The Seminar Series is a weekly lecture and discussion organized by the Near Eastern Studies Department and Program. Prominent scholars, journalists, diplomats and others are invited to to speak on a range of topics relating to the Middle East, North Africa, the Caucasus, Central Asia, 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. If an event is Hybrid, the registration link can be found in the announcement for each event on this page.
Conveners 2024-2025: Eve Krakowski
Upcoming Events
Sacha Stern is Professor of Jewish Studies at University College London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. This term he is Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. An ancient historian by training, his research focuses on late antique and early medieval Jewish history, with a focus on the history of calendars and time reckoning, on…
C. Ceyhun Arslan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Koç University and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at EUME and Saarland University. His book, The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures, has been published by Edinburgh University Press. He is working on a…
Jonathan Marc Gribetz, Professor of Near Eastern Studies, will speak about his newly published monograph Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy (Princeton University Press, 2024).
Jonathan Marc Gribetz is a Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and in the Program in Judaic Studies…
Ramona Teepe is a PhD candidate in the fields of Coptic and Arabic studies at Yale University. Her research focuses on the shift from Coptic to Arabic in Egypt and the development of the Coptic grammatical tradition in the 13th-century as exemplified by muqaddimāt.
In this talk I will share my knowledge on the…
Muhammad U. Faruque is the Inayat Malik Associate Professor and a Taft Center Fellow at the University of Cincinnati and a former Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. His award-winning book Sculpting the Self (University of Michigan Press, 2021) addresses “what it means to be human” in a secular,…
Ahmad Al-Jallad is a philologist, epigraphist, and historian of language. His work focuses on the languages, writing systems, history, and cultures of pre-Islamic Arabia and the ancient Near East.
His latest book reconstructs the religion and rituals of Arabia’s pre-Islamic tribespeople: “The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of…
Michael Christopher Low is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. Low is the author of Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (Columbia University Press, 2020). In 2021, Imperial Mecca received the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani…
Tehseen Thaver is Assistant Professor of Religion at Princeton University. In addition to her book Beyond Sectarianism: Ambiguity, Hermeneutics, and the Formations of Religious Identity in Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), her articles have appeared at venues such as the Journal of the American Academy…
Lacy Feigh is the Link-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and History at Princeton University. A historian of modern Ethiopia and the greater Nile Valley, her research focuses on legacies of slavery, empire, and constructions of race in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her…