” This change was not merely cosmetic; it reflected the interdisciplinary goals of most of the faculty, who saw themselves as part of a larger community of scholars working on all aspects of Near Eastern cultures. This amounted to a return to Cameron’s original conception. When Cameron stepped down from the chairmanship in 1969, NELL/NES had 18 tenure-track faculty members on its roster, while 14 other regional specialists belonged to other departments. Within NES this configuration lasted, with remarkably few changes, for nearly two decades. As one of the leading Near Eastern departments and programs in North America, NES prospered under the leadership of the Arabic and Near Eastern Studies (2017) 11

Kurdish linguist Ernest McCarus (chair, 1969-77) and the Iranist polymath Gernot Windfuhr (1977-87). The Department’s Arabic section, recognized as one of the top two or three in the U.S., covered classical Arabic literature ( James Bellamy); modern Arabic literature (Trevor LeGassick); medieval Islamic history (Andrew Ehrenkreutz); and linguistics and instructional pedagogy (Raji Rammuny, Ernest McCarus, Ernest Abdel-Massih). The latter three, together with colleagues from outside Michigan, achieved international renown for a series of textbooks and materials for elementary and intermediate Arabic. Iranian studies in their full range were covered by Windfuhr (linguistics and literature) and K. Allin Luther (history and literature). The ancient Near East was the purview of Charles Krahmalkov (Semitics, biblical studies), Louis Orlin (ancient history, Assyriology), George Mendenhall (biblical studies, and Arabic as well), and Gene Schramm (Hebrew and Semitic linguistics). The internationally known biblical scholar David Noel Freedman came to Michigan in 1971; he directed the Program in Religion. Other faculty members had to work alone. Turkish and Turcology were the domain of James Stewart-Robinson; John Kolars came from Geography after the elimination of that department; and Edna Amir Coffin had sole responsibility for modern Hebrew language and literature, though eventually another slot was created for an assistant professor in this area. Like her Arabist colleagues, Coffin was a national leader in language instruction, authoring a widely-used textbook series for modern Hebrew and winning major grants for pioneering new methods and technologies. Courses in language pedagogy were instituted for prospective language teachers. In 1974 the U.S. headquarters for the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA), then (as later) the premier program for advanced training in Arabic language, housed at the American University in Cairo, went from the University of California, Berkeley to Michigan where it remained, under the directorship of Ernest McCarus, for a number of years. As already mentioned, three NES Arabists (together with non- Michigan colleagues including Peter Abboud of the University of Texas) jointly authored the Arabic textbooks that dominated 12 Near Eastern Studies

the field for decades—Elementary and Intermediate Modern Standard Arabic, universally known as “the Michigan books.” In retrospect, there is little question that George Cameron, who had the lion’s share of responsibility for hiring these scholars and organizing their efforts, also earned a large share of credit for their collective achievements. Credit must also go to his successors, McCarus and Windfuhr, who were completely aligned with Cameron’s agenda and mission. Windfuhr, a comparative linguist and an expert on the language, literature and religions of Iran in literally all historical periods, certainly saw things this way: that is, he thought that NES as a whole, together with its individual faculty, should integrate knowledge of several fields into a synthesis that scholars may now identify as humanist in the very best sense. No doubt Cameron, McCarus, and Windfuhr had to modify this vision over the years, but it proved to have lasting power. And just as there may have been some tension between Cameron and Schorger, there may also have been episodes of tension between Department and Center under subsequent leadership. On the whole, however, these two units worked harmoniously toward what were—and still are—common goals. After Cameron entered retirement in 1975, his own field, Assyriology, fell victim to budget cuts, somewhat ironically. Cameron’s prize student, Matthew Stolper, accepted the position as his replacement, but when Stolper moved on soon afterward to the University of Chicago, the College decided to let the position lapse. Then, however, after Cameron’s death in 1979, his widow Margaret Cameron endowed a new chair, with the result that Assyriology returned to NES, first with the appointment of Thorkild Jacobsen as Cameron Visiting Professor, then with the arrival of Piotr Michalowski in 1981 as the first regularly-installed George G. Cameron Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. This was one of only two major hires made between 1969 and 1986, the other being David Noel Freedman, as mentioned. Otherwise, the only tenure-track additions in these years were two assistant professors who did not remain. This level of stability in staffing, unusual then and unthinkable