“We realized that we needed to rebalance the department so that the modern side would begin to be as thorough and as comprehensive as the premodern side,” Hamori says.

The department is about to recommend the appointment of an assistant professor in Middle Eastern politics, he says.

“But what we try and say and what the dean of the faculty says we have resources for are often very different things,” Hamori notes.

Columbia and NYU have also stepped up to the challenge. The schools have both instigated hiring frenzies that have revitalized their respective programs.

“These hires are not a response to recent news events, but part of a more long term strategy at NYU that sees its Middle Eastern Studies program as a strong component of its broader academic mission,” says Shiva Balaghi, the associate director of NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Middle Eastern Studies. “Indeed, in the past decade, NYU’s department has developed as one of the strongest departments within the university.”

Another Bump in the Road

One possible explanation for the deficiencies within the field of Middle Eastern scholarship is the changing nature of area studies.

Since the 1980s, many area studies programs have been reappropriated by more traditional departments like history and economics.

“Although Middle Eastern studies survives as a discipline, it is being reined in by academic departments,” Granara says. “Nowadays, to study Middle Eastern history, you have to study historical theory through the history department. In the 1960s you went into a university to become a Middle Eastern scholar, not a historian.”

Due to this methodological trend, area studies are losing out to the larger disciplines, professors worry.

Government and economics, are particularly disinclined toward studies defined by geographical or cultural regions, Bellin says. They prefer theory.

But some feel that, in the long run, Middle Eastern studies may benefit from being absorbed back into well established departments.

Gulru Necipoglu, the Aga Khan professor of Islamic art, says there is an advantage to the reclaiming of area studies by departments—“it does not dilute or water down the seriousness of specialist study,” she says.

“Area studies has the advantage of having everyone under the same building, like at Princeton; however scholars tend not to know what is going on in other departments and are unable to relate their study to larger issues,” Necipoglu says.

The practical institutional reactions to this trend away from limited regional studies have been an emphasis on centers and institutes—such as CMES—separate from mainstream undergraduate curricula.