ANNUAL REPORT: KING FAHD CENTER FOR MIDDLE EAST & ISLAMIC STUDIES MIDDLE EAST STUDIES PROGRAM Submitted by Joel Gordon, Professor of History and Director of Middle East & Islamic Studies July 2011 TABLE OF CONTENTS Overview Curriculum King Fahd Center Activities – AY 2010-11 King Fahd Center Activities/Projects -- Ongoing Budget/Expenditures Graduate Student Support Undergraduate Student Support Faculty News Faculty Outreach Graduate Student News Undergraduate Student News Alumni News Looking Ahead OVERVIEW The King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies is an interdisciplinary program in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, dedicated to the study of the Middle East and the geo-cultural area in which Islamic civilization prospered, and continues to shape world history. Faculty members associated with the Center are rooted in degree-granting departments in Fulbright College and the broader University of Arkansas. We specialize in history and politics, literature and popular culture, religious and secular practice and interpretation, 1 human engagement with the environment and ecosystem in contemporary times and antiquity. We work in diverse media: poetry and fiction, public archives, film and music, television and oratory, curricular instruction and cartography, the detritus of the past and the cultural production, classical and colloquial, artistic and vulgar, of the present. The Center offers an undergraduate co-major linked to regional language study and supports the best of our undergrads with scholarships. Many of our undergraduates go on to graduate study in area studies programs and related professional work in public and private spheres. At the graduate level the Center supports students working in key disciplines towards the MA and PhD. Our graduate students have received highly competitive fellowships to support research and foreign language study, and have presented their work at annual professional meetings and specialized academic conferences. Many are now teaching at academic institutions here and abroad – ‘research one’ universities, metropolitan universities and liberal arts colleges – and are affiliated with research institutes or government agencies. The current academic year was marked by a number of transitions and achievements that promise to represent watersheds in the Center’s growth. In July 2010 the Center hired Mahfuza Akhtar, previously Administrative Specialist II, to replace Suz Wall (retired) as Administrative Support Supervisor, and Laila Taraghi, a Masters student in Political Science to serve as Program Assistant. At the urging of Fulbright College, we consolidated our administrative offices in Old Main 202. We retained an office in Old Main 104 for visitors; Old Main 105, the prior office of the Administrative Support Supervisor, was delegated to the History and Political Science departments for graduate teaching assistants working in primary or secondary fields in Middle East studies. In January 2011 – in between blizzards and amidst the growing surge of revolutionary politics in the Middle East – the King Fahd Center hosted a major convocation of scholars of contemporary Syria to discuss the legacies of the decade since the death of Hafez al-Asad and the succession of his son Bashar. The gathering of internationally prominent scholars and human rights activists, co-sponsored by the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a US-based NGO, consisted of a public forum and a private workshop. Organizers hope to pursue a major edited volume. The Center also hosted a distinguished visiting scholar in residence for the Spring 2011 semester. Kenneth L Brown (see below) participated in Center-sponsored events, including the Syria convocation, a number of public forums, and offered a topics course on Mediterranean Cities for undergraduates. At the curricular level, the Center moved to more actively pursue the creative use of advanced graduate students to teach topics courses in their areas of specialization, freeing up core faculty for other courses and providing the opportunity for students to teach beyond general department requirements. In one case, the Center was able to sponsor a course – in modern Iranian literature – that had never been offered and that greatly enhanced the curricular spread of the program at both graduate and undergraduate levels. 