Professor Lamia Balafrej (UCLA Art History, CNES Faculty Affiliate) has been named the 2025-2026 Berenson Fellow with her project “The Feminized Robot as Palimpest” at I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

The UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies has awarded its 2025-26 Mosafer Centennial fellowships for Near Eastern Scholars. The fellowships will support four UCLA graduate students who will spend this summer and fall conducting research abroad.

The UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES) has published a public online dashboard that pulls together data on Iranians living outside of Iran. The online tool provides demographic and socioeconomic profiles of Iranian diaspora communities worldwide and is now available through the CNES website.

This spring, the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies hosted a three-part lecture series, “The Deserts of the Middle East and North Africa,” focused on innovative approaches to studying desert spaces in the region.

Sohaib Baig (Middle East, South Asian and Islamic Studies Librarian, CNES Faculty Advisory Committee member) and William Stalls (Collection Assistant for Middle Eastern and Islamic Materials) write about individual manuscripts endowed by Muslim women that are held in UCLA Library Special Collections as part of the Islamicate manuscript collection.

At a recent CERS and CNES event, Amín Pérez detailed how Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad forged a politically committed sociology during the Algerian War of Independence.

Boum, Maurice Amado Professor of Sephardic Studies at UCLA and incoming interim director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies (2025–26), attended the April 2025 ceremony in Rabat, Morocco, with two UCLA colleagues.

UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies is announcing a call for applications for its Arabic Language Fellowship and Mosafer Centennial Fund Fellowship. Deadline: April 10, 2025.

The fall 2024 conference explored the concept of an "Arabicate" world as a predicate to the "Persianate" world in Islamic civilization elucidated by historian Marshall Hodgson.