By the turn of the millennium, the Middle East Centre was already a mature unit of St Antony’s well into its fifth decade of operations. Founded in 1957, the MEC grew under the visionary leadership of Albert Hourani to one of the largest and most influential area studies centres in the world. Drawing on government funds following the 1961 Hayter Report on Oriental, Slavonic, East European and African Studies – target areas of British post-imperial interest – Hourani was able to establish new positions in a wide range of disciplines. Working with Elizabeth Monroe, who came to the Middle East after earlier research on the Mediterranean and Abyssinia, Hourani recruited some of the best minds in Middle Eastern studies: Geoffrey Lewis (Turkish), Peter Lienhardt (sociology), Roger Owen (economic history), Mustafa Badawi (modern Arabic literature), John Gurney (Persian history and culture), Derek Hopwood (bibliographer and modern history), and Robert Mabro (economics). At the height of its operations, the MEC boasted a Fellowship of nine world-class scholars who played a major role in defining the new and dynamic field of modern Middle Eastern studies.
As this first generation of MEC scholars approached retirement, a second generation of Fellows began to take shape. In 1980, Hamid Enayat succeeded Albert Hourani as Fellow in the modern history of the Middle East but tragically died in 1982. The Faculty of Oriental Studies subsequently froze the post. Avi Shlaim secured the Alastair Buchan Readership in International Relations and, one of the Israeli New Historians, joined the Middle East Centre in 1987. Shlaim introduced the field of international relations to the MEC fellowship. Two years later, Celia Kerslake was appointed to the Fellowship in Turkish. Eugene Rogan followed in 1991, when the MEC secured the release of the modern history post. When Roger Owen left Oxford to assume a new chair in Harvard in 1993, his post migrated from Oriental Studies to the Department of Politics and International Relations, reflecting the evolution of Owen’s teaching and research from economic history to the politics of the Middle East. Philip Robins succeeded Owen as politics Fellow in 1995.
Nadim Shehadi (Director of the Centre for Lebanese Studies), Palestinian stateswoman and Honorary Fellow Dr Hanan Ashrawi, Walter Armbrust, Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, March 2004.
Celia Kerslake, Librarian Mastan Ebtehaj, and Philip Robins, July 2016.
As the Centre entered the twenty-first century, the transition to the second generation of fellows reached completion. In 2001 Walter Armbrust assumed the University Lectureship in Modern Middle Eastern Studies following the retirement of Derek Hopwood in 2000. The Centre drew on funds raised in honour of Albert Hourani, who passed away in 1993, to underwrite St Antony’s contribution to the UL in MMES, and Walter Armbrust became the first Hourani Fellow. The core Fellowship expanded with the creation of two new posts. Michael Willis filled the H.M. King Mohammad VI Fellowship in Moroccan and Mediterranean Studies in 2004. In 2010, Tariq Ramadan became the inaugural H.H. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani Professor in Contemporary Islamic Studies. At that point, the Centre boasted a fellowship of seven permanent members covering Turkish, history, international relations, politics, anthropology, Islamic studies, and regional focus ranging from North Africa, Egypt, the Levant, Israel, and Turkey.
The Centre’s activities expanded along with its Fellowship. Increasingly, the MEC turned to fundraising to address the growing strain on resources. The first major gift created an endowment for the Middle East Centre Archive, to fund the salary of a full-time professional archivist. Founded in 1961 by Elizabeth Monroe, from private papers she first collected to write her landmark imperial history, Britain’s Moment in the Middle East, the MEC Archive grew into a major collection consulted by scholars from around the world. Thanks to the generous support of the King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives in Riyadh, the Centre was able to recruit a professional archivist to oversee its valuable Private Papers and Photographic archives.
In May 2002, Debbie Usher took up the post of Middle East Centre Archivist and set about the systematic transformation of the collection.
The next challenge was to build up the Fellowship after the suppression of key posts first established under Albert Hourani’s directorship. Upon the retirement of Peter Lienhardt, Mustafa Badawi, and Robert Mabro, the university opted not to renew the posts in sociology and economics. Moreover, the posts in Persian history and modern Arabic literature migrated to other colleges – Iranian studies to Wadham, Arabic literature to St John’s. A major benefaction from the Moroccan British Society enabled the creation of a new College post in North African studies named in honour of King Muhammad VI of Morocco.