2 The Center maintained a vigorous program of guest speakers across disciplines and Center faculty participated in forums on campus and took their expertise off campus to local/regional, national, and international forums. With the sudden emergence of the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, especially, MEST faculty assumed an even larger than usual role in public outreach – in addition to teaching and ongoing research agendas. The upsurge of revolutionary politics in the region led to the cancellation or redefinition of some Center-sponsored projects, and the re-routing of some undergraduate and graduate study/research plans, sometimes pushing deadlines for recruitment and reasonable airfare. Overall, however, the changes in the Middle East, as well as the ongoing development of curricular programming at the University, made for an exciting, productive year. Much of this will be treated below. As a capstone to the academic year the Center launched its web site. In accord with general University and Fulbright College guidelines, yet with its own unique look, this site should hopefully serve as a valuable reference for faculty and students, prospective and current, and others who seek information about our program, people, and profile. CURRICULUM MEST Core Faculty Core MEST Faculty members are full-time tenured/tenure-track faculty members whose salaries are paid in full or in part by the King Fahd Center, plus several full-time tenured/tenure-track faculty members and a full-time instructor who make substantial contributions to the MEST curriculum/program through teaching and mentoring students. The Center is pleased to add Nikolai Antov, the new tenure-track hire in History, to its list. Nikolai Antov (Assistant Professor of History): Pre-Modern/Classical Middle East/Islamic History, Ottoman History Jesse Casana (Associate Professor of Anthropology): Archaeology of the Ancient Orient and Medieval Near East, Cultural Heritage Preservation Mounir Farah (Professor of Curriculum and Instruction): Pedagogy and Curriculum Development, Educational Reform, Social Sciences, US-Middle East Relations Najib Ghadbian (Associate Professor of Political Science): Arab World Politics and International Relations, Islamic Movements Joel Gordon (Professor of History, Director King Fahd Center): History of the Modern Middle East, Popular Culture, Film and Media Adnan Haydar (Professor of Foreign Languages): Arabic Language Pedagogy, Comparative Literature, Middle East Literature, Arab Poetics, Translation Theory 3 Paula Haydar (Instructor of Foreign Languages): Arabic Language Pedagogy, Comparative Literature, Translation Theory, Modern Arabic Literature Mohja Kahf (Associate Professor of English): Comparative Literature, Pre-modern Islamicate Literature, Modern Arab/Islamic/Diaspora Literature Thomas Paradise (Professor of Geography): Cultural and Physical Geography of the Middle East and North Africa, Cartography, Natural/Cultural Resource and Architectural Management/Preservation Jerome Rose (Professor of Anthropology): Biological Anthropology, Bio-Archaeology, Forensic Archaeology Ted Swedenburg (Professor of Anthropology): Cultural Anthropology of the Middle East/Islamic World, Popular Culture, Social and Critical Theory Courses Taught AY 2009-10 Faculty members are currently able to teach approximately fifteen undergraduate and combined undergraduate-graduate courses across the core disciplines per semester. Summer course offerings have been minimal, although we have been fortunate to have steady offerings in colloquial Arabic. Those numbers will rise with the addition of Nikolai Antov, the new historian of Islamic history. Professor Antov will be teaching two MEST core courses in the coming Fall semester. The number of MEST courses offered has also been supplemented by a more creative approach to utilizing advanced graduate students and, in Spring 2011, by the visiting appointment of a distinguished guest scholar, Kenneth Brown, who taught a course on Mediterranean Cities, cross-listed with Anthropology and History. The following courses were offered between Summer 2010 and Summer 2011 Summer 2010: ANTH 4256 (Casana), PLSC 3523 (Ghadbian), WLLC 398V (P Haydar), WLIT 3893 (Kahf) Fall 2010: ARAB 1016 (2 sections/P Haydar), ARAB 3016 (A Haydar), ARAB 4023 (A Haydar), ARAB 470V (A Haydar), ANTH 3033 (Chapman), ANTH 4123 (Casana), ANTH 4913 (Swedenburg), HIST 5213 (Gordon), MEST 2013 (Kahf), PLSC 4593 (Ghadbian), WLIT 3983 (Kahf) Spring 2011: ARAB 2016 (2 sections/P Haydar), ARAB 4016 (A Haydar), ARAB 4033 (A Haydar), ARAB 470V (A Haydar), ANTH 3033 (Chapman), ANTH 3903/HIST 3983 (Brown), ANTH 4533 (Swedenburg), HIST 4433 (Gordon), MEST 4003/H (Kahf), PLSC 3523 (Ghadbian), PLSC 5513 (Ghadbian), WLIT 3983 (Bassiri), WLIT 3983 (Natour) Summer 2011: ARAB/WLLC 398V 4 Fall 2011: ARAB 1016 (2 sections/P Haydar), ARAB 3016 (A Haydar), ARAB 4023 (A Haydar), ARAB 470V (A Haydar), ANTH 3033 (Chapman), ANTH 3923H/4193 (Swedenburg), GEOG 4033 (Paradise), HIST 3033 (Antov), HIST 3043 (Akturk), HIST 3983 (Antov), HIST 4983 (Gordon), MEST 2013 (Ghadbian), PLSC 400V (Kapur), PLSC 4843 (Ghadbian), WLIT 3983 (Bassiri), WLIT 3983 (Kahf), Major/Minor Requirements and