"Area studies"--a distinctively American way of organizing knowledge about the rest of the world--have been in a state of crisis in recent years, especially since the end of the cold war and the spread of globalization. In no field of inquiry has that crisis been as acute as in Middle Eastern studies. This volume focuses on one of the leading institutions in the field, Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), which was founded fifty years ago to further research and teaching about a region that remains enigmatic to the United States.

The book is divided into three parts: the first presents a critical look at the history of the Center against the backdrop of ongoing debates about Middle Eastern studies and area studies in general; the second examines the multifaceted operations of CMES that serve the scholarly community within and beyond Harvard; and the third consists of a series of essays, mainly by members of the core faculty of the Center, offering diverse assessments of the state of Middle Eastern studies today as well as visions of how Harvard might meet the complex challenges to the field in the years ahead.

Don Babai is an Associate of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. His research interests include banking and finance in the contemporary Middle East and the development policies of international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He has taught, mainly in the area of international political economy, at Harvard, Boston University, the University of Maryland at College Park, and the University of California at Davis. He holds a doctorate in international relations from the University of California at Berkeley.