News

The Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures is pleased to announce a new scholarship program for summer Arabic study at UC Berkeley, with support from the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Ten $600 grants are available to support students enrolled in Arabic 1A this summer. Students must have a 3.0 GPA at the time of application. Non-UC Berkeley students are eligible.

Please join us in celebrating the life and career of Professor Niek Veldhuis on Monday, April 28, from 9AM to 3:30 PM in 470 Stephens Hall. Colleagues, students, and former students will deliver short papers and long appreciations in Professor Veldhuis's honor. Contact Benjamin Porter at bwporter@berkeley.edu with any questions.

Get a jump start learning Arabic this summer at Berkeley! The Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures Department will offer first-year Elementary Arabic in eight-week sessions (Session C) between June 13 and August 15. Learn more here.

The Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures Department is delighted to announce that its departmental commencement ceremony will be held on Friday, May 16 from 2-4 PM at the Women's Faculty Club on the UC Berkeley campus. The Department looks forward to honoring our Winter 2024 and Spring 2025 degree recipients. Please contact MELC Undergraduate Student Services Adviser Rania Shah with any questions. More details will be announced soon.

Congratulations to MELC faculty member Fateme Montazeri, who won the Association for Iranian Studies' Conference to Journal Paper Award at the AIS conference in August 2024. The award aims to recognize AIS members who are either PhD students or early career scholars and support them in the development of peer-reviewed work. Fateme's article, titled "Sufi, Ash‘arite, or Shi‘i?

The 2nd Berkeley Workshop on Middle Persian Documents & Sealings will take place online on October 10–11, 2024. This virtual workshop brings together scholars from around the world to discuss, analyze, and advance the study of the valuable, yet still under-appreciated, collections of Middle Persian texts and sealings stemming from late Sasanian and early Islamic Iran, the Levant, Central Asia, and Egypt.

Professor Persis Berlekamp will be teaching in the History of Art department this Fall semester as the Guitty Azarpay Visiting Professor.

 The MELC department mourns the passing of Ayla Esen Algar, longtime Lecturer of Turkish.

Fateme Montazeri, Lecturer in Persian, has published a collection of short stories in Persian entitled غرب آرزو Gharb-e Arezou.

The MELC department mourns Professor Emerita Guitty Azarpay, esteemed colleague and member of the department between 1964 and 1994 (continuing as active emerita for another decade), who passed away in early April 2024.

The summer 2024 courses offered by MELC are open for registration. Please click here to find out more.

The MELC department mourns Grace Martin Smith, longtime Lecturer of Turkish, who passed away in October at the age of 92.

MELC is excited to announce that Dr. Yonatan Binyam will join the MELC faculty as an assistant professor of Ancient Mediterranean & Ethiopic Studies starting in Fall 2024. This position is the first time that Berkeley will host a full-time faculty member with a specialization in Ethiopic Studies, and represents an anticipated and exciting expansion of MELC's coverage of the pre-modern world to also include antique to medieval eastern Africa and the Red Sea region.

Solmaz Sharif will give the 2023 Maziar Maghsoodnia Memorial Fund Reading on September 13, 2023 at 4pm in the David Brower Center, Tamalpais Room. Following, she will be in conversation with Lubna Safi.

The MELC department mourns Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, an esteemed colleague and long-time member of the Department, who passed away in July, aged 92.

MELC is delighted to announce that Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed is joining the department as Assistant Professor of Islamic Thought beginning in Fall 2023.

The Department of  Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures's Commencement Ceremony will take place at The Women's Faculty Club at 4:00PM on May 12, 2023.All Graduates (B.A., M.A., C.Phil, Ph.D) who received or will receive degrees in Fall 2022 and Spring and Summer 2023 are invited to participate in the ceremony. Names of all students who received awards and honors will be also announced.

Francesca Rochberg, Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor (emerita) of Near Eastern Studies, was awarded the California Institute of Technology’s prestigious Francis Bacon Award in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology for 2022.