now, was both a result and a source of strength. Near Eastern philology Near Eastern Studies (2017) 13 coexisted happily with modern structural linguistics, literary and historical theory, and the study of religion, social theory, geography, and other areas. Many faculty members had affiliations and contacts with other departments such as History, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature. And as already mentioned, some of them were involved in research on applied linguistics and pedagogy, producing much-praised materials for an array of modern languages. At the same time, this stability reflected certain problems and no doubt contributed to certain others. Academic hiring no longer matched the heady pace of the 1950s and 1960s. The Iranian revolution of 1979 generated interest in the region, but it also brought considerable stress—not only intellectual but emotional—to some faculty, the Persianist Allin Luther in particular. And over the longer haul, Persian and Iranian studies in this country were destined to suffer from the lack of access to Iran for students and researchers, and from the generally negative tenor of U.S.-Iranian relations. Compounding all these problems were the era’s financial crises, especially in “rust belt” Michigan. These years saw the drying up of funds from the Middle East that had previously brought graduate students from the region. A new emphasis in LSA on undergraduate education made it necessary to revise the curriculum thoroughly. And all the while, a demographic time bomb was ticking in a department that by now consisted almost entirely of full professors. The Department’s leadership was aware of these problems and acted to anticipate and to mitigate them. New hires began in 1986, with the arrival of Peter Machinist as associate professor of Hebrew and Assyriology. Then, when Piotr Michalowski (the first Cameron Professor) became chair in 1987, he took advantage of every opportunity. The next few years saw the creation of a new cohort of assistant and associate professors, beginning in 1988 with Jarl Fossum (New Testament), then Michael Bonner (medieval Islamic history, succeeding Andrew Ehrenkreutz), Elliot Ginsburg ( Jewish thought), and upon Machinist’s departure for Harvard, Brian Schmidt (Hebrew Bible and Ancient Mediterranean West Asian Cultures). Accordingly, when NES underwent an internal and external 14 Near Eastern Studies

review in 1992, it could argue convincingly that it was undergoing a transition and that it had a forward-looking strategy. This view of the matter prevailed with LSA Dean Edie Goldenberg. In this way, NES and its leadership achieved a positive outcome at a difficult moment. The decade of the 1990s continued to feature growth and change. Leadership was entrusted to Norman Yoffee, an Assyriologist and anthropologist of high standing, who arrived from the University of Arizona in 1993 as professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies, and as the first chair of NES to come from outside the University since Cameron’s appointment in 1948. Upon his arrival, Yoffee called for a revision of the Department’s curriculum. A committee reviewed offerings, weeded out obsolete listings, and reformed the entire structure. To replace the welter of options then available, three divisions were created: Ancient Civilizations and Biblical Studies (ACABS); Hebrew and Judaic Cultural Studies (HJCS); and Arabic, Armenian, Persian, Turkish, and Islamic Studies (AAPTIS). Several longstanding members of NES entered retirement in the 1990s. Allin Luther’s premature death in 1996, after years of illness that he endured with courage and grace, was a severe blow. Meanwhile, new faculty continued to enter (and in a very few cases, to leave) in what seems, in comparison with the 1970s and 1980s, like a whirlwind of movement. The hiring spree of the mid-to-late 1990s brought Alexander Knysh (Islamic studies), Carol Bardenstein (Arabic Literature and Culture), Anton Shammas (Modern Middle Eastern Literature), Kathryn Babayan (Iranian History and Culture), Sherman Jackson (Islamic Studies, Law, Afro-American studies), and Gabriele Boccaccini (New Testament and Second Temple Judaism). It also brought the Hittite and Mesopotamian scholar Gary Beckman and the Egyptologists Terry Wilfong and Janet Richards, both of whom took joint positions with the Kelsey Museum. At the end of the decade, in 2000, the Department acquired a new Turcologist and Ottomanist, Gottfried Hagen, and a specialist in Rabbinic literature and the history of the Jews in Late Antiquity, Yaron Eliav. All these remained on the faculty at the time of the University’s bicentennial, with the exception Near Eastern Studies (2017) 15 of Jackson, who departed for the University of Southern California. Credit must go to Yoffee and his successor, Alexander Knysh (1998-2004) for bringing this new cohort into the Department, thus assuring its future, its high standard, and its international reputation. * * * September 11, 2001, constitutes a marker for the field of Near Eastern Studies, as for many other areas. Another, more local marker came in 2002, when NES underwent a comprehensive review, ten years after the previous one. Language instruction. Enrollments in Arabic