CALIFORNIA

Adventures in Field-Building: On the History of Middle East Studies in the United States

A lecture by Zachary Lockman, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University

Sponsored by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies

Tuesday, April 14, 2015
3:00 PM
10383 Bunche Hall
UCLA

Area studies is often simplistically depicted as little more than a Cold War form of knowledge, but its emergence as a component of the postwar academic scene was in fact propelled and shaped by visions, exigencies and contingencies that were not initially or exclusively about the needs of the national security state. Drawing on extensive research in the archives of the big foundations, academic organizations like the SSRC and the ACLS, various universities, etc., Zachary Lockman explores how the field of Middle East studies in the United States actually got built in the postwar period, with a focus not on intellectual paradigms but on funding decisions and their rationales, efforts to elaborate and implement a theory and method for area studies, the development of what he terms the field’s infrastructure and (not least) the anxieties that always accompanied the building of what was initially imagined as a new kind of academic field.

Zachary Lockman, from the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and the Department of History, New York University, focuses his research and teaching field on the socioeconomic, cultural and political history of the modern Middle East, particularly the Mashriq.