We’d like to draw our readers’ attention to a new membership organization that shares ideals with the NAS. The Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) was formed two years ago in response to the growing academic interest in these two areas. ASMEA seeks to address Middle Eastern and African studies through open inquiry and pursuit of the truth, and it upholds rigorous standards of scholarship.
Bernard Lewis, Princeton’s Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies, is chairman of ASMEA. Here is a video of Professor Lewis’s keynote address at the 2008 ASMEA conference, in which he situates the academic study of the Middle East in a historic context.
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