Harvard University Center for Middle East Studies

The Harvard Center for Middle East Studies occupies a significant place in Edward Said’s account of how European Orientalism was adapted within postwar American scholarship. Its mid-1950s director, H. A. R. Gibb, brought the inherited intellectual outlook into an institutional setting where the study of the Middle East was increasingly framed as Cold War area studies and connected to public policy.

Institutional Setting and Purpose

Said places the Center within a broader American apparatus for Middle East research that took shape after the Second World War. He describes this new institutional landscape as responding not simply to scholarly curiosity but also to strategic concerns about political and intellectual influence in the region. The Center thus belongs to a network in which universities, public institutions, and policy interests helped establish the conditions under which the Middle East was studied.

Gibb’s Directorship and Influence

In the mid-1950s, Gibb became director of the Center. Said distinguishes his influence from that of Philip Hitti, whose position at Princeton had stimulated considerable scholarly interest and helped produce a substantial group of scholars. Gibb, by contrast, was more directly engaged with Orientalism’s public-policy dimensions. From Harvard, his position and intellectual style helped orient the field toward a Cold War area-studies approach.

That distinction matters because Said’s criticism concerns not only the content of individual scholarship but also the institutional settings that lend ideas authority and direct research. The Center’s importance in his account rests on its connection to Gibb’s role in making the study of the Middle East more closely legible within a policy-oriented framework.

European Inheritance and American Area Studies

Said argues that American postwar Middle East studies accommodated, normalized, and popularized a European tradition of Orientalist scholarship. Its institutional forms and social-scientific techniques could appear contemporary and refined while sustaining older assumptions about the Orient. He presents the Center as one point at which that intellectual inheritance entered the American university system and acquired renewed force through the language and organization of area studies.

The Center is therefore part of a larger continuity rather than an isolated scholarly initiative: European intellectual frameworks were carried into American institutions and adapted to the postwar strategic environment. In Said’s analysis, the result was a field whose academic authority and policy relevance developed together, even when its methods presented themselves as modern scholarship.