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Home > Annual Newsletter 2000-01
New Center for Middle Eastern Studies Established
Religious Studies professor Dwight Reynolds received the exciting and long-anticipated news in May that the U.S. Congress had approved federal funding for the establishment of a Center for Middle East Studies as a “national resource center” (NRC) at UCSB. The Center joins eleven other universities with federally funded comprehensive centers in Middle East Studies, including Berkeley and UCLA.
With start-up funding of approximately $1,000,000 for the three years from 2000 to 2003, the Center has been established with support from the UCSB Office of Research, the College of Letters and Science, the Graduate Division, the University Library, the Center for the Study of Religion, and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. It is UCSB’s first national center serving both the social sciences and the humanities. Dwight Reynolds is serving as the first director of the Center, with Garay Menicucci appointed as assistant director and M. Tarech Reheem filling the position of administrative assistant.
The goals of the Center are praiseworthy and ambitious: it aims to strengthen teaching and research about the Middle East across the curriculum; it will establish an outreach program to public schools in Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo counties, including teacher training and curriculum materials; it will offer at least two major conferences annually during each of the next three years; and it will expand Persian (Farsi) instruction and help support other language instruction, such as modern Hebrew and Hindi/Urdu. Professor Reynolds is particularly excited about the prospects for collaboration among departments and programs from all parts of the campus. “We hope to see a number of joint ventures, for example, with scholars in environmental studies,” he said. “UCSB is a national leader in both environmental studies and Middle Eastern studies and this money will allow us to explore a variety of new connections. Another area ripe for collaboration is with the growing interest in South Asian studies at UCSB.” Public lectures and Middle Eastern cultural events will be offered in the Santa Barbara area, with funding for visiting professors and library acquisitions.
With similar centers located at both UC Berkeley and UCLA, the new Center for Middle East Studies at UCSB helps to position the University of California as a preeminent institution for Middle Eastern studies in the world, boasting “remarkable library collections and a superb faculty” according to Reynolds. “We would like to move toward a system in which graduate students are based at one campus but are offered increasing flexibility to spend short periods of time at other campuses so that they can benefit from the stellar faculty found through the University of California,” he continues. “The UC probably has the largest combined faculty in Middle Eastern Studies in the world and it’s time we took advantage of that.”
With the amount of hard work and planning that has gone into preparations for the Center for Middle East Studies, there is no doubt about its outlook for success. The Department of Religious Studies is enormously proud of Dwight Reynolds, and the stunning results of his tireless efforts on behalf of Middle Eastern studies are his just due.
