Resources
Designated as a National Resource Center of Excellence, the Center for Near Eastern Studies supports the enrichment of the UCLA Library’s sizeable material collection which is available to students and scholars, researchers and professionals, precollegiate teachers and the public.
The Library’s Middle East and Islamic studies research collection is the largest in the western United States, with over 500,000 volumes including publications from the Middle East and from diaspora communities in the West. Middle East Bibliographer David Hirsch maintains a web portal and numerous specialized databases to assist researchers. The Department of Special Collections houses over 10,000 manuscripts in Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Ottoman Turkish and Persian. Other specialized collections are housed in the Art, Biomedical, Music and Law Libraries.
CNES’s outreach program maintains a collection of several hundred textbooks, primary sources, maps, artifacts and multimedia resources for the use of K-12 teachers. In collaboration with the CUNY Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center, CNES developed MEARO, Middle Eastern American Resources Online. CNES continues to research and collect Middle Eastern Americana, soon to be accessible online under the rubric of American Orientalism.
Some one thousand Middle East-related moving image titles are available from UCLA’s Instructional Media Library and Film and Television Archive, including features, documentaries and newsreels from the region, Middle East-themed Hollywood films (from The Sheikh of 1921 to the Three Kings of 1999), and works on the Middle Eastern diaspora such as the CNES-produced documentary Arabs in America. These resources are widely used in film studies, language instruction and throughout the undergraduate curriculum, and for individual viewing.
The Center is developing path-breaking online resources for the study of Middle Eastern languages, such as Turkish Tutor, the pilot Azeri Tutor and the forthcoming Iraqi Arabic Tutor. UCLA’s online Language Materials Project maintains a comprehensive database of Middle Eastern language teaching resources.
The Center counsels students on funding Middle East language and area studies in the US and abroad and maintains links with numerous overseas research centers and language schools. Pending annual renewal of Title VI funds, CNES administers the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship program for the Middle East. CNES-affiliated graduate students have won many Graduate Division Special Fellowships, including the prestigious multi-year Chancellor’s Scholarship, and outside grants for researcvh and study abroad from organizations such as the Social Science Research Council and the Fulbright-Hays Program.
Undergraduate students can spend all or part of their junior year in the Middle East via the University of California Education Abroad Program. Middle East destinations include Egypt, Israel and Turkey. Students in the recently approved undergraduate Global Studies major will soon be able to study at the International Institute satellite in Beirut, Lebanon.