language increased dramatically after 9/11, to no one’s surprise, and they would continue to rise until reaching a plateau about 2011. NES has also regularly taught four other modern languages, namely, Armenian, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish. Of these four, Hebrew has had the highest enrollments. All five modern language programs enjoy high prestige within the profession and are a source of great pride for the Department. They enroll many students, quite a few of whom then enter the departmental concentration and minor. Things had been different in earlier times, when NES offered a joyfully abundant variety of ancient, medieval, and modern languages while using more or less the same method for teaching all of them—a method that was predominantly textual and grammar-oriented. As early as the 1960s, NES was a pioneer in the movement away from this method, with the collaborative work culminating in Elementary and Intermediate Modern Standard Arabic, as well as with the textbooks authored or co- authored by Gernot Windfuhr for modern Persian, by Edna Amir Coffin for modern Hebrew, by Kevork Bardakjian for Armenian, by Ernest Abdel-Massih for Tamazight and for Egyptian colloquial Arabic and by Ernest McCarus for Kurdish. Student proficiency was, and very much still is, the goal of this approach. NES language faculty have also insisted that their students attain a high level of grammatical and textual skills. The trend for Near Eastern languages, as for other ones, has been toward professionalization. A few decades ago it was standard practice, at Michigan and elsewhere, to hire graduate students to teach modern languages at the elementary or 16 Near Eastern Studies

intermediate levels (whether as drill assistants or with primary responsibility for a class), even if their professional interests and plans did not focus on language teaching. Since then, this practice has become less common, as language instruction has emerged as a field and a discipline in its wno right. NES made an important advance in 2003 when it established a Mellon Lectureship in Arabic. This resulted from years of discussion between CMENAS and the Mellon Foundation and,,in the end, a significant contribution from LSA. The first Mellon Lecturer was the gifted, generous and witty Waheed Samy. Unfortunately and tragically, he died prematurely of a heart attack in early 2011, a severe loss to the Department. Since 2012, the Mellon Lecturer has been Martha Schulte-Nafeh, an experienced and dedicated language professional who supervises the first three years of instruction in Arabic. In modern Hebrew, since the retirement of Edna Coffin in the late 1990s, a cohort of four and five lecturers has handled the first three years of instruction with autonomy, professionalism, and a shared sense of responsibility, achieving uniformly outstanding results, while coordinating with the Department’s senior tenure-track Hebraist, Shachar Pinsker. Persian and Turkish are each taught by individual lecturers who show uncommon dedication, professionalism and skill. Armenian in all its varieties (Eastern, Western, and Classical) is taught by the master linguist Kevork Bardakjian, Manoogian Professor of Armenian Language and Literature. In Arabic the Department has relied for many years on a combination of tenure-track faculty, lecturers, and GSIs. But here, too, the movement has been steadily in the direction of professionalization — not only in the creation of the Mellon Lectureship but in the founding, during the decade of the 2000s, of two new degree programs, the M.A. in teaching Arabic, and the M.A. in Arabic for professional purposes. These programs, together with the Department’s Ph.D. program in Arabic, are taking the lead in building a strong cohort of Arabic instructors at the national level. In 2010, the Department welcomed Mohammad Alhawary as associate professor of Arabic linguistics and second language acquisition. This marked an important move forward in the Near Eastern Studies (2017) 17 professionalization of the teaching of Arabic and of NES language programs as a whole. Soon after 9/11, NES was invited to apply for status as an “Arabic Flagship.” This program, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, had the goal of bringing students to the highest possible level of proficiency in the target language. (In addition to Arabic, it covers Russian, Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Persian, and now Brazilian Portuguese.) At that time, the Flagship was designed for graduate students. It also carried an obligation that some considered onerous, namely, that students who accepted the fellowships would commit to a period of employment with the U.S. government, possibly (though not necessarily) in one of the intelligence agencies. This issue raised a storm among NES faculty; those who opposed Flagship pointed especially to the employment requirement. In the end, even though the chair of NES (Knysh) and the dean of LSA (Newman) were in favor, the Department decided, by majority vote, not to apply. The Flagship resurfaced in 2008, in a newer version aimed at undergraduates and carrying no obligation for students regarding their future employment. This time, the Department’s