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11248 Bunche Hall
Box 951487
Los Angeles, California 90095-1487
phone: 310-825-4811
fax: 310-206-3555
Dear Colleagues,
Professor Gabriel Piterberg, History, has stepped down as Director of the Center for Near
Eastern Studies. We wish to express our sincere gratitude to Gabi for his capable leadership of
CNES since 2013. Under his leadership, the Center has continued to encourage, coordinate and
integrate instruction and research in the humanities and the social sciences, business, law, medicine
and the media, and in all languages essential to an understanding of the Near East and has fostered
public education programs and research projects of interest to the academic and professional
communities and to the broader public in metropolitan Los Angeles and throughout Southern
California. Thank you Gabi for your leadership of the Center!
We are pleased to announce that the new permanent Director of CNES, effective winter quarter
2016, will be Aslı Bâli, Associate Professor in the Law School. Aslı joined UCLA from the
Yale Law School where she was the Irving S. Ribicoff Fellow in Law, and coordinator of the
Middle East Legal Forum. She is also a graduate of the Yale Law School, where she served as an
editor of the Yale Law Journal and as an articles editor of the Yale Journal of Human Rights &
Development. Her Ph.D. is in Political Science is from Princeton University, where her dissertation
concerned the challenge of enforcement in the nuclear non-proliferation regime. After law school,
she worked for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and as
an associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP in the New York and Paris offices.
Her current research interests focus on public international law, arms control, human rights
and international humanitarian law. She also has a strong interest in the comparative law of
the Middle East.
In the meantime, James Gelvin, Professor of History, and Susan Slyomovics, Professor of
Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, will serve as Interim Co-Directors.
Jim focuses on social and cultural history of the modern Middle East, particularly of Greater
Syria (the area of present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories)
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among his honors, he received the
Outstanding Academic Title, American Library Association in 2006 for The Israel-Palestine
Conflict: One Hundred Years of War. Susan studies gender, human rights, folklore and material
culture, visual anthropology, and the Middle East and North Africa. Among her honors, Susan
received the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, Distinguished
Senior Scholar Award in 2014. We are fortunate that Jim and Susan are taking on the interim
co-directorship.
CNES Announcement
Page 2
Please join us in thanking Professor Gabriel Piterberg for his dedicated service and in welcoming
Professors Aslı Bâli, James Gelvin and Susan Slyomovics to the International Institute in their leadership
roles at the Center for Near Eastern Studies!
Sincerely,
C. Cindy Fan
Interim Vice Provost of International Studies
International Institute
Christopher L. Erickson
Senior Associate Vice Provost of International Studies
Director, International Institute