It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of former Near Eastern Studies Department manager Mary Craparotta on January 11, 2020. Employed by the university for thirty-seven years, she served as the Near Eastern Studies Program manager for many years before becoming in 1987 the NES Department manager, a position she held until her…

Khedouri A Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East Marina Rustow’s new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue, has been published by Princeton University Press. “Illustrated with stunning examples from the Cairo Geniza, this compelling book advances our understanding of documents as physical…

The Balzan Seminar seeks to bring together an internationally recruited group of eight to ten early-career scholars working on topics related to the formation, maintenance, and failure of states in the various regions of the Muslim world prior to 1800 and to include in the group two early-career scholars working on…

Keiko Kiyotaki, an Associate Research Scholar in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, has published Ottoman Land Reform in the Province of Baghdad with Brill (2019). In the book, Kiyotaki traces the Ottoman reforms of tax farming and land tenure and establishes that their effects…

Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies Michael A. Cook has been awarded the 2019 Balzan Prize for Islamic Studies by the International Balzan Foundation, whose “aim is to promote culture, the sciences and the most meritorious initiatives in the cause of humanity, peace…

Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies Michael A. Cook was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Literature (DLitt) by the University of St Andrews in a ceremony held this morning, June 27, 2019. The citation read in part, “Michael’s contribution to the entire field, from Islam’s genesis to the present, displays a mastery of…

Near Eastern Studies held its 2019 Class Day reception in Studio 34, Butler College, on June 3. At the reception the Department and Program announced departmental honors and presented this year’s prize winners. Following opening comments by NES Chair M. Qasim Zaman, Departmental Representative Eve…

Near Eastern Studies concentrator Noah Hastings ’19 has been elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the oldest of all national honorary scholastic societies. “Election to this chapter is based on scholastic standing and is open to candidates for the A.B. and B.S.E. degrees in their senior year. The chapter generally…

Princeton University’s Board of Trustees has approved the promotion of Assistant Professor M’hamed Oualdi to Associate Professor with tenure, effective July 1, 2019. Oualdi, who has been at Princeton since 2013, is a historian of North Africa whose research has centered on two main topics: slavery and its social…