The Center for Middle East Studies is preparing to embark on an exciting new chapter. After this academic year, CMES will become an independent academic center at the University, a move that will coincide with the launch on July 1, 2025, of the new Thomas J. Watson Jr. School of International and Public Affairs. This marks an important transition for CMES, which has expanded considerably over the past several years and has become one of the leading research centers in its field.
 
Establishing CMES as an independent center reflects the outcome of an external review of the research centers within the current Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs. In July 2024, the Watson Institute’s centers, initiatives, and programs began conducting a self-study to assess how they might contribute to the future Watson School, whose mission will be focused primarily on policy and governance. After consultations with CMES's Steering Committee, faculty, students and staff during the Fall 2024 semester, it became clear that the Center’s multidisciplinary identity as well as the broad historical range represented in its research initiatives and programming would best be served by establishing it as an independent unit, rather than integrating it within the new Watson School. This decision was supported by a team of external reviewers as well as a benchmarking survey showing that all of Brown’s peers situate their own area studies centers outside of their policy schools.
 
This represents an important and exciting transition for CMES, whose footprint on the Brown campus has grown substantially in recent years. Several new faculty chairs related to the study of the Middle East have been established since 2012. The Center currently has over forty affiliated faculty members with specializations across a vast chronological and disciplinary spectrum, from ancient archaeology and medieval art history to gender studies and contemporary politics. CMES hosts three postdoctoral fellowships and an undergraduate concentration, and serves as a second intellectual home for a large group of graduate students spread across various Ph.D.-granting departments. A successful fundraising campaign has provided endowment support for student travel funding, an extensive programming schedule and various faculty research initiatives.
 
CMES’s growth and success have been due in no small part to the wonderful home it has had in the Watson Institute over these past many years. The rich intellectual connections CMES has forged with Watson’s faculty, staff and students will continue uninterrupted, long after the Center has moved into a new space on campus, which will take place during the summer of 2026. During the 2025-26 academic year, CMES will remain in its present location in Stephen Robert Hall, even as it implements the operational changes necessary for its new institutional status.

We thank our faculty, students and staff for making the Center for Middle East Studies the vibrant community that it is today. We look forward to many more years of rigorous scholarship, inspired teaching and thoughtful conversation.