We know of no other program that offers the combination of academic expertise and intellectual focus that defines MESAAS. Like other departments whose origins lie in what used to be known as Oriental Studies, our approach evolved from the close study of the languages, cultures, and histories of particular world regions. The critique of Oriental Studies, in which Columbia scholars played a leading role, transformed an academic discipline that had been embedded in forms of imperial enterprise into a field of critical reflection on the limits and possibilities of area-based knowledge.

Most disciplines in the humanities and social sciences still focus their concern on understanding European and American experience, or on extending the forms of knowledge derived from that experience to other parts of the world. We are interested in what can be learned from, rather than simply about, ideas and life-worlds that have been shaped outside or in tension with the history of the West. Much of our research examines the challenges this learning can present to the dominant categories of knowledge and understandings of history derived from Euro-American experience.

We differ from most other departments that focus on regions outside the West in three respects. First, unlike many Departments of Near Eastern or South Asian Studies, we are concerned to understand the modern era no less than the earlier historical and cultural complexes from which experiences of modernity arose. Thus, while some of us study the languages, literature, and ideas of the classical and early-modern traditions, others work on the more recent past or on contemporary culture and politics.

Second, the department encompasses the study of three regions: South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. While most of the faculty focus their research on one region, as do most graduate students, many of our interests overlap from one region to the next. All of us benefit from exploring questions that are often echoed or extended in the work of colleagues who study neighboring regions and traditions.

Third, we are not divided into humanists and social scientists. Different members of the department draw upon different disciplinary tools, including those of comparative literature, history, science studies, law, critical philology, anthropology, political economy, and political theory. Most of our students take the opportunity to benefit from this rich post-disciplinary environment. There are also numerous colloquia and other regular events that bring this larger community together. At the same time, many students specialize in a particular set of theoretical approaches and disciplinary tools, sometimes in conjunction with work in another department or program.

The intellectual program of MESAAS can be loosely divided into four distinct but overlapping themes. Most of the department’s research faculty work across more than one of these areas, and some across three or four. The four areas of focus complement and cross-cut the older division into Middle East and South Asian, and more recently African, studies, pointing towards a developing conversation across regional and linguistic specializations. The themes provide a way of organizing the curriculum, encouraging students to develop one or more linguistic and regional specializations, in combination with one or more thematic orientations.

The four themes are:

1. Literatures and aesthetics (Classical, early modern, and contemporary genres of imaginative literature; the visual and performing arts; cinema studies)
2. Knowledge systems, classical and contemporary (in law, ethics, science, language, and other fields; the history of Oriental Studies; the university)
3. Genealogies of the political (discursive and institutional histories of contemporary political practices)
4. Histories, disciplinary and subaltern (comparative studies of academic or professional modes of history writing and the vernacular or popular forms of retelling the past)

Your fellow students in MESAAS will be those drawn to work with the faculty in the department, so the kind of research we do (follow links to individual web pages) is a good guide to the kind of work our students will be doing.

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