History
The Middle East Studies Center (MESC) was established at the Ohio State University in 1981. As an area studies center in the Office of International Affairs, MESC serves the university community and the community at large by facilitating and promoting interdisciplinary collaboration, offering courses on the Middle East, funding graduate study through the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS), linking OSU and foreign institutions through exchange programs and collaborations, and engaging various constituencies through educational activities. In addition MESC helps OSU to maintain its academic coverage of the Middle East by supporting the Middle East Studies Library, seeding positions, funding course development, and supporting study abroad to the Middle East.
Since its designation as a National Resource Center (NRC) in 1988, it has been consistently renewed in the 1991, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2003, and 2005 cycles, for a total of 19 years. MESC is one of the leading NRCs in the country, one of the few consistently-funded Middle East NRCs, and one which has been recognized by its peers and by the US Department of Education. We recognize the generosity of the Office of International Affairs, the Graduate School, the College of the Humanities, and the central university administration, who also have made our programs possible. Most of all, we remain grateful to our affiliated faculty; without their scholarship this NRC status would not be possible.
The Center's current Title VI NRC grant will bring over two million dollars to The Ohio State University (OSU). This funding creates more opportunities, and more access to OSU programs and activities focusing on the Middle East. MESC will continue to support cross-disciplinary scholarly synthesis focusing on the Middle East, the generation and dissemination of knowledge about the Middle East and the Muslim World, and a robust outreach program which connects MESC to a number of community partners, including the P-12 education community. Additionally, MESC will continue to support up to 12 academic Year FLAS Fellows and between 5 and 10 summer awards. By combining efforts with the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Department, these funds have allowed MESC and OSU to serve as host of the Eastern Consortium in Persian and Turkish for the 3 consecutive years most recently for three consecutive summers from 2004 to 2006. In addition, OSU served as its host in the summers of 1990, 1996-98. The Eastern Consortium summer intensive Persian and Turkish program is unique in the nation, providing graduates, undergraduates and professionals the chance to form a foundation in those languages. Through this membership in the Eastern Consortium, OSU is collaborating with some of the top universities in the United States. Other members include Harvard, Yale, NYU, Columbia, Princeton, Georgetown, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago.
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