The Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World
CASAW is the result of a UK government initiative to build crucial expertise on the Arab World based on a knowledge of the Arabic language coupled with advanced research methods skills in the social and political sciences, arts and humanities.
The Centre is a collaboration between the Universities of Edinburgh, Durham and Manchester. It fields one of the largest concentrations of expertise in the UK, bringing together over 50 full-time members of staff drawn from a variety of departments in the arts, humanities and social and political sciences, all working on areas directly related to the Arabic-speaking world. CASAW’s priority is to serve national strategic interests by safeguarding the future health of Arab World expertise in the UK, training the next generation of academics and providing a vital flow of expertise to sustain the needs of the public and private sectors.
The Centre will substantially enhance national capacity in Arabic and Arab World studies. In addition to training an elite cadre of masters and doctoral students, it hosts eight post-doctoral fellows trained in Arabic and pursuing, alongside teaching and administration, major research projects on areas such as jihad and martyrdom, minority identities and the Muslim diaspora. The critical mass of scholarly expertise available at all three universities fosters a culture of national and international collaboration, both within academia and beyond to the public and private sectors.
As part of the United Kingdom’s Language-Based Area Studies Initiative the country’s major funding bodies - the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council), AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) and SFC (Scottish Funding Council) - awarded the Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Durham £5 million to establish the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW) which was founded in September 2006.
