2025 MESA Award Recipients & Honorees
The Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza and the Isnad program of the Welfare Association (Taawon)
Jane Hathaway, Ohio State University
Brinkley Messick, Columbia University
Sherene Seikaly, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Sublime Post: How the Ottoman Imperial Post Became a Public Service (Yale University Press)
Choon Hwee Koh, UCLA
Honorable Mention
Arab Brazil: Fictions of Ternary Orientalism (Oxford University Press)
Waïl S. Hassan, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class (Stanford University Press)
Stacy D. Fahrenthold, UC Davis
Honorable Mention
Love Across Difference: Mixed Marriage in Lebanon (Stanford University Press)
Lara Deeb, Scripps College
Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought (Stanford University Press)
Susanna Ferguson, Smith College
Making Space For the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East (Stanford University Press)
Arang Keshavarzian, New York University
Honorable Mentions
Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press)
Nora Barakat, Stanford University
Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press)
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, UC Santa Barbara
Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the Humanities (Co-winners)
The Politics of Hygiene: Public Health and Urban Transformation in Late Ottoman Istanbul
Can Gümüş-İspir, Boğaziçi University, Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History
Supervised by Cengiz Kırlı
Nakba Ecologies: On Elemental Intifada in Colonized Palestine
Sherena Razek, Brown University, Department of Modern Culture and Media
Supervised by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
Honorable Mention
Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 606/1210) Book of the Hidden Secret and Its Reception
Lillian C. McCabe, Yale University, Department of Religious Studies
Supervised by Travis Zadeh
Mashaʿ of the Periphery: Collective Labor and Property in Palestinian Liberation Struggle
Faiq Mari, ETH Zurich, Department of Architecture
Supervised by Philip Ursprung and Christian Schmid (internal) and Abdel Razzaq Takriti (external)
Honorable Mention
Rescaling Family and Intimacy via Indebtedness in the Soma Coal Basin
Ferda Nur Demirci Eryat, University of Toronto, Department of Anthropology
Supervised by Andrea Muehlebach and Fırat Bozçalı
Sons, Families, Secrets: Queering Normative Kinship in Jordan
Johnathan Norris, Boston University, Department of Anthropology
Honorable Mentions
The Palestinian Sunbird: Analyzing the Bodily, Environmental, and Metaphysical Mobility of Resistance and Oppression in Palestine
Jenna Barhoush, Columbia University, Department of Anthropology
Drone Recirculations: Iran’s Reverse-Engineering Warfare
Soha Saghazadeh, UC Santa Barbara, Film and Media Studies