The Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies is an interdisciplinary education and research organization founded in 2001, devoted to the regional study of the Eastern Mediterranean within the greater Middle East. The Center is part of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, at Tufts University. Its aim is the study and understanding the heritage of the Eastern Mediterranean and the challenges it faces in the twenty-first century, being at the crossroads between the academic and policy world.
Activities
The founding director defined the goal of the center as the pursuit of a cross-regional and cross-cultural analysis, fostering the encounter of a diversity of viewpoints, with the belief that a broad diversity of views serves as an effective means of conflict resolution. The center aims to foster greater understanding of the Middle East to students, notably through studying relationships between the groups involved in Middle Eastern conflicts.
Initially the regional focus was on Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, and the neighboring countries of Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Israel, and Turkey. Later on the focus was broadened to also include other countries in the greater Middle East and North Africa regions.
The center hosts scholars conducting research and offering courses on the region. Fares also serves as a forum, organizing events such as conferences, for the discussion of policy issues from an international perspective, welcoming both for scholars within the school as well as reaching out to guest speakers. The center includes numerous events organized by the school's Mediterranean Club.
The Center has served as the organizer of the Issam M. Fares Lecture series, a renowned forum endowed by the Fares' foundations since 1993 and attended by thousands of students. Past notable speakers included former British Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair; former President of France Valéry Giscard d'Estaing; former U.S. Secretaries of State James Baker, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton; and former U.S. Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
History
The Fares Center was established in 2001 with the financial support of Issam M. Fares, a Lebanese businessman, deputy prime minister of Lebanon, Tufts trustee emeritus, and a member of Tufts’ International Board of Overseers and the Board of Overseers for Arts & Sciences. The dedication of the Center took place in March 2002, with President Bill Clinton speaking at the event.
Leila Fawaz was the founding director of the Center, from 2001 to 2012. Nadim Shehadi succeeded her taking over in 2015. Before Vali Nasr became dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 2012, he held the position of associate director at the Fares Center.
It was reported in 2002 that the Center had acquired a ceramic photo mural from the Arab American female artist Wasma'a Khalid Chorbachi. The artwork is displayed by the entrance of the center.
Directors
Leila Fawaz (2001-2012) The founding director of the Center was Leila Fawaz, who remained in that position until 2012. Fawaz was born in Sudan to Greek-Orthodox Lebanese parents and raised in Lebanon. She took two degrees at the American University of Beirut between 1967 and 1968 and pursued graduate studies in history at Harvard between 1972 and 1979.
She became a member of the Tufts faculty in 1979, and became a full professor in 1994. She chaired the History Department from 1994 to 1996. From 1996 to 2001, she served as dean of arts and humanities and as associate dean of the faculty. At Tufts Fawaz became the Issam M. Fares Professor of Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean Studies, where she also held appointments as professor of diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and as professor of history.
From 1990 to 1994 she Fawaz was the editor-in-chief of The International Journal of Middle East Studies, there she advanced the notion of conducting analytical and comparative research, with an international and cross-disciplinary approach. She bemoaned the overspecialization within the field, the neglect of attention to humanities/arts and, uninteresting writing, and linked these problems to Middle East studies as a whole, because researchers were "still a long way from being pathfinders in the world of scholarship generally."