leading Arabist, Raji Rammuny, submitted a proposal, with the Department’s approval. The Department has run Flagship for several years, bringing a remarkable series of students to high proficiency, especially after a year of study in Alexandria. More recently, however, NES has encountered difficulties with Flagship and has lost out in the more recent cycles of grants. Regardless of this outcome, however, NES has instituted further changes in its Arabic curriculum, insisting even more on student proficiency and placing more emphasis on colloquial, in addition to standard, Arabic in speaking, writing, listening and understanding. Ancient Near East and Bible. This broad area enjoys considerable strength, to an unusual extent for a department that also has strong coverage of the medieval and modern periods. The Department has three Egyptologists, Richards and Wilfong, as already mentioned, who both hold joint appointments at the Kelsey Museum, and recently added a lecturer in Egyptology, effectively doubling the course offerings in this field. Mesopotamian studies went from three professors 18 Near Eastern Studies

to two since Yoffee’s retirement in 2010, with the two remaining Mesopotamianists, Michalowski and Beckman, being internationally-acclaimed specialists who are capable of covering many of the languages, history, literature and social structures of the ancient Near East. Now Beckman continues as specialist in Hittite and Bronze Age Syrian cultures, and C. Jay Crisostomo, who studies scribal cultures in Sumerian and Akkadian contexts, has succeeded Michalowski in 2015. Brian Schmidt handles Old Testament/Tanakh, including Biblical Hebrew. For quite a few years, NES faculty in ancient and biblical studies have called urgently for the appointment of a specialist in Aramaic. This refers to a gamut of closely related languages, belonging to the Semitic family of languages and extending in time from around 900 BCE until today, when “Neo-Aramaic” is still spoken in areas of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Aramaic was the primary spoken language during the time of the Assyrian and Persian empires and on the Mediterranean coast in later biblical times. Therefore, in one form or another it is relevant to most of the Department’s subsections or divisions; indeed, it is critical for all phases of Biblical Studies. For a time NES managed to have it taught by an excellent lecturer, but since funds ran out, Aramaic remains a gap in coverage. Until the departure of Jarl Fossum, Christian origins and early Christianity came under the familiar rubric of New Testament Studies. The arrival of Gabriele Boccaccini as assistant professor in 1996 initiated a conceptual change, apparent in his title of assistant professor (now professor) of New Testament and Second Temple Judaism. This approach received considerable reinforcement with the arrival in 2000 of Yaron Eliav, then assistant and now associate professor of Rabbinic literature and Jewish history of Late Antiquity. The formative periods of both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism can be viewed as a common history, against a shared backdrop of the Roman and Persian empires and of late antique society and religion as a whole. The arrival in 2009 of Ellen Muehlberger as assistant professor of Christianity in Late Antiquity marked another major step forward. Working with texts in a variety of languages (Syriac, Coptic, Greek), Muehlberger (whose appointment is shared with Near Eastern Studies (2017) 19

History) works in the context of Late Antique society, rather than of New Testament studies. Her book, Angels in Late Ancient Christianity (OUP, 2013), attracted much notice. Hebrew and Judaic Studies have flourished in the new millennium with the arrival of Shachar Pinsker, now associate professor of Hebrew literature and culture, and Maya Barzilai, assistant professor of Modern Hebrew and Jewish culture. This division of NES has maintained its strength in Hebrew literature throughout its long history, including Eliav’s work on rabbinic literature and Ginsburg’s focus on Jewish mystical literature of all periods. For the modern era, Pinsker and Barzilai emphasize the identity (or multiple identities) of Modern Hebrew as a language and literature in conversation with various counterparts, including Yiddish, German, Russian and English. They share this approach with a lively group of colleagues from Slavic, Germanic, English and Comparative Literature. With this active cohort, NES is developing one of the very best American programs in Modern Hebrew. Islamic history and civilization, the religion of Islam. Survey courses cover the religion of Islam as a whole, in addition to Sufism, Shi‘ism, Quranic studies, intellectual history and other topics. Alexander Knysh, an internationally acclaimed scholar of Sufism, carries most of this load. The departure of Sherman Jackson created a gap: the Department especially misses his introductory course on Islamic law. This division of NES also includes three historians, Michael Bonner, Kathryn Babayan and Erdem Cipa (the latter two with a .5 appointment in History). Bonner and Babayan work on the Islamic world before the modern era or right on its cusp. Their courses cover such topics as sexuality and gender; messianic movements; jihad; surveys of Islamic, Iranian, and North African history; economic history; and Arabic and Persian historical, biographical, and geographical texts. Cipa is an Ottoman historian completing a book on the early sixteenth-century Sultan Selim. He teaches courses on the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, an important topic that NES previously covered only intermittently. Gottfried Hagen, professor of Turkish and Ottoman Studies, has a wide range of interests and accomplishments, including the geographical literature in the 20 Near Eastern Studies

