Middle East Centre

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The Middle East Centre, founded in 1957 at St Antony’s College is the centre for the interdisciplinary study of the modern Middle East in the University of Oxford. Centre Fellows teach and conduct research in the humanities and social sciences with direct reference to the Arab world, Iran, Israel and Turkey, with particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, during our regular Friday seminar series, attracting a wide audience, our distinguished speakers bring topics to light that touch on contemporary issues.

Recent Episodes
  • The chaos (fawḍà) Bashshar al-Asad warned against – Damascus University 10th November 2005 – and present-day Syria
    Mar 6, 2025 – 51:18
  • Israeli Public Opinion, War and Prospects for Peace
    Feb 19, 2025 – 01:10:27
  • The Axis of Resistance
    Feb 11, 2025 – 53:35
  • Sudan's current war: a longer view on peacemaking and prospects
    Feb 7, 2025 – 01:00:07
  • Lebanon and Syria Amidst Regional Turmoil
    Jan 31, 2025 – 01:12:37
  • Defining antisemitism: what is the point
    Dec 19, 2024 – 01:12:29
  • Regional dimensions of the Gaza crisis, and the Arab role in the UN Security Council
    Nov 19, 2024 – 51:47
  • From the Cradle to the Street: Family and the 1979 Revolution in Iran
    Oct 31, 2024 – 49:56
  • What Gazans Think Before and After October 7th
    Jun 26, 2024 – 48:30
  • Reflections on Tunisian Women's Continued Fight for Respect, Dignity and Rights: Focus on Women in the Labour Movement
    May 14, 2024 – 49:18
  • Webs of oppression’ in everyday organizing in Palestine: An Intersectional Feminist Analysis
    Mar 7, 2024 – 55:51
  • The Gender Effect in Intra-Party Meritocracy (with Rabia Kutlu)
    Mar 7, 2024 – 47:47
  • Is a Binational State Possible After 7 October?
    Feb 28, 2024 – 58:21
  • Panel Discussion: Recognizing Palestinian Statehood: European views
    Feb 19, 2024 – 01:05:14
  • Genocide and Accountability in Gaza: The Limits and Potential of International Law
    Feb 14, 2024 – 01:05:59
  • The Settler Movement, Political Impasses, and Beyond
    Feb 12, 2024 – 49:58
  • Considering the Political Options in Gaza After Three Months of War
    Feb 5, 2024 – 01:04:07
  • Israeli Public Opinion and Political Options after 7 October
    Jan 30, 2024 – 49:10
  • Modern Arab Kingship - Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East
    Jan 25, 2024 – 58:51
  • Stories to Connect: The Reza Hosseini Memorial Lecture Series on the past and present of the Middle East
    Jan 23, 2024 – 01:19:34
  • Reconsidering the 60s generation in the Arab world and beyond
    Jan 23, 2024 – 01:12:43
  • What have the Arab Uprisings done to "Contemporary Arab Thought"?
    Jan 23, 2024 – 58:16
  • Zionism and the Jews of Iraq: A Personal Perspective
    Sep 19, 2023 – 58:21
  • Memorial in honour of Derek Hopwood OBE and Celia Kerslake
    Aug 22, 2023 – 01:31:46
  • Women’s Movements and Citizenship in the Middle East
    Aug 9, 2023 – 49:45
  • The Conflict in Syria, A Personal Story
    Aug 9, 2023 – 48:27
  • 'The Transformation of Iraq since the 2003 Invasion: From "The Dodgy Dossier", to Human Security, Gender, and the Nation's Future in the Face of Climate Change'
    Aug 2, 2023 – 54:10
  • Iraq 2018-2019: The Rule of Law: a perspective
    Jul 27, 2023 – 46:20
  • Cheaters Dilemma: Iraq, WMD and the path to the 2003 war
    Jul 11, 2023 – 01:01:41
  • The Popular Mobilisation Units and their Pursuit of Power and Legitimacy within the Iraqi State
    Jul 11, 2023 – 01:05:48
  • Clerics in the time of Tishreen
    Mar 3, 2023 – 59:20
  • The International Thought of Turkish Islamists: History, Civilization and Nation
    Feb 22, 2023 – 52:53
  • The struggle for Salafism in Egypt’s post-revolutionary period
    Feb 21, 2023 – 01:02:23
  • Resurrecting the Caliphate: The Creed of Abraham and ISIS’s Hermeneutics of Power
    Feb 21, 2023 – 01:03:11
  • Jihad, Radicalism, and the New Atheism
    Feb 7, 2023 – 43:37
  • Centres, Peripheries and New Histories of the Left in Iran
    Dec 23, 2022 – 01:07:43
  • Women's Rights Research Seminar: Threatened motherhood in the Israeli welfare state: The discourse and the practice behind the disqualification of disadvantaged women's motherhood
    May 19, 2022 – 33:25
  • Yemen’s Enduring Crisis
    Mar 29, 2022 – 36:32
  • The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty
    Mar 24, 2022 – 01:09:57
  • All Jihad Is Local: the Micro-Politics of Militant Islamism in 1980s Lebanon and Beyond
    Mar 16, 2022 – 58:04
  • The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt
    Mar 2, 2022 – 01:09:25
  • The Fate of Colonial Elites in Post-Colonial Regimes: Evidence from the 1952 Egyptian Revolution
    Feb 3, 2022 – 56:57
  • Islam and the Arab Revolutions – the Ulama between Democracy and Autocracy
    Jan 31, 2022 – 56:18
  • What does political ecology tell us about the environmental crises in the Middle East?
    Dec 8, 2021 – 48:46
  • Afghanistan and the Middle East
    Dec 6, 2021 – 01:00:06
  • Failing Flows: The Politics of Water Management in Southern Iraq
    Dec 1, 2021 – 54:58
  • Air Pollution, Toxicity, and Environmental Politics in the History of Iranian Oil Nationalisation
    Dec 1, 2021 – 50:42
  • The Tunisian Political Crisis; the end of Democracy?
    Nov 25, 2021 – 01:04:35
  • Environment Discounted: Energy and Economic Diversification Plans in the Gulf
    Nov 22, 2021 – 58:52
  • The Blue-Clad Fennec: Authoritarian Environmentalism in Tunisia, and its afterlives
    Nov 17, 2021 – 49:22
Recent Reviews
  • Heartandbile
    Shameful bias
    Like most university Middle East programs worldwide, Oxford’s centre appears to have disastrously betrayed academic integrity and scholarly rigor to bow before activist-academics whose pseudo-scholarship has and continues to dangerously indoctrinate students against reality. You need more Israeli and Jewish scholars to balance out the ideological virulence, lies and distortion of the vast majority of your speakers (settler colonialism? Here too? By the 3000-year-old indigenous population of the land most of whom returned as homeless refugees to build the region’s only pluriethnic democracy? What empire is that again? How about a few lectures on the virulent antisemitism pumped for decades into the Arab street or the murderous intransigence of Islamist political forces and genocidal Iranian proxies encircling Israel?) I earned my undergraduate degree at Oxford and was proud of its commitment to intellectual rigor and serious critical thinking. Yes, there are far fewer Jewish voices against oceans of Arab or Muslim points of view- that’s always been demographically true. But that’s no excuse and not pertinent in the perennial battle of truth against lies. Do better. Oxford has a real chance here to restore its reputation as a fount of world class education and deep intellectual commitment instead of devolving into another dangerously corrupted vehicle for dishonest activism and indoctrination.
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