In 2004, Michael Willis became the inaugural H.M. King Muhammad VI Fellow in Moroccan and Mediterranean Studies.
This was followed by a generous endowment from the Qatar Foundation to establish both a statutory professorship in the Faculty of Oriental Studies and a cooperation programme with the Middle East Centre in contemporary Islamic studies. In 2010, Professor Tariq Ramadan joined the fellowship, inaugurating a new partnership with the Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies (subsequently renamed the College of Islamic Studies of the Hamad bin Khalifa University).
With the expansion of the Fellowship, of the Archive, and the Library, and growing student numbers, the Centre was rapidly outgrowing its facilities.
The main Centre building, at 68 Woodstock Road, housed an ever-growing Library as well as Fellows’ offices, while the Archive filled the basement of 66 Woodstock Road.
Seizing on the approaching fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the MEC in 2007, the Director and Fellows entered into discussion with architects and potential donors with their biggest fund-raising campaign yet: a new building for the MEC. St Antony’s Governing Body gave the MEC permission to develop the land between 66 and 68 Woodstock Road. In 2005, preliminary drawings by Oxford Architects, a distinguished local practice, were rejected by the Oxford council’s planning committee for violating the strict North Oxford conservation rules about preserving green spaces and gaps between buildings. Moreover, we failed to secure a donor to support the proposed building’s conventional design.
All was to change in 2006, when the Centre entered into discussion with Mr Nemir Kirdar, the founder and CEO of the Bahrain-based investment bank, Investcorp. Introduced to the Centre by his daughter Serra Kirdar, who followed undergraduate studies in Pembroke College with a master’s and doctorate in education at St Antony’s, Mr Kirdar raised the Centre’s game by proposing visionary architect Zaha Hadid to design the new MEC building. Like Mr Kirdar, Zaha was a native of Iraq and a friend of St Antony’s, where her brother Foulath Hadid secured an Honorary Fellowship for his many services to the MEC. Mr Kirdar generously committed to covering all the architects’ fees to design an innovative landmark that would overcome the Oxford planning committee’s resistance.
The new design was first unveiled at the MEC’s fiftieth anniversary reunion in the summer of 2007. We got our first sense of how the public would react to the shock of the new, as half the alumni expressed grave reservations about the double-curved sculptural design they believed looked like neither the Middle East nor Oxford, while the other half raved over what they saw as a most exciting design taking the MEC into the 21st century. Indeed, the Oxford planning committee responded in exactly the same way, with half the members voting enthusiastically in support and the other half voting against the building. We only just scraped through by the casting vote of the committee chair in favour of planning permission.
From commission to opening, the new building project, dubbed the ‘Softbridge,’ took nine years. No sooner had we secured planning permission than the global financial crisis of 2008 put all development projects on hold. However, in 2012, Mr Kirdar’s company Investcorp pledged a gift of £11 million to cover the construction of the new building. This, in addition to Mr Kirdar’s personal gift of £3.5 million, ensured the new building enjoyed full funding for architects’ fees, construction, and £1 million for maintenance. It was the most generous gift St Antony’s has ever received, and ensured the building’s construction, maintenance and upkeep have come at no cost to the College.
In May 2015, St Antony’s welcomed Zaha Hadid and the Kirdars to celebrate the opening of the new building, which was named the Investcorp Building in honour of the donors. To celebrate Nemir Kirdar’s role, we also renamed the Victorian building at 68 Woodstock Road the Kirdar Building. H.H. Sheikha Moza bint Nasser al-Missned of Qatar gave the keynote address before a distinguished audience from Investcorp, Zaha Hadid Architects, the town and university of Oxford, hosted by the Warden and Fellows of St Antony’s.