later Ottoman Empire and the life of the Prophet Muhammad as portrayed in a wide range of sources, from early Arabic to late Ottoman. Literary matters. The study of Armenian language and literature at Michigan has its home in NES, through the work of Kevork Bardakjian, Manoogian Professor of Armenian language and literature, who moved to the Department from Slavic. (This move made eminent sense: the Armenian language is Indo- European but not Slavic, and by any measure it and its related culture is entirely Near Eastern.) Bardakjian teaches, by himself, the entire gamut of Armenian literature, in its three main forms (Western, Eastern, and Classical), offering elementary and intermediate level Armenian language, topical surveys, and advanced reading courses. Arabic literature occupies the attention of more NES faculty than any other single area. After James Bellamy’s retirement, the Department for many years did not have a specialist in classical Arabic literature, but other faculty (Knysh, Bonner, Alhawary, Rammuny, LeGassick, Bardenstein) performed bits and pieces of this task. This changed with the arrival of Samer Ali as associate professor of Arabic literature in 2015. In modern Arabic, the Department has notable strength. The well-known novelist and critic Anton Shammas teaches advanced classes in both Arabic and English. Carol Bardenstein offers classes on Near Eastern film, Palestine-Israel in literature, and a survey of Arab culture, in addition to the Arabic language itself. Trevor LeGassick, in NES since Cameron’s days, teaches surveys of Arabic literature in all periods. Other members of the faculty in other areas also teach and write about literature, in particular Beckman and another recent hire, Cameron Cross, assistant professor Persian literature, who specializes in medieval epics, with a strong comparative emphasis. Community relations, grants and gifts. The greater Detroit area has the most significant community of Arabs and Arab- Americans in the Western Hemisphere. It also has representatives of almost all the other ethnic and religious communities that relate to the Department’s work. Accordingly, the Department has cultivated relations with these various Near Eastern Studies (2017) 21 communities. Time and space are lacking here for more than a sampling of events and programs, most of them recent. The Department has been fortunate to have an endowed fund for the support of graduate students in Islamic studies (conceived and defined very broadly). This fund was the gift of Professor George Hourani, a member of NES from 1950 to 1967 and a distinguished scholar of Islamic philosophy, religion, and civilization. Since 2000, and under the leadership of Gabriele Boccaccini, the Department has been involved with the Enoch Seminar, an international group of specialists in Second Temple Judaism and Christian origins. The Seminar convenes every other year, most often in Italy. In Ann Arbor, the Department coordinates—again, through Boccaccini’s efforts—with the Michigan Center for Early Christian Studies, a major interdisciplinary center for the study of Christian origins. In fall 2011, NES hosted a visit by Tawakkul Karman, the Yemeni activist who had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. The event was a great success and helped to improve the Department’s visibility in the Arab-American community. In the following spring, NES received a visit from the Kuwaiti philanthropist ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Sa‘ud al-Babtain; eventually this resulted in the Department receiving a grant that enabled it to teach courses on Arabic poetry, to send students overseas for Arabic training, and to host a highly visible lecture series, among other things. In the late 1990s, Marjorie Fisher, an NES Ph.D. in Egyptology who has also taught in the Department as a lecturer, formed the Friends of Near Eastern Studies, a group which has raised funds to support graduate students working on the ancient Near East, an invaluable support in times of decreasing funds. Friends of NES has invited a series of distinguished scholars to address its membership, and has brought groups on archaeology-centered trips to Egypt and Southeast Asia. In 2016 NES received and even more generous gift, as Marjorie Fisher endowed a lecturer position in Egyptology in her name; the first holder of the position is Katherine Davis. In 2016, NES organized the first George Mendenhall Symposium in Law, Religion, and Society of the Near East, 22 Near Eastern Studies

