About Our Program
The Middle East Studies degree is designed to provide students with language and cultural competence in the region of the Middle East that can become the foundation for careers in public affairs, public service, business, and many other fields. Students are strongly encouraged to combine the Middle East Studies Major with a major in another discipline so that upon graduation they have acquired a foundation of career-oriented skills as well as a high degree of global competency.
Information & Announcements
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May 1st, 2024 We have been horrified by the unending violence and humanitarian crisis still unfolding
in Gaza. While we do not share all the same perspectives on the conflict, the harrowing
images emerging from Israel and Gaza have shocked our collective conscience.
All year, our Middle East Center has sought to facilitate hard, serious conversations
necessary to bring about sustainable change. We’ve brought world-class faculty to
Utah. We’ve built a curriculum and a culture deeply grounded in the history, languages,
and injustices of the region. We’ve given a platform to rigorous, hard-hitting scholars
who’ve been able to navigate these complexities and nuances with integrity.
We’ve given our students the space and guidance to wrestle with the big questions
that define this seemingly intractable conflict. Instead of accelerating into confrontation,
we’ve done the slow, methodical, incremental work of education.
And we’ve built a curriculum and a culture on the foundation that peace is not a slogan;
that it takes hard work, and intense self-reflection; that it can only be attained
by asking ourselves what rights and freedoms we must accord each other in order to
safeguard our own.
This is the continuing mission of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah.
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Why Study the Middle East?
Middle East Studies News & Featured Events
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Lamia Balafrej
Medieval Siri: Replicating Histories of Gender, Automation and Representation - April 17 - 4:30-5:30 - ART 158
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Gaming the Middle East: History and Humanists in the Gaming Industry
Tuesday, April 16, 2pm-3:30pm, Gould Auditorium, Level 1, J. Willard Marriott Library
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2024 Dolowitz Lecture in Human Rights - Writing History in a Time of War: Afterlives of Israel's 1982 Lebanon Invasion - March 21, 2024 - 12:30-2:30 - UMFA
Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon was a pivotal moment in global history, transforming the fate of Palestinian self-determination, Lebanese and Israeli politics, Israel's regional relationships, diaspora Jewish perceptions of Zionism, and western policy across the Arab world. Yet it has often been elided in public discourse and scholarshipâa result of selective amnesia, political convenience, and the difficulty of research across national divides. In a contemporary moment of profound ruptureâand especially in light of the ongoing war in Gazaâhow can we make sense of this contested past and its multiple legacies?
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Asad Q. Ahmed - The Logic of Impossibles and Islamic Theology
February 29, 2024 - 12pm-1pm - Hinckley Caucus Room Postclassical logic in the Islamic world was deeply concerned with the celebrated Avicennan (d. 1037) distinction between essence and existence, which, in part, was meant to explain the fact of a contingent world. A major issue related to the distinction is that the conceptualization of an essence or of existence posited it as an individuated mental existence; this led to an infinite proliferation of existences or the existence of non-existent essences. This same intuition about mental existences led to various paradoxes that challenged the semantics of affirmative propositions, some of which had significant theological import. This paper begins with an exploration of the essence-existence distinction and the paradoxes it generated; it then explores how the idea that conceptualization indicated mental existence both produced and resolved certain paradoxes in the field of logic; the paper ends with some reflections on the theological import of these discussions in logic.