Fall 2009 Language Placement Exam Information

New Fall 2009 Courses at MEALAC

Updated Guidelines for Registration in Arabic Language Classes

Columbia Arabic Summer Program

Middle East and South Asian languages and cultures, in one form or another, have been taught at Columbia University continuously since 1780, within a variety of institutional configurations. An independent department of Indo-Iranian Languages and Literatures was founded in 1895, supplemented and then replaced by Semitic Studies, and by Middle East Languages and Cultures in 1954. South Asian studies was added in 1992, and African studies in 2006.

Largely initiated at Columbia, the creative ferment over questions of Orientalism, area studies, and postcolonialism has transformed the field and made MEALAC into one of the foremost sites in the world for the study of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. A core feature of the department's approach is its commitment to critical philology, or the theoretically reflexive study of texts read in the primary language. Yet while critical philology is a necessary condition of our disciplinary coherence, it is not a sufficient one. Textual expertise, if deprived of intellectual history, literary knowledge, and social and cultural studies -- three additional pillars of MEALAC -- is crippled, just as the latter deprived of the former is blind. But even that formulation does not capture the full epistemic contours of the department's scholarly work. Here a new disciplinary-or even postdisciplinary-formation is emerging, one that takes seriously the vernacular mediations and mutations of our knowledge, the conceptual processes by which our objects of study have been constituted, the centrality of the past in understanding the present, the need for methodological rigor, and the rich possibilities of comparison.

602 Kent Hall MC3928
1140 Amsterdam Ave.
New York, NY 10027
Phone: 212-854-2556
Fax: 212-854-5517