Making Regions: Academic Strategies for Middle East Studies
Seteney Shami/ director of Arab Council for the Social Sciences
Regions are made and remade both politically and intellectually.They are shaped, debated, and reimagined through politics, scholarship, and global change. Since the Cold War, U.S. universities have relied on Area Studies as a central framework for shaping world regions, including the Middle East. This model once rested on long-standing, albeit contested, assumptions: that knowledge production follows disciplinary boundaries, that regions correspond to coherent geographic and cultural units, and that university knowledge constitutes a public good.
Today, migration, digital networks, and especially shifting geopolitics challenge the older ways of debating and imagining regions. At the same time, funding structures, institutional priorities, and political debates are reshaping higher education itself. These transformations raise urgent questions for Middle East Studies—and for Area Studies more broadly.
How might we rethink regionalism for the twenty-first century? What would it mean to move beyond bounded geographic models toward inter-regional and intra-regional frameworks that emphasize circulation, comparison, and connection? How can critical Area Studies address overlapping histories, diasporas, transnational movements, and global systems while still preserving deep linguistic, historical, and cultural expertise?What kind of institutional structures and ecosystems are needed to sustain such inquiry?
This conversation invites scholars and institutions to reconsider how regions are made, both intellectually and institutionally, and to imagine new strategies for sustaining Middle East Studies in a rapidly changing academic and political landscape.
Seteney Shami is founding Director-General of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) since 2012. She is an anthropologist from Jordan and obtained her BA from the American University of Beirut and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She has conducted fieldwork in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and the North Caucasus. After teaching at Yarmouk University, Jordan, she moved in 1996 to the Population Council in Cairo. In 1999, she joined the SSRC in New York as director of the Middle East and North Africa program and the Eurasia program. She also developed the InterAsia Partnership program hosted by the SSRC until 2021 and currently hosted by the ACSS. Her publications include Seeing the World: How US Universities make knowledge in a Global Era (co-authored with M. Stevens and C. Miller-Idriss) Princeton University Press 2018; and “South and North, East and West: Knowledge Circulations and Connections in a Disordered World” In Thinking the Re-Thinking of the World (eds. K. Kresse and A. Sounaye) De Gruyter 2022.
Moderator:
Charles Kurzman is Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a leading scholar of social movements, revolution, and political change in the Muslim world. He is the author of several influential books, including The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists, Democracy Denied, 1905–1915, and The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran. His research draws on historical analysis, public opinion data, and firsthand sources to challenge conventional assumptions about Islam, violence, and democratization, and his work has shaped scholarly and public debates on revolution, terrorism, and global political transformation.
Duke University Middle East Studies Center, Middle East focus