supported by the family of this eminent scholar of Biblical Studies, who unfortunately passed away only a few weeks before the event, just shy of his 100th birthday. A gift from the family will enable the Department to hold Mendenhall Symposia every three years in the future. James Bellamy, the great Arabist who had retired from NES in 1995, passed away in 2015, and bequeathed to the department funds for an endowed professorship in Arabic studies, effectively assuring that his own specialization will enjoy permanence in the Department. The first James A. Bellamy Professor will be hired in 2017. Bellamy’s bequest also provides significant support orf graduate studies. Infrastructure. For many years NES was housed in the Frieze Building, a former high school that became increasingly run down and, in the minds of some, dilapidated. In 2007, many were overjoyed when the Department vacated the Frieze and moved across the street to the new Thayer Building. Since then, opinion has been divided about Thayer. Some say that it inhibits teaching and interaction among faculty, and that its acoustic engineering is poor. Others, however, maintain that the architects made the best of an awkward location, as the building had to be crammed into a narrow space between a street corner and a parking garage, and that it has the merit of maximizing the natural light available for offices and meeting places. Unlike its newer and much larger neighbor, North Quad, Thayer presents a thoroughly modern look in its design and materials, thus encouraging viewers and visitors to think creatively and non-nostalgically about the present and future. Not long before this move, NES received the personal library of the late Professor George Makdisi. Born in Detroit and educated in the U.S., Lebanon, and France, Makdisi was one of Cameron’s early hires in the 1950s. Makdisi left Michigan for Harvard and then the University of Pennsylvania, where he concluded a distinguished career as a historian of Islamic intellectual life, institutions, and education. All along, Makdisi harbored a fondness for Ann Arbor and NES, and the Department was extremely fortunate to acquire a marvelous collection of books that contains Makdisi’s precise notes and that spans the entire range of Arabic and Islamic studies. The Near Eastern Studies (2017) 23 collection also includes a valuable set of microfilms. Since the move to Thayer, the Makdisi Collection, together with the Department’s other holdings, has been housed on the third floor. Soon afterward the Department received a further gift of books and manuscripts from George Makdisi’s son, John Makdisi. Recent changes and reorganizations. Toward the end of the 2000s, all units were called upon to make significant cuts in their budgets. NES had few options. The chair, Gary Beckman, saw that there was no choice other than to sacrifice one of the Department’s already scarce allocations of funding for graduate students. As a result, NES now admits an even smaller number of graduate students each year—a number that was already too small. However, NES’s situation in this matter is quite different from that of humanities departments that agonize over how to help their new Ph.D.s find employment. In NES, nearly every new Ph.D. finds academic employment. This applies especially to Islamic (religious) studies, Islamic history, and modern language instruction; the situation may be somewhat more difficult in other areas, but newly minted Ph.D.s find academic jobs there, too. This situation was also affected by developments regarding the Cameron Fund, which is the endowment supporting the professorship until 2016 occupied by Piotr Michalowski, and now by Gary Beckman. Since the endowment produced considerably more income each year than was required for the professorship, the Department used to deploy some of the excess money for funding graduate students working on the ancient Near East. The College, however, put an end to this practice in in 2006. The Ancient Near East division of the Department suffers especially from this shortage of graduate students. Meanwhile, this sacrifice of a graduate student funding slot alleviated but didn’t resolve the problem of reducing the departmental budget. This and other considerations induced Michael Bonner, who became chair in 2010, to undertake a review and reform of NES curriculum, the first since 1993. In April 2013, after much deliberation, the Department agreed to change its concentration and minor in favor of a more 24 Near Eastern Studies

comprehensive and flexible model. It first sought to refine its curricular divisions, which instead of three became five, but in 2015 it abolished the divisions in the curriculum altogether (they remain in place for administrative purposes) and created one new concentration for the entire Department, within which students now are free to select a language specialization and a disciplinary focus (e.g. history, religion, literature, visual culture). This move has been flanked by an initiative to create new undergraduate courses which straddle the linguistic and chronological boundaries of the old divisions. Meanwhile, NES faced (and still faces) the problem of small sections. It is entirely understandable that a department offering such subjects as Sumerian and Ottoman Turkish is going to run a certain number of