The Middle East Studies Graduate Student Association (MESGSA) is an interdisciplinary group united by a shared scholarly interest in the Middle East and North Africa. Combining diverse humanities and social sciences backgrounds with regional expertise, the association aims to foster conversations among graduate students that are theoretically diverse and regionally focused.
The association offers opportunities for funding of paper workshops and reading groups, panels on fieldwork in the Middle East led by graduate students with experience conducting dissertation work across the Middle East and North Africa, and research travel. These gatherings serve to support and foster critical and engaged Brown student scholarship in the Middle East at the graduate level.
Middle East Studies Graduate Student Association Leaders
Nida Jaffer is a second year PhD student in the History of Art and Architecture. She studies the art and architecture of the medieval Islamic and Mediterranean worlds. Her current research centers on the eco-phenomenology of Islamic art and the materialization of the human-nature relationship in art and architecture. She is particularly interested in how water, as a material and symbolic element, shapes experiences of space, ritual, and authority in the art and architecture of the Fatimid dynasty.
Lâl Verda Karaoğlu is a second-year PhD student in the History of Art and Architecture department at Brown University. She works on 18th- to 20th-century Ottoman art, with a focus on relics of the Prophet Muhammad and their iconographic reproductions, hilye panels, prayer books, and other visual and verbal representations of the Prophet. Before joining Brown, Verda worked in the Textiles Department at the Art Institute of Chicago, cataloging and documenting the museum’s collection of 17th- to 20th-century Ottoman domestic textiles.