CMENAS welcomes new director, Samer Ali
The Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies (CMENAS) is pleased to announce that Samer Mahdy Ali, associate professor of Arabic and Islamic culture, has been appointed as its new director, effective July 1, 2017.
Before arriving at the University of Michigan, Professor Ali taught at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) and at the Free University in Berlin. While at UT Austin, he served as graduate advisor in Middle Eastern studies where he raised $500,000 to fund the education and research of the 42 graduate students he recruited. He is particularly dedicated to mentoring women, minorities, and first generation graduate students. He remarked,
I’m excited to begin my term as director of CMENAS. I am grateful for the trust of my colleagues who nominated me and the leadership of my predecessor, Juan Cole. I look forward to the challenges ahead.
Professor Ali earned his BA in psychology, with emphasis on education, from the University of Chicago; MA in Arabic studies from the University of Utah; and PhD in Arabic literature from Indiana University. He is the author of Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages: Poets, Public Performance and the Presentation of the Past, and co-editor of The CALICO Journal: Special Issue on Hebrew and Arabic, both by University of Notre Dame Press. He has published articles in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women, Encyclopedia of Islam, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, and Journal of Arabic Literature.
Professor Ali strongly supports the center’s mission of promoting the study of the Middle East, past and present, broadly across the discipline. He says,
I am the product of public education and I am indebted to public grants, like Fulbright Awards, which have supported my research on five occasions. I am thus committed to public investment in the humanities. I plan to advance the CMENAS mission by building up the center’s development efforts; reaching out to constituencies in the Midwest, including K-12 teachers, community college educators, and local Middle East immigrant communities; and by nurturing relationships with interested units on U-M campuses. Beyond that agenda, however, I hope to use my fleeting term as director to highlight the role of languages and arts in the lives of the people of the Middle East across history.
###
Media Contact: Raquel Buckley (raquelrb@umich.edu)
The Center for Middle Eastern & North African Studies (CMENAS) at the University of Michigan provides a venue for faculty, students, and the community to learn and share knowledge through an active lecture series and various educational and research programs, and by partnering with a host of units across campus on projects of mutual interest. CMENAS is a member of the International Institute.
