Dear MELC Community,
As I complete my second year as chair of the MELC department, I am happy to reflect on the many achievements and successes of our department. I am grateful to MELC faculty and staff, and as always, humbled by the support of our MELC community as we work to serve our students.
MELC continues its mission to educate those passing through our classroom doors about the cultures, literatures and languages of the Middle East, Central Eurasia, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Our faculty regularly instruct in a dozen languages, from the ancient to the modern, as well as offering culture and literature courses that bring the Middle East here to Seattle. Thank you to all our faculty for their continued efforts to keep our department, which first offered classes in 1970, intellectually vibrant and forward-looking.
We have much to celebrate in the 2025-2026 year. First, we are happy to announce the completion of the merger of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Near and Middle Eastern Studies into MELC. I wish to thank the previous director of the program, Reşat Kasaba, for his work on many facets of this transition; and most especially Liora Halperin, the current director of NMES, for the important work she put in both during the transition and throughout the year. With the arrival of the NMES program, we also welcome fourteen Ph.D. students into the MELC community.
This year, we welcome our newest faculty member, Dr. Elham Monfaredi, as our Assistant Teaching Professor in Persian Language. Dr. Monfaredi was previously a temporary lecturer in our department; we all are delighted with her promotion. Dr. Monfaredi is teaching our first- and second-year Persian classes, with Persian cultural classes to be added in the future.
In other faculty news, MELC lecturer Lillian McCabe’s work was awarded the Malcolm H. Keer Award Honorable Mention by the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) in 2025 for her dissertation, “Fakhr al-Din al-Rasi's (d. 606/1210) Book of the Hidden Secret and Its Reception.” Associate Professor Aria Fani received the Rene Wellek Prize for Best Book in Comparative Literature 2025 for his book Reading across Borders: Afghans, Iranians, and Literary Nationalism (University of Texas Press, 2024); and the MLA-Roth Translation Prize 2025, jointly with co-author Adeeba Shahid Talukder, for their book Shape of Extinction: Poems by Bijan Jalali (Asemana Books, 2025). Assistant Professor Canan Bolel was awarded the Simpson Center Collaborative Project Award, along with Liora Halperin, for their project West Coast Working Group on the Jews of the Maghrib and Middle East. Finally, Assistant Teaching Professor Elham Monfaredi and Lecturer Amina Moujtahid were jointly awarded the Writing @UW Faculty Fellowship for their project on AI-Assisted Writing Reflection for Language Learners.
To help further foster and build community, we have continued our Meet and Greet quarterly gatherings with the Middle East Center and the Near and Middle Eastern Studies Interdisciplinary PhD program. These Meet and Greets are open to all–including undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, staff and community–who study and work in Middle Eastern, Central Eurasian, North African and Horn of Africa Studies. Our first Meet and Greet of the year was on October 22, and our winter gathering took place on January 30. We welcome everyone to our upcoming spring Meet and Greet, date to be announced.
I also want to recognize the many ways our faculty continue to support our students, including our majors and minors, heritage students of all majors, and all other students who take our courses. In particular, I want to acknowledge the great work being done for student language groups, including our Arabic Club with faculty Khalid Ahmed and Amina Moujtahid, Turkish Conversation Club with Melike Yücel-Koç and MELC’s 2025-2026 Fulbright TA Cemalcan Uslu, Hebrew Restaurant Club with Hadar Khazzam-Horowitz, and our newest language club, Amharic Club with Mehari Worku.
MELC hosts and cohosts a wide variety of lectures, colloquiums, film screenings and discussions throughout the year. Please see the MELC website for up-to-date information on our events. I especially want to highlight two upcoming events. First is the 2026 Walter G. Andrews Memorial Lecture on April 23, 2026, at 6pm in Kane 110. Our speaker this year is Dr. Alison Terndrup of the University of Delaware. Next is the 2026 Farhat J. Ziadeh Distinguished Lecture in Arab and Islamic Studies, to be held on May 21 at 7pm in the Walker Ames Room on the second floor of Kane Hall. Our speaker this year is Dr. Shawkat Toorawa of Yale University. Please join us for these events, as they promise to be both thought-provoking and fascinating.
Please enjoy the articles in the 2026 MELC newsletter. Here you will find a variety of stories about our MELC community, including updates and stories from our various programs, insight into MEC and Translation Studies here at UW, reviews of recently published works by MELC professors and affiliates, and more. Special thanks to Kathryn Medill, Mehari Worku, Canan Bolel, and Elham Monfaredi for all their work and dedication in creating this newsletter. Please continue to check our website and social media platforms for MELC news and events.
As we look ahead, we are excited to continue building on this year’s momentum in teaching, research, and community engagement at MELC.
Stephanie Selover,
Chair of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures