Posted: August 26, 2026

20 May 2026

Eve De Rosa
Dean of Faculty
Cornell University

Dear Eve,

The Department of Near Eastern Studies (NES) in the College of Arts and Sciences has requested to change its name to the Department of Middle East and North Africa Studies (MENAS). The department formally made this request to College leadership in March 2025. As the enclosed proposal indicates, the initiative for this change came from the department faculty. The proposal details the careful deliberations undertaken by the faculty beginning in 2022 and culminating in a vote in the fall of 2024. The final vote tally from November 2024 demonstrates the overwhelming consensus of the faculty in favor of this change.

The opinion of a broad majority of the department’s faculty is that “Near East” is an antiquated term, not legible to current students or the broader public and increasingly esoteric in the scholarly community. While recognizing that no single term can entirely convey the full scope of the department’s remit, it is their strong sense that the MENAS name better reflects both the intellectual commitments of the department’s faculty and the geopolitical, cultural, and historical realities on the ground.

I accept the department’s request for the change of name and ask you to initiate the next steps of the process.

Sincerely,

Peter John Loewen
Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

xc: Patrizia McBride, Senior Associate Dean for Social Sciences & Interdisciplinary Programs
Kim Haines-Eitzen, Chair, Department of Near Eastern Studies

March 3, 2025

The Department of Near Eastern Studies has voted to change its name to the Department of Middle East and North Africa Studies (MENAS). This decision is the outcome of long and careful deliberations. We have sought to renew the department’s identity by bringing its name in alignment with a term that is recognizable to our students and the public, and one that better reflects the intellectual commitments of our faculty.

Department History

After a post-depression disbandment in 1932, the department was reinstated in 1965 as the Department of Semitic Languages and Literatures. In 1976, the department was renamed Near Eastern Studies to reflect the broadening of its scope to include ancient Near Eastern history, Assyriology, Archaeology, Biblical Studies, Islamic literature and history, Hebrew, and Arabic. Since 1976, our remit has expanded yet further to now include the region’s modern history and anthropology. Nearly half a century later, our department and our graduate field today include faculty and graduate students whose research spans the entirety of the MENA region including Iberia, North Africa, Egypt, the Levant, Turkey, and Persianate worlds of Iran and the Caucasus in their past and present linguistic
diversity. The name Middle East and North Africa Studies reflects the vitality of our department and our ability to adjust to changing times, as we have done in the past.

Name Change Rationale

The term “Near East” is a regional toponym that originated in the 19th century in the context of European colonialism to describe the regions east of Europe (but closer than the “Far East”). It gained currency in the late 19th and 20th centuries as both a geopolitical term closely connected with Ottoman territories, including North Africa, and a referent for ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Levant. In the mid-20th century, as “Middle East” came to eclipse “Near East” as the preferred term in public discourse, the latter became increasingly esoteric, used primarily by scholars of the region, particularly those studying its deep past. Today, only scholars in ancient studies use “Near East.” Even in those circles it is becoming increasingly obsolete, as archaeologists and ancient historians come to assimilate Edward Said’s core critique that the political and cultural conditions of the present shape all knowledge production. At the same time, in the post-WWII period the term “Middle East and North Africa” (MENA) has gained currency, reflecting shared geopolitical, cultural, and historical ties across the same region.

As the “Near East” has fallen out of circulation, the name of our department has become increasingly unrecognizable to Cornell students. The vast majority of Cornell’s undergraduate students know the region by the more common terms, Middle East and MENA. In our classes, and in the annual Arts & Sciences Majors Fair held every Fall semester, we often find ourselves explaining to students what Near Eastern Studies is, and we usually describe it as broadly synonymous with Middle East and North Africa. Our department consistently maintains strong enrollments, but a more legible department name will only further attract students to our courses and help us promote and grow our major.

With its Mediterranean coastline to the north, North Africa, from the Maghreb to Egypt, has always had strong historical and cultural ties to the Middle East and Mediterranean. From prehistory to the age of Egyptian civilization, and onward through the Islamic conquest and Ottoman rule, political, religious, and social influences have profoundly and mutually shaped both the Middle East and North Africa in ways that challenge the overly stark distinction in contemporary geographic imaginaries. Faculty in the department study and teach about these flows and influences. In antiquity, throughout the second, and the first part of the first millennium BCE, Egypt controlled the southern Levant, a political reality that manifests in the archaeological record and in the biblical imagination. From late
antiquity through the late medieval period, people, ideas, and goods moved back and forth between the Maghreb, Spain, Egypt, Syria and Iraq, fostering intense cultural exchange. In the 20th century, Egyptian media distribution reached across the Arabic-speaking region. The name MENAS acknowledges the important place North Africa holds in the history and culture of the Middle East, and vice versa.

We recognize that people and ideas also traveled between MENA and along other routes across Africa, the Mediterranean, and Central Asia. We seek to foster collaboration with other departments and interdisciplinary programs to highlight these interconnections. While recognizing that global power relations taint all geopolitical toponyms, including MENA, and no single term can exhaustively capture the full breadth of our intellectual scope, we have determined by a strong consensus that Middle East and North Africa Studies is the most fitting name for our department in the 21st century.

Process

The decision to change our name was the result of a careful process. In Spring 2022, NES began gathering information about names of comparable departments (both longstanding and newly adopted). We also circulated articles contributing to debates over what to call the field. At the time, we achieved consensus about the need to change our department name. However, there remained a diversity of opinions about what new name to adopt.

In Fall 2022, NES held a retreat facilitated by Katrina Nobles of the Scheinman Institute where we began to discuss a process for changing our department name. This meeting focused on how to work toward achieving consensus on divisive issues. NES decided to postpone further discussion on the name change until we had completed two tenure track searches, so our new colleagues could participate in the discussion.

In Fall 2024, NES held a two-part retreat facilitated by Katrina Nobles and Sally Klingel of the Scheinman Institute. We established a process for voting on adopting a new name. NES faculty unanimously agreed that the new name must achieve consensus in order to be adopted. In other words, a new name would only be adopted if everyone accepted the name, even if it was not their first choice. If any department faculty opposed the name, we would retain NES until we achieved consensus on a replacement name. We devoted several hours to discussing the pros and cons of all of the names under consideration. In a non-binding straw poll at our meeting on September 28, 2024, it became clear that a consensus was forming around: Middle East and North Africa Studies.

On October 28, NES circulated an online ballot for faculty to submit a binding vote on changing the department name. All continuing NES tenure stream and lecturer faculty participated in the vote. On November 1, 2024, the vote tally showed that NES faculty approved changing the name to “Middle East and North Africa Studies.”

Tally of the final vote