News

Oualdi’s A Slave Between Empires Earns Nikki Keddie Book Award Honorable Mention
Oct. 15, 2020

A Slave Between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa (Columbia University Press, 2020) by M’hamed Oualdi, a former member of the Near Eastern Studies faculty, was…

Cook Receives 2020 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award
Sept. 28, 2020
Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies Michael A. Cook has been awarded the 2020 Middle East Medievalists Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of long and distinguished contributions to the fields of Islamic and Middle East Studies and to the promotion of the profession at large.
Haeley Ahn ’21 elected to Phi Beta Kappa
Sept. 21, 2020

NES concentrator Haeley Ahn ’21 has been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. “The Phi Beta Kappa Society [was] founded in 1776 and [is] the oldest of all national honorary scholastic societies…. Election to [the Princeton] chapter is based on scholastic standing and is open to candidates for the A.B. and B.S.E. degrees in their senior year…

Virtual NES, Part 1: “Jerusalem Contested”
June 25, 2020

With the switch to remote learning by Princeton University following the outbreak of the coronavirus, professors throughout the university had to suddenly adapt their syllabi to the new reality. Featured below is one such example, NES221/JDS223, Jerusalem Contested,” taught by associate professor Jonathan Gribetz.

The story,…

NES Celebrates Class Day 2020
June 4, 2020

Near Eastern Studies held its first virtual Class Day on June 1, 2020. During the celebration the Department and Program announced departmental honors and presented this year’s prize winners. Following opening remarks by NES Chair M. Qasim Zaman, Director of Undergraduate Studies Jonathan Gribetz

Zaman Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
May 1, 2020

Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Robert H Niehaus ’77 Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Religion and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Zaman, who joined the Princeton faculty in 2006, has written on the relation­ship between religious…
Art and Archaeology Department Hires Assistant Professor in Islamic Art and Archaeology
April 28, 2020

The Princeton University Board of Trustees approved the appointment of Patricia Blessing-Yaycioglu, a specialist in Islamic art and Archaeology, as an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology, effective this summer. Blessing-Yaycioglu received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2012 and has been a…

New Publication by Lara Harb
April 24, 2020

Assistant Professor Lara Harb's new book, Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature, has been published by Cambridge University Press. Arabic Poetics offers an answer to what the question "What makes language beautiful?" looked like at the height of the Islamic civilization. In this novel argument,…

Leor Halevi ’94 Wins Guggenheim
April 21, 2020

Leor Halevi, who earned his Princeton B.A. in Near Eastern Studies, has won a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship for a book project exploring “how Saudi originalists known as Salafists formulated an ethic in response to globalization.” Halevi, who received his Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from…

NES Dissertations on Infectious Diseases
April 17, 2020

Near Eastern Studies is not a field that one normally associates with medicine, infectious diseases, or public health, but if you are looking for some Middle East-related reading to pass the time during this Covid-19 stay-at-home period, check out the following NES dissertations. In 1971 Michael Dols finished his…