Among the distinguished guests, five stood out as members of the MEC’s new Advisory Board. Conceived by Nemir Kirdar as a solution to the College’s concerns for the maintenance funding for the Investcorp Building, the MEC Advisory Board held its first meeting on the opening day of the Investcorp Building. The first five members, chaired by Mr Kirdar, were Sheikh Ghassan Shaker, Dr Nayef Al Rodhan, Professor Joseph Sassoon, and Mr Marshall Cloyd. Over subsequent years, Dr Serra Kirdar, Ms Danah Al Mulla, Ms Suzy Assaad Wahba, Mr Hazem Ben-Gacem, and Ms Suzy Kanoo joined the board through election. When illness prevented Mr Kirdar from continuing to serve as Chair, his daughter Dr Serra Kirdar was unanimously elected to succeed him. Over the years, through twice annual meetings, the Advisory Board member has provided financial support and invaluable guidance in ensuring the MEC fulfils its mission to the highest standard. They have also helped us to preserve the Investcorp Building in the same pristine condition as on its opening day.
From the very beginning, the Investcorp Building has provided the most remarkable facilities for the MEC. Built over four levels, the basement of the building provides a 117-seat lecture theatre with the best acoustics of any hall in Oxford. The ground floor serves as a gallery space with kitchen facilities and windows onto gardens for breakout space. The first floor offers expansive readers’ facilities and stacks for the MEC Library, while the second floor gives dramatic space for the MEC Archive reading room. The storage area for the Archive is also housed in the basement and provides optimal environmental conditions for the conservation of both the photographic and the paper collections. Such functionality is delivered in a prize-winning building of exceptional beauty that won not only RIBA awards but took the top prize for academic buildings in the World Festival of Architecture in Berlin in 2016. Tragically, it would prove the last of her buildings that Zaha Hadid would see completed. She passed away suddenly in March 2016, leaving in Oxford a minor masterpiece as part of her rich legacy.
In 2017, the MEC welcomed its alumni back for our sixtieth anniversary reunion. By then, all reservations about the shock of the new had been resolved by the experience of seeing the completed Investcorp Building. The gaudy proved our largest and most successful reunion yet, attracting both emeritus faculty and alumni from across the decades. The MEC Fellowship was flying high with Dr Toby Matthiesen, a five-year senior research fellow (2015-2020) in international relations joining the seven permanent fellows to make for a large and diverse group of scholars. Based in our stunning new building, attracting outstanding master’s and doctoral students, and enjoying the financial support of our Advisory Board and donors, the sky seemed the limit. Yet hard times lay ahead.
In October 2017, three women in France accused Professor Tariq Ramadan of rape, charges that Prof Ramadan denied. Further accusations followed from Switzerland. Coming at the height of the ‘Me Too’ movement, the accusations set off a press frenzy that proved very traumatic for students and colleagues alike. In November the University granted Prof Ramadan leave while he sought to clear his name. When Prof Ramadan returned to France in 2018 to face his accusers, he was detained by the police and confined to prison for nine months. He has since been held in France pending resolution of the case (he was convicted of charges in Switzerland and has appealed the verdict). In June 2021 Prof Ramadan took early retirement from Oxford on grounds of ill-health.
While the ‘Ramadan Affair’ preoccupied the MEC and College, two of our Fellows faced grave medical issues. Michael Willis was diagnosed with cancer, while Philip Robins faced medical issues that his doctors had difficulty diagnosing. Fortunately Prof Willis responded to treatment and surgery with a full recovery. However, Prof Robins was finally diagnosed with a complex case of Parkinson’s and was granted early retirement on health grounds in September 2019. In 2020, Dr Toby Matthiesen’s five year Fellowship drew to a close as he left Oxford to pursue a prestigious Marie Curie Fellowship in Stanford. By the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the MEC Fellowship had been reduced to a core of four Fellows – Eugene Rogan, Walter Armbrust, Michael Willis and Laurent Mignon.
The COVID years proved challenging and transformative for the MEC. The Fellows adapted to the range of online platforms to deliver lectures, tutorials and research supervision to students. The Library and Archive scrambled to provide their services through digital resources. The Friday seminar went online, as we adapted to the Zoom webinar. While the online lecture had the advantage of opening our programme to friends and alumni around the world – on some evenings we noted audience from South America, North America, Europe, the Middle East and East Asia – we all longed for the face-to-face contact of the lecture theatre followed by a good dinner at High Table. As the lockdown rules began to relax, the Fellows took every opportunity to reach out to students. We would have meetings in the MEC gardens with beers and soft drinks in which we would gather in groups of six just to chat. At the end of the first lockdown, we hired a riverboat for an open-air celebration of the end of exams with all our master’s students and faculty to cruise from Folly Bridge to Radley and back.
