On Monday, August 29, Yaara Perlman successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, “Family Relations and Politics in Early Islam.”

Cecilia Palombo, who earned her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies in 2020, has been hired to teach the History of Early Islam until 1250 in Chicago’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Palombo, whose advisor was Michael Cook, wrote her dissertation on “The Christian Clergy’s Islamic Local Government in Late Marwanid and Abbasid…

Patricia Blessing's new book, Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire, has been published by Cambridge University Press as an e-book.

Bayard Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Hossein Modarressi’s latest book, Text and Interpretation: Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and His Legacy in Islamic Law, has been published by Harvard University Press.

Varak Ketsemanian successfully defended his doctoral dissertation.

Seventh-year Ph.D. student Samin Rashidbeigi has been awarded a 2022 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

Shimon Shamir, (Ph.D. 1961), professor emeritus of Middle East history at Tel Aviv University, has been awarded the Israel Prize in the field of Middle Eastern Studies for 2022.

Three NES graduate students and one NES alumna were awarded 2022 Flash Grants by the Humanities Council.

Near Eastern Studies held its first in-person Class Day since 2019 on May 23, 2022. During the celebration, the Department and Program announced departmental honors and presented this year’s prize winners.

NES senior concentrator Ethan Kahn has been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Kahn previously was a recipient of the 2018-2019 Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence and named a 2022 Scholars in the Nation’s Service Initiative graduate scholar. The Phi Beta Kappa Society, founded in 1776 and the oldest of all national honorary scholastic societies…