Dear MELC Community,As I write my first chair’s letter for the MELC newsletter, I want to say first that I am proud and honored to be the Chair of this department. I am also grateful for the support of everyone here in MELC, beginning from my first day in 2015 as a fresh-out-of-graduate-school part-time instructor, to today, as I begin my tenure as the Chair of the department as an Associate Professor.Our department covers so much of the world—from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia– and so…

By Kathryn Medill and Mehari Worku The MELC Department already offers opportunities for students to learn about ancient and modern Middle Eastern cultures and their diasporas around the world. Now we have expanded to include the Horn of Africa, an area which has always been deeply connected with the Middle East. The Horn of Africa includes the modern countries of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia. Mehari Worku is our new full-time hire in Horn of Africa Studies. He will be teaching…

By Kathryn Medill Ancient Middle Eastern cultures like the Egyptians, Sumerians, Hittites, Israelites, and Babylonians were around long before the rise of the Roman Empire. Much of what we know about their lives was first discovered through archaeology. Would you like to try volunteering at a summer archaeological excavation? Here’s an interview with two of our Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies (HBANES) faculty, Stephanie Selover and Kathryn Medill, to tell you what to expect!…

By Selim Kuru In this article, Dr. Selim Kuru sits down with Dr. Aria Fani to discuss developments in Persian & Iranian Studies, Translation Studies, and more. This must be a significant year in your life with the publication of your first book, Reading Across Borders: Afghans, Iranians and Literary Nationalism (University of Texas, 2024), while you organized a series of events. Moreover, you continued your work in the Simpson Center's Translation Hub Project. How did these events,…

By Mehari Worku This academic year, MELC is offering third-year Arabic (ARAB 301, 302, 303). This series of courses includes classes in language acquisition, culture, and the history of the language, touching on contributions from the Golden Age of Islamic science. Amina Moujtahid has co-authored a new book titled The Combinatorial…

By Shai ben Ami and Kathryn Medill This year, the Modern Hebrew and Israel Studies program in MELC has welcomed an ISEF and Israel Institute Fellow, Shai ben Ami. We are happy to have Shai here to teach courses for students interested in both Middle Eastern Studies and Environmental Studies! In this interview, Shai told us about his background, his research, and the courses he will be teaching for the UW this year. Tell us about yourself. I was born and raised in Jerusalem, where I have…

By Selim Kuru Dr.  Melike Yücel-Koc offers a compelling course titled “Oral History of Immigrants from the Middle East” through the University of Washington Honors Program. This interdisciplinary course enables students to explore the lived experiences of Middle Eastern immigrants through oral history, focusing on personal narratives that illuminate migration, identity, and cultural adaptation in the U.S. Approximately 20-25 Honors students enroll in the course each year, representing a…

By Kathryn Medill On December 8, 2024, with the support of both the MELC Department and the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, Dr. Canan Bolel organized UW’s annual Ladino Day, designed to celebrate Sephardic Jewish language and culture. This year’s main event was a conversation with Bolel and author Leigh Bardugo. Bardugo’s YA fantasy novels have been New York Times bestsellers for more than ten years, and have even inspired a Netflix series, Shadow and Bone. The main subject of…

By Kathryn Medill Since 2006, the MELC Department has helped to host the Svoboda Diaries project (Svoboda Diaries Project – Svoboda Diaries Project), an effort to transcribe, annotate and publish the diaries of Joseph and Alexander R. Svoboda, who lived near Baghdad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. English versions of Joseph Svoboda’s 1897-1899 diaries and Alexander Svoboda’s Travel Journal are already available on 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…