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Rashad Hauter can remember his father shaking him awake at 2 a.m. inside their one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, prodding him from sleep to learn the alphabet as a 3-year-old. At that early hour, his father, Ahmed, would just be getting home from an 18-hour shift at the corner store. Rather than [...]

  George Sibley has assumed the role of Diplomat in Residence (DIR) for the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S, covering North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. A career member of the Senior Foreign Service, Sibley most recently served as deputy chief of mission and then chargé d’affaires at the U.S. [...]

“We have come to live a life that is almost exclusively indoors–from air-conditioned houses to air-conditioned cars, offices, malls…” said Marwa Koheji of her native Bahrain. “Indeed, when I learned that more than 60 percent of electricity in the Arab Gulf is consumed by air conditioning, it made me aware [...]

How to Teach about the Middle East -- and Get it Right: Islam through Art How to Teach about the Middle East -- and Get it Right! That may seem like a daunting order to any educator. The MENA region is so large and broad in scope, it can be [...]

Photo: Ahsan Kamal, from https://southasia.berkeley.edu/pirzada-awardees Alumnus Ahsan Kamal (Sociology Ph.D ‘19) has been awarded the Pirzada Dissertation Prize in Pakistan Studies for his dissertation, Saving Sindhu: Indus Enclosure and River Defense in Pakistan (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2019). Awarded by the Institute for South Asian Studies at [...]

The 2020 Middle East and African Cultures Teacher Fellows participate in a program on Zoom. In December 2020, 15 North Carolina teachers completed the intensive nine-month Middle East and African Cultures Teacher Fellows Program (MEAC) offered by the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies and the UNC African Studies Center. The 2020 MEAC program was [...]

The logo for the Teachers Collaborating Across Borders Program, designed by Shawn Adeli. The Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies and the University of Arizona Center for Middle Eastern Studies (UA CMES) have collaborated to establish the Teachers Collaborating Across Borders Program (TCAB), a unique opportunity for educators from the United States and teachers from the Middle East and North [...]

On Dec. 9, 2020, high school students from across North Carolina gathered virtually for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University’s sixth annual Learning through Languages High School Research Symposium awards ceremony. The Learning Through Languages High School Research Symposium is a way for world language students in [...]

On Dec. 8, 2020, pedagogical experts on world language instruction from across North Carolina participated in “The Future of Language Learning in North Carolina,” a virtual panel discussion about the direction of teaching and learning of world languages in the state. The panel was held in conjunction with Carolina’s sixth annual [...]

UNC students practice Classical Persian Calligraphy. The Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is participating in Connecting Carolina Classrooms with the World (CCCW), an initiative launched by the Office of the Vice Provost of Global Affairs in May 2020, in collaboration with the College [...]

Sarah Mackenzie (BA '20) has been named Carolina's 51st Rhodes Scholar.  Sarah graduated with highest distinction from UNC as a Morehead-Cain Scholar, earning a B.A. in Public Policy and Global Studies with a minor in Arabic.  Sarah spent the fall semester of her junior year studying Arabic in the CET [...]

Part of the series “Viewpoints on Resilient and Equitable Responses to the Pandemic” from the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The COVID-19 pandemic is causing people around the world to question how this virus will affect the many public and private systems [...]