News

On March 3-4, 2023, the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley hosted the first Berkeley Workshop on Middle Persian Documents & Sealings. This virtual workshop brought 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.

Francesca Rochberg, Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor Emerita of Near Eastern Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, has been named as one of the 2023 Martin Meyerson Faculty Research Lecturers at UC Berkeley. For more than a century, UC Berkeley’s academic senate has selected distinguished faculty members whose research has changed the trajectory of their disciplines and expanded the global understanding of a subject.

Lubna Safi, a graduate student in MELC focusing on Arabic literature, has just published her debut collection of poetry Your Blue and the Quiet Lament, with Texas Tech University Press. The book is described as follows:

The Department of  Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures's Commencement Ceremony took place at The Women's Faculty Club on campus at 2:00PM on May 13, 2023.

Dr. John Hayes, emeritus lecturer in MELC, delivered a commencement speech entitled What do I care about the gender of turtles, redux.

Congratulations to all the graduates!

The inaugural Maziar Maghsoodnia Persian Poetry Reading will be given by Dr. Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, Senior Research Fellow in Persian and Professor of Persian Literature at Wadham College, University of Oxford. The event will be titled An Earthly Paradise or a City Teeming with Rabble? Shiraz as depicted in the poetry of Hafez and his contemporaries.

Nathalie Khankan's poetry collection Quiet Orient Riot, published in 2020 with the University of Chicago Press, was awarded the 2021 California Book Award in Poetry. Many congratulations to Nathalie!

The book is described as follows:

A new start-up fund will allow the University of California, Berkeley to bring Assyrian studies into the curriculum by supporting visiting faculty, courses, digital projects, and conferences, the campus announced. The efforts, made possible by a $675,000 gift from Nora Betyousef Lacey, will include support for a visiting faculty member in the Department of Near Eastern Studies in the College of Letters and Science. At the discretion of the dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities, the fund may be shared jointly with the Department of History.