The Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies (MESAS) in Emory College is a humanities-based, cross-disciplinary area studies department. It is built upon strengths in the cultures, literatures, and histories of the region that spans from the Pillars of Hercules to the Bay of Bengal. As one of the few departments in the United States that offers an undergraduate degree in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, MESAS is dedicated to understanding the region through primary sources, whether textual, oral, or material, as well as through multiple theoretical and disciplinary perspectives.

We specialize in the languages of Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Persian, and Tibetan as tools for our broader inquiry. With faculty members whose areas of expertise include archaeology, anthropology, gender studies, history, linguistics, literature, and religion, MESAS approaches the study of the region integrally, focusing on historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious continuities from the Ancient Mediterranean and Indo-Pakistani sub-continent, through the Islamic period up to the present day.