Coming out of COVID, the MEC has worked to rebuild its faculty – and to diversify away from its notorious all-male Fellowship. In the process, a distinct third generation of MEC Fellows has taken shape. The third generation was initiated with the appointment of Professor Laurent Mignon to the fellowship in Turkish in 2011, following the retirement of Celia Kerslake earlier that same year. The third generation has progressed rapidly in the post-COVID years. In 2021 Neil Ketchley was appointed politics Fellow, succeeding Philip Robins in a join post hosted by the Department of Politics and International Relations and the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA). In 2022, Maryam Alemzadeh filled a new post in the history and politics of Iran, jointly funded by the MEC and OSGA. Centre funding for the Iran post came from an endowment originally established by the Shah of Iran in the late 1970s and has served to fund an Iranian visiting fellowship. In 2023, Professor Raihan Ismail took up the H.H. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani chair in contemporary Islamic studies. In 2024, the MEC welcomed Professor Pascal Menoret, who filled the Al Saud Professorship in the study of the contemporary Arab world. While the Al Saud Chair is attached to Magdalen College, the MEC struck an agreement with the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (which had recently changed its name from Oriental Studies) to provide Professor Menoret’s faculty office in the MEC. This marks the first time that the MEC has hosted an Al Saud Professor, and brings the Fellowship of the Centre back to full strength of eight permanent faculty.
The expansion of the Fellowship has led to the activation of important partnerships and exchanges with scholars in the Middle East and North Africa. Raihan Ismail has relaunched the MEC’s partnership with the College of Islamic Studies in Doha through our Contemporary Islamic Studies Programme, which involves lectures, seminars and workshops in Oxford and Qatar. Michael Willis and Eugene Rogan have led an important new exchange with Tunisian universities fostering a two-way exchange of doctoral researchers and faculty made possible through the generous support of our Advisory Board member, Hazem Ben-Gacem. The MEC established a visiting fellowship programme with Birzeit University in Palestine, funded through a generous bequest from the late Soraya Antonius and named in honour of her father, George Antonius. Eugene Rogan and Pascal Menoret are reactivating cooperation and exchange with the King Abdulaziz Foundation in Riyadh, to include archival resources, joint publications, and annual lectures. These and other exchanges ensure the MEC remains deeply engaged in the region we study.
As St Antony’s turns 75, the Middle East Centre marks important milestones as well. We celebrated the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Investcorp Building in 2025 with the loan of original art by Zaha Hadid from both the Zaha Hadid Foundation and from Michael Wolfson. We also hosted two lectures on Zaha’s life and work. Michael Wolfson, former student and colleague of Zaha’s, spoke on the early years of Zaha’s practice, and Joseph Giovannini spoke from his forthcoming biography of Zaha Hadid. It was a pleasure to welcome back many of the architects who contributed to the Investcorp Building on this occasion, including Patrick Schumacher, Jim Heverin, Johannes Hoffmann and Ken Bostock. We hope to continue honouring Zaha’s legacy in cooperation with the Zaha Hadid Foundation for years to come. We also look forward to welcoming our alumni back for a seventieth anniversary ‘platinum jubilee’ celebration in 2027.
While the MEC is once again at full strength, we are well aware of the threats our subject faces. The Middle East and North Africa is itself divided into intractable conflicts that put whole parts of the region beyond reach for travel, study, and research. Universities have confronted divisive tensions since war erupted between Israel and Gaza, provoking accusations of antisemitism and of genocide. The advent of the Trump Administration in the United States has brought particular difficulties to Middle Eastern studies in partner universities like Harvard and Columbia. No doubt the MEC will face serious challenges in the years to come. Yet we believe our mission more important than ever in these challenging times.
Author: Professor Eugene Rogan
July 2025
St Antony’s College 75th Anniversary