Our Mission
The Middle Eastern Studies Forum at Stanford, founded in 2024, fosters and supports scholarly research, education, intellectual inquiry, and artistic engagement with the Middle East, broadly defined as the lands stretching from Central Asia to the Eastern Mediterranean, from the Black Sea Basin to the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa.
While acknowledging the historical complexities and contestations surrounding the term "Middle East," MESF at Stanford critically engages with the legacy of Middle Eastern Studies as a field. We encourage innovative approaches to thinking, researching, and representing the region, along with its diverse peoples, including diasporas, languages, cultures, intellectual and artistic traditions, economies, institutions, and environments, both past and present.
Our Initiatives
Ottoman and Turkey Encounters at Stanford
OTES is an intellectual forum housing several series of events that foster critical engagements with contemporary Turkey and the Ottoman world, namely Southeast Europe, the Middle East and North Africa during the Ottoman centuries. Taking the potential embedded in the word “encounter” seriously, OTES encourages the radical rethinking of the relationships between intellectual work, public engagement, and action in our encounters with scholars, writers, activists, and artists.
Launched in collaboration with the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, this project explores the history and culture of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries. The project organizes academic and public events about Sephardic culture and history, and also supports the development of a digital library that includes representative samples of writings in various Judeo languages of the Sephardim over the ages, starting with Ladino.
Arab Futures & Pasts focuses on contemporary and modern historical dynamics relevant to the Arab world.