The Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies (CMENAS) celebrates its 60th Anniversary in 2021!
To kick off the celebrations, CMENAS is looking to hear from you! If you are an alumnus, current student, community, faculty, or staff member (past or present), we would like to hear your favorite stories about your time with CMENAS.
In the near future, we hope to celebrate this milestone in person and share the meaningful work that CMENAS has accomplished, so be on the lookout for special events and other programming.
To share your stories or any photographs with us, please fill out the online CMENAS Stories form. Visit our CMENAS@60 page to stay in the loop of all activities related to CMENAS 60th year anniversary.
Here are some of the stories from our community on what CMENAS means to them.
Every semester, one of the CMENAS faculty and staff would open their home for the center to come by for a Middle Eastern meal and chat. The food was excellent, and the company even better. At these events, I befriended students and faculty, who are friends that I continue to interact with to this day.
— Christopher Pumford (BA ‘19)
I felt a strong connection and sense of support with nearly every CMENAS professor in ways that did not exist in my other studies. The instructors are not only extremely knowledgeable and established experts in their fields, but they also ensured a positive and comfortable space for learning and oftentimes went the extra mile to make sure their students felt supported.
—Farah Erzouki (BA ‘14, MPH ‘16)
My CMENAS education provided me with a strong, social, political, and historical understanding of the region, which has ultimately helped me become a better-informed advocate.
—Sarah Blume (BA ‘16)
Everything I do now is helped by what I learned in my degree. Being able to tailor my degree was massively helpful; it allowed me to improve my Arabic, which I use on a daily basis, and I feel as though I am able to educate non-Arabs about Arab culture and heritage with confidence.
—Devin Bathish (BA ‘17)
[My CMENAS degree] has allowed me to connect with my culture in a way that I couldn’t before. For example, when I recently traveled to Oman to visit my family, I could communicate much better with them and enhance the relationships we already established. This is perhaps one of the most beneficial things I’ve gained from the degree.
—Tina Al-Khersan (BA ‘17)
There is an embarrassment of riches at U-M and [students] should take advantage of as many opportunities as possible; be as involved as possible with CMENAS; most institutions don’t have these spaces.
—Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar (PhD ‘10).
I very much enjoyed having area studies centers as meeting points for focused dialog, I also appreciated that the CMENAS colloquium, workshops, and seminars often encompassed transregional topics and spoke to diverse audiences. These were some of the more stimulating intellectual conversations during my time at Michigan.
—Joseph Viscomi (PhD ‘16)
At U-M, [CMENAS] was my home base. I am very grateful for the NDFL Fellowships from the Center that enabled me to stay at Michigan and finish my PhD. I have been impressed by all the collaborative activities across departments and faculties. If we all support CMENAS, it will have a bright future.
—Lois Aroian (PhD ‘78)
[CMENAS] was an exciting place to be [in the 1980s] because so much was happening...We had some wonderful students. They worked in the center and because of their activity, we could do an awful lot more. They were usually willing to help and offer ideas and they came from a lot of different places. I stay in touch with a lot of them and I read their books, I watch their presentations at [the conferences of the Middle East Studies Association], and a lot of the people in the field now were people who were our students.
—Betsy Barlow (CMENAS Outreach Coordinator ‘82-’00)
