MELC Associate Professor Aria Fani, along with poet and translator Adeeba Shahid Talukder, has been awarded the prestigious MLA (Modern Language Association) Roth Translation Award for 2025, for their translation of Shape of Extinction: Poems by Bijan Jalali (Asemana Books, 2025). The book was also illustrated by MELC alumna Amelia Ossorio. The MLA award committee notes that "Poet and author of Ghazal Cosmopolitan provides a brilliant reflection of the…
Faculty Updates
Shai David Ben Ami
A current Israel Institute and ISEF Fellow, he has joined the MELC faculty for the 2024-2025 academic year.
Published a new book in Hebrew, “The Zionist Zoo: The History of Zoos in Israel.” https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://resling.co.il/product/**C-**I-**K/_…$
Canan Bolel
Organized Ladino Day 2024
Published ““What’s behind the “L.”?” AJS Perspectives, December 2024.
Published “Butchers, Rabbis, Foreignness—and…
In a recent blog post celebrating Arab American Heritage Month, UW President Ana Mari Cauce acknowledges achievements of our department and, in particular, of several MELC faculty and an alumna (Hussein Elkhafaifi, Amina Moujtahid, and Jocelyn Hendrickson).
MELC also notes that Prof. Elkhafaifi was recently honored with an award for outstanding community service by the Arab Community of the Pacific Northwest.
Congratulations!
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Jocelyn Hendrickson, who completed a BA in our department along with a BA in Comparative Religion in 1999, has been awarded the Middle East Medievalists Book Prize for 2023.
Dr. Hendrickson is currently Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta. Her book, Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa, was published by Harvard University Press. Combining legal theory with social history, It focuses on legal opinions (fatwas…
What have our faculty, students, and alumni been doing this year? Scroll down to find out!Faculty UpdatesMelike Yucel-KocPresented “Reimagining American Identity through Immigrant Narratives”at the59th Annual Conference of the Oral History Association,held in Atlanta, Georgia (October 17, 2025). Her presentation, based on extensive interviews and archival materials, explored how oral histories from…
Faculty Updates
Canan Bolel
Presented “The Foreigner Within: Ashkenazi Butchers, Sephardic Jews and Imageries of Foreignness in the Late Ottoman Empire” at Jews amidst the Embers of the Ottoman Empire, University of Washington, Seattle. May 21-22.
Presented “The Unlikelihood of Wholeness” for Prof. Andrew Nestingen’s “The Nobel Prize in Literature” course on 1981 Nobel Laureate in Literature Elias Canetti.
Presented “No Place for Mazalto: Female Insanity…
This year our department has had a special occasion for self-reflection: a Program Review, as is required of all academic units at UW every ten years. Among other things, the review process calls for a self-study report assessing how we are doing and how we have fared in the past decade. In our deliberations, we are noting multiple significant changes the department has undergone since our last review – including a change of departmental name. Previously we were Near Eastern Languages and…
Dr. Mamoun Sakkal designed the original NELC logo in 1997, and we thank him now for providing us an updated MELC design. He became a full time Arabic type designer after receiving his PhD from the Near and Middle Eastern Studies Interdisciplinary program at UW in 2010, and he has served as an affiliate instructor in our department. Dr. Sakkal has lectured on Islamic art, Arabic calligraphy, and Arabic typography at universities and conferences in the United States, Canada, England, Dubai,…
Husky Giving Day Success!
On April 7, Husky Giving Day, NELC raised $2400! Thanks to all the donors who contributed to our Friends of NELC Fund, and special thanks to the anonymous donor who matched the first $1000 in contributions. Your support helps the department thrive and support our educational mission
On October 2, Dr. Jere Bacharach, professor emeritus of history at UW, gave a public lecture through the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) called, “Excavating Fustat, Cairo, Egypt.” The lecture introduced both the history of excavation at the site in Fustat as well as the findings of the excavations.
By Erin Kelleher, NELC MA student. Erin works on Near and Middle Eastern intellectual history
Professor Bacharach explained first that Fustat was continuously occupied from pre-…
