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Regions are made and remade both politically and intellectually.They are shaped, debated, and reimagined through politics, scholarship, and global change. Since the Cold War, U.S. universities have relied on Area Studies as a central framework for shaping world regions, including the Middle East. This model once rested on long-standing, albeit contested, assumptions: that knowledge production follows disciplinary boundaries, that regions correspond to coherent geographic and cultural units, and that university knowledge constitutes a public good.

Today, migration, digital networks, and especially shifting geopolitics challenge the older ways of debating and imagining regions. At the same time, funding structures, institutional priorities, and political debates are reshaping higher education itself. These transformations raise urgent questions for Middle East Studies-and for Area Studies more broadly.

How might we rethink regionalism for the twenty-first century? What would it mean to move beyond bounded geographic models toward inter-regional and intra-regional frameworks that emphasize circulation, comparison, and connection? How can critical Area Studies address overlapping histories, diasporas, transnational movements, and global systems while still preserving deep linguistic, historical, and cultural expertise?What kind of institutional structures and ecosystems are needed to sustain such inquiry?

This conversation invites scholars and institutions to reconsider how regions are made, both intellectually and institutionally, and to imagine new strategies for sustaining Middle East Studies in a rapidly changing academic and political landscape.