University of Michigan. Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies

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Established in 1961 as the Center for Near and Middle EAstern Studies, the center received federal funding in 1963 and was renamed as Center for Near Eastern and North African Studies.

The center coordinated research, awarded fellowships, and offered conferences and workshops focusing on history, politics, economy, literature, art and related topics. In 1991 it was redesignated as the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies.

The Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies (CMENAS) was created by the University of Michigan in 1961. It was originally called the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies, which was changed to the Center for Near Eastern and North African Studies in 1963, and was changed once again in 1991 to its current name. The Center was one of many "area centers" established at American universities in the post-World War II era. Following the war, American foreign policy makers argued that a lack of American expertise in foreign language and culture had hindered the U.S. war effort, and that this deficiency would continue to weaken the nation's global position. Area centers were intended to remedy this weakness by encouraging intense interdisciplinary scholarship with a strong focus on the mastery of language. In 1947, the University of Michigan established its first area studies center, the Center for Japanese Studies.

The Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies was the product of an expansion of area studies at the university proposed by the College of Literature, Science and the Arts (LS&A) in 1959. LS&A appointed a committee chaired by anthropology professor William Schorger to develop the proposal. The committee recommended the creation of four new centers: the Center for Chinese Studies, the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies, the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, and the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies. In 1961, the university secured a large grant from the Ford Foundation to carry out the proposal, and launched the new centers. Schorger was appointed director of the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies.

The new center drew upon the faculty of a variety of academic departments. Professors from the extant Department of Near Eastern Studies, who were mostly language experts, provided the core of the center's faculty; they were joined by faculty from history, anthropology, economics, the history of art, and other disciplines whose work concerned the Middle East or North Africa.

The center's main objectives are to coordinate research on the Middle East and North Africa and to train experts on those regions. In its first decade, the center primarily fulfilled these goals by funding faculty instruction and research, providing fellowships to students, and supporting library acquisitions. In the 1970s and 1980s, the center expanded its activities by hosting academic conferences, sponsoring lectures, and developing workshops on the Middle East for secondary school instructors. In the 1990s, the Center has continued its varied activities, supported by federal grants under the Title VI National Resource Center and Foreign Language Fellowships Program.