Contact
Shai Ginsburg
Duke University Middle East Studies Center
John Hope Franklin Center
2204 Erwin Road, Box 90414
Durham, NC 27708
(919) 684-2312
Email: shai.ginsburg@duke.edu
Website: https://middleeaststudies.duke.edu/duke-unc-middle-east-studies-certificate
Program Description
The Duke University Middle East Studies Center (DUMESC) coordinates the new Duke-UNC Graduate Certificate in Middle East Studies, a joint offering of the Consortium in Middle East Studies administered through the Department of Asian and Middle East Studies at Duke and the Department of Religious Studies at UNC. The Graduate Certificate in Middle East Studies trains students for interdisciplinary research in Middle East Studies and is designed to complement the disciplinary training in their home departments. The Certificate is open to students in any graduate department, program, or professional school at Duke University and UNC-CH who are engaged with the study of the Middle East.
The Duke University Middle East Studies Center is a hub for research, education, and outreach about the Middle East that serves as a world forum at the local, national, and international levels. We prepare tomorrow's leaders by equipping them with knowledge about Middle Eastern languages, cultures, and societies. Our Center is distinguished by its transregional approach, which treats the Middle East as a unit extending from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and emphasizes interdisciplinarity, comparativity, and connectivity. The Graduate Certificate is designed to complement the disciplinary training students receive in their home departments and to formally recognize a focus on the Middle East within their graduate programs of study and research. Certificate objectives are to offer a coherent set of courses that introduce Middle East Studies as an interdisciplinary field to MA students, professional students, and Ph.D. students; to link course work to research, doctoral exams, and thesis or dissertation writing, with an emphasis on the challenges of blending disciplinary and interdisciplinary training; and to provide training for classroom instruction in Middle East Studies through course work, faculty mentoring, and opportunities for teaching.
To receive a Graduate Certificate in Middle East Studies, students must complete four courses--including a required Certificate Core Course, "Critical Genealogies of Middle East Studies," which will be co-taught each fall by faculty from Duke and UNC; participate in a bi-weekly workshop organized each spring by the Consortium for Middle East Studies; submit a writing sample (thesis, dissertation chapter, or a major seminar research paper) on a topic related to Middle East studies; and demonstrate relevant langage skills, or international experience or training. In addition to the Certificate Core Course, students must take three other graduate courses on a topic related to the Middle East. One of these three courses must be outside the student's home department or school; one may be an advanced Middle East language course (third-year or above in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, or Urdu).