The Seminar Series is a weekly lecture and discussion organized by the Near Eastern Studies Department and Program. Leading scholars in the field are invited to speak on a range of topics relating to the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Previously called the “Brown Bag Lunch Talks,” the series has been running since the 1970’s. It meets on Mondays at noon while the university is in session. The events are open to the public and usually take place in Jones Hall 202. Our events will take place virtually in 2021–22. Registration links can be found in the announcement for each event on this page.
Convener 2022-2023: Michael Reynolds
To view NESS Webinar Recordings, click here.
Upcoming Events
Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer is an Assistant Professor of History at New York University. Her area of expertise is the early modern Ottoman and Safavid Empires. Her publications examine empire formation in the Middle East and its enmeshment with sectarian, geo-political, and fiscal…
Ali Gibran Siddiqui is the Leon B. Poullada Postdoctoral Research Associate in Central Asian Studies at the Department of Near Eastern Studies. As a historian of Islamic Central Asia, he is interested in the economic, political, and social lives of Naqshbandi Sufis in the Timurid and Mughal Empires…
Arman Grigoryan is Associate Professor in the International Relations Department of Lehigh University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University, and an MA from the University of Chicago. Professor Grigoryan specializes in interventions, ethnonationalist…
Robert Ford finished a 30-year career with the Peace Corps and the U.S. Department of State in 2014 and now is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, where he writes and speaks about Syria, Iraq and North Africa. Ford has since 2016 also been a fellow at the Jackson…
Morgan Liu is Chair and Associate Professor of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University, with a Ph.D. in anthropology from The University of Michigan. He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows and serves 2019-2022 in the…
Alison M. Vacca is Gevork M. Avedissian Associate Professor of Armenian History and Civilization at Columbia University. Her work relies on Arabic and Armenian sources to explore the history of the Umayyad and early ʿAbbasid North (Armenia and Caucasian Albania). Her…
Olivier Bouquet is professor of Ottoman history at Université Paris Cité and research fellow at the CESSMA (Centre for Social Sciences Studies on the African, American and Asian Worlds). He is the author of many books, including Les Pachas du Sultan (Peeters, 2007;
Gabriel Said Reynolds is Crowley Professor of Islamic Studies and Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of The Qur’an and the Bible: Text and Commentary (Yale 2018) and Allah: God in the Qur’an (Yale 2020). He also hosts a…
Richard Talbert is now Research Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, after a long career of learning ancient history at Cambridge (PhD 1972), and then teaching it in Northern Ireland, Canada and Chapel Hill. Romans’ consciousness of space and time,…