Academic Programs
Program Highlights
COURSES
Interested in taking MENA courses? Whether your a major, minor, grad student, have a general interest, or are satisfying distros, check out what courses are being offered!
Research
MENA faculty members produce cutting-edge research and public scholarship on the contemporary Middle East and North Africa, publishing articles in leading academic journals and books that are widely taught and make an impact both in the scholarly world and in the wider cultural conversation.
Languages
Studying a language of the Middle East and North Africa allows you to have a more intimate perspective on the cultures, histories, and societies of the region. Whether you choose to major in MENA or not, you may enroll in courses in any of the four major languages of the region: Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish.
PROGRAMMING
We host a range of events over the course of the academic year, including a quarterly New Directions in Middle East & North African Studies lecture; our new MENA Conversations series; the MENA Graduate Student Colloquium; an annual Research Symposium; and events organized by our Working Groups.NEW IN MENA
Working Groups
MENA Interdisciplinary Working Groups are designed to encourage active and emergent research agendas shared by faculty and graduate students, and to facilitate collaboration in Middle East and North African Studies across home departments, colleges, and campuses. 2021-2022 Working Groups:
- Story-telling and Violence: Narratives of Insecurity in the Middle East and North Africa
- Institutional Histories of Aesthetic Forms
- Arabic Literature Reading Group
News and Events
Recent Posts
Upcoming Events
Apr
10
2023
MENA Mondays: Multilingual Poetics: A Reading and Conversation wi...
12:30 PM - 2:00 PM, Evanston
Zeina Hashem Beck joins NU poets Fadia Antabli and George Abraham in conversation on the poetic process across English and Arabic, and ...
Apr
11
2023
Zeina Hashem Beck: Reading and Conversation
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM, Evanston
Join MENA and Creative Writing for an evening with acclaimed poet Zeina Hashem Beck! Reception followed by poetry reading. Zeina Hashem...
Apr
17
2023
MENA Mondays: ROUNDTABLE | Trauma and Its Afterlives in the MENA ...
12:30 PM - 2:00 PM, No Location
Zoom: register at bit.ly/MENA_4_17 Orkideh Behrouzan, SOAS University of London; Nora Parr, University of Birmingham; Lara Sheehi, Geor...