small classes, and no one has any intention for NES to abandon this practice. However, the overall ratio of student credit hours to sections (or courses) taught needed examination and has proved susceptible to improvements, so that the overall numbers are already more favorable than before. In this way NES faculty can continue to teach small classes where and when they need to. Administration and staffing. Throughout most of the 1980s and 1990s, Jane Hansen held the position that at some point came to be called “key administrator.” A long series of chairs owed her a significant debt. Sometime after Hansen’s departure, her place was taken by Lisa Michelin, who did an incomparable job as key administrator over ten years until her departure for the International Institute in 2013. During that time, NES, like other units, has entered the world of shared services, moving its business operations into a shared services office across the street in the Modern Languages Building in 2012. In the same spirit, in late 2013 Nikki Gastineau, key administrator for the upstairs neighbor Asian Languages and Cultures also took on the same role for NES. In the course of the following year, all staff positions became shared between the two departments. Faculty were apprehensive initially, but have come to appreciate the benefits of efficient administration and student services under Gastineau’s innovative leadership. Area and international studies in the Near Eastern context. In this brief history of NES over the past century and a half, George Near Eastern Studies (2017) 25

Cameron has had the central role. Cameron intended for the Department to combine expertise in the more traditional version or form of Near Eastern Studies (as it was understood at that time), together with other disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. The founding of CMENAS in 1961, under William Schorger’s leadership, marked a move in a different direction, in that NES would contribute expertise in language and literature, while other units were providing regional experts from their disciplines. As an interdisciplinary meeting place, CMENAS never had and was never meant to have its own permanent faculty. But despite a degree of contradiction within this arrangement, these two visions (Cameron’s and Schorger’s) coexisted, productively on the whole, for many years. Once again, the new millennium and 9/11 provide a marker in time, a harbinger of unexpected change. In fall 1999, CMENAS submitted its proposal for a grant as an NRC (National Research Center) and a recipient of FLAS (Foreign Language Area Studies) fellowships for graduate students. This was a more or less routine event, taking place at that time once every three years (now every four). In spring 2000, however, to everyone’s surprise, CMENAS found that the U.S. Department of Education had ended its status as an NRC under Title VI, and had reduced its allocation of FLAS fellowships. In the event, the damage was undone, though under unhappy circumstances: in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, CMENAS was reinstated as an NRC, and in the following competition for NRC and FLAS grants, in 2003, its proposal did better than everyone else’s, with only one exception (the University of Texas). Nonetheless, this episode raised some difficult questions. One of these came up in a conversation that the then-director of CMENAS, Michael Bonner, had with U.S. Department of Education representatives in Washington in the summer of 2000. “If the University of Michigan is such a powerhouse in the social sciences,” Bonner asked, “then where are the social sciences in all this?” At this time some departments—notably History and Anthropology—were close partners with both CMENAS and NES, but some other social science departments were not. Since then this situation has improved, but only in part. Comprehensive coverage of the region, especially in its contemporary aspects, remains elusive, 26 Near Eastern Studies

even as student demand for this coverage has increased. In the era of the Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war, and tumultuous events throughout the region, this remains an enormous problem. What can be done? CMENAS has seen decreases in its funding from the U.S. Department of Education for almost ten years, through no fault of its own, and like other University area studies centers that rely on federal funding and that are based in the International Institute, it faces an uncertain future. The answer may be that the Department of NES must step forward to deal with the situation. The vision that George Cameron first expressed over sixty years ago, and which has provided the Department’s basic framework ever since, needs to be studied anew and reinterpreted creatively. If this were to happen, then both NES and the leadership of the College would probably conclude that NES must focus more on the contemporary world than it has so far. At the same time, they would agree that NES must maintain its past and current strengths in the languages, literatures, history, economy, politics, cultures, and civilizations of the Near East, a region that has now moved into the center of world events, as it has already done so many times in the past.