Revival, Renewal, and Optimism
Message from the Director
Michael Christopher Low
Director, Middle East Center
The 2023-2024 academic year was an exceptionally exciting time for the Middle East Center. Working closely with Dean Hollis Robbins and the College of Humanities, the Middle East Center has charted a bold new course. Having written an ambitious five-year plan and hosted an external review of our programs, the Middle East Center is undergoing nothing short of a renaissance.
Over the past year, the center played a vital role in the intellectual life of the College of Humanities and wider university. We hosted incredible lectures from world-renowned scholars like Alan Mikhail, chair of History at Yale University, and Asad Q. Ahmed, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at University of California, Berkeley. In October 2023, in collaboration with Qatar Debate, the University of Utah hosted the 4th U.S. Arabic Debating Championship, drawing some 40 universities and over 200 competitors from across the country. In April 2024, we hosted Gaming the Middle East, featuring roundtable discussions and gaming demonstrations on the role of historians and humanists in the video game industry.
In the wake of the tragic events of October 7, 2023, and the ongoing war in Israel and Gaza, the center has sought to facilitate the hard, serious conversations necessary to bring about sober understanding and sustainable change. In the immediate aftermath of these events, we hosted roundtables for the College of Humanities and Student Affairs to provide our faculty and staff with a realistic sense of the roots and future directions of this conflict. Since then, we’ve given a platform to rigorous scholars who’ve been able to navigate these complexities and nuances with integrity. In March 2024, International Studies and the Middle East Center co-hosted University College-London’s Seth Anziska for the Dolowitz Lecture in Human Rights. Anziska’s incredibly prescient talk on Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was proof positive that even the most difficult subjects can be handled with grace and care.
As we look forward into the future, we do so with a sense of brimming optimism. Addressing strategic needs across multiple departments, geographies, and themes, we are thrilled to welcome an exceptional cohort of four new faculty members.
The Middle East Center is undergoing nothing short of a Renaissance
We welcome Edith Chen, Annie Greene, Yuree Noh, and Rawad Wehbe. Collectively, this stellar group boasts doctoral training from some of the world’s leading centers of Middle East scholarship, including University of Chicago, UCLA, UPenn, and Princeton, as well as postdoctoral fellowships from Harvard and Oxford. They bring a stunning array of research and field work experience from Algeria, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. They also command language and paleography skills ranging from Arabic, Ottoman, and Turkish to Chinese, Hebrew, and Judeo-Arabic. Their research and teaching interests range from Arabic poetry, intellectual life in Ottoman Iraq, and Jews of the Islamic world to the Mongol empire in Iran and authoritarian regimes in the contemporary Arab world.
We’re exceptionally proud of our growth and progress. We look forward to welcoming students and faculty from across the university to join us for an exciting slate of new courses and stimulating events this fall.
Edith Chen
Assistant Professor, History
Edith Chen is an historian of the premodern Islamic world and the Mongol Empire. She completed her Ph.D. at Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies in 2021 and was the Bennett Boskey Fellow of Global History at Exeter College, Oxford from 2021-2024. Her book project, “The Formation of the Mongol Empire: The Mongols and Their Local Allies in the Islamic World,” is under contract with Cambridge University Press.
Annie Greene
Assistant Professor, History
Annie Greene is a cultural and intellectual historian of Iraq and the late Ottoman Empire. Her research and teaching interests also include gender history and religious minorities of the Middle East. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Her book project focuses on the contributions made to the Arab Renaissance (Nahda) by Iraqi intellectuals during the late Ottoman period.
Yuree Noh
Assistant Professor, Political Science
Yuree Noh’s research is primarily concerned with authoritarian institutions and publics in the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on gender and politics, electoral institutions, and public opinion and survey research. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from UCLA. She has conducted fieldwork in Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Morocco, the UAE, and South Korea (Yemeni refugees in Jeju Island).
Rawad Wehbe
Postdoctoral Fellow, World Languages and Cultures
Rawad Wehbe’s work focuses on structural poetics and emotion across different poetic modes and moments in the Arabic literary tradition. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the translator of “Where Not to Be Born” (Litmus Press, 2023) and co-translator of “Home: New Arabic Poems” (Two Lines Press, 2020). His translations have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Read, Doublespeak, and Words Without Borders.