A Research Guide to Middle Eastern Studies: Home

Frieze tile with phoenix  |  ca. 1270s  |  Iran (probably Takht-i Sulayman)  |  Fritware, overglaze luster-painted  |  Metropolitan Museum of Art.  (12.49.4)

(Muqarnas entrance hood, Fatima Masumeh Shrine. Qom, Iran)

Welcome! This guide is meant to act as a toolbox of digital and print resources for those researching or studying the Middle East. As a living document, this is by no means an exhaustive guide, but it's certainly a good place to check for resources you may not have considered before. This guide aims to consolidate info from Near/Mid East guides at numerous institutions, mixing in newly found resources at Penn and beyond, into a unified toolbox that reflects researcher needs and approaches. This guide would not have been possible without the hard work of librarians at other institutions before me. Please see the "Useful Links" tab to find links to their guides. I have updated resources and removed long-dead links and reorganized material into the form you see here.

Above in the tabs, you'll find more specialized lists of resources by type relating to the Middle East. These are freely available to Penn users online through our proxy or the wide web, and a few are linked to the print copies available in our libraries. You'll find several of the bigger sources cross-listed amongst our lists and links to handlists of collections housed at Penn.

Below are the basic/introductory research tools available at Penn, which are foundational for any stage of study or research. These are not specific to the Middle East, but often include many major journals and sources pertinent to the field.

Know of a great tool that somehow wasn't listed here? Feel free to send an email to have it added to our guide.

The Middle East Collection is housed in various locations of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, depending on the type of material and its content. Below is a general orientation:

Center for Global Collections 

Located on the 5th floor of Van Pelt, this is where you can find books in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Kurdish. This is also where the office for the Middle East Studies Librarian is, as well as the Middle East Seminar Room which houses a reference collection. 

Van Pelt Library 

The Van Pelt Library houses the main contents of the Middle East Collection. The collection is integrated into the main stacks, which is in turn, arranged by the Library of Congress Classification system. Floor-by-floor, the layout is as follows:

• First floor: Microfilm

• Third floor: History, Religious Studies

• Fourth floor: Current periodicals, literature

Kislak Center

Located on the 6th floor of Van Pelt Library, the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses a number of important rare books and manuscripts in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish. Further details can be found by clicking here.

Fisher Fine Arts Library

Most of the works dealing with Islamic art and architecture are housed in the Fisher Fine Arts Library.

Museum Library

Within the Museum Library, patrons can find the holdings dealing with archaeology and anthropology of the ancient Middle East, and related topics. Official publications of Middle East-based institutions concerned with archaeological conservation and excavations can also be found here.

Center for Advanced Judaic Studies

CAJS houses a small collection of reference works and monograph titles related to Arabic and Islamic studies, in addition to a collection of over 80 manuscript codices in Arabic and other languages of the Middle East.

JSTOR

JSTOR offers the back issues of journals from a range of humanities and social science disciplines, which you can search by individual title or across the entire database. You can access articles as both as images and as text.  Access to journals from JSTOR is restricted to current Penn faculty, staff and students.

Worldcat

Comprehensive online catalog of library holdings across the globe, which will provide listings of books, journals, maps, recordings, films, scores, and other materials located in public, academic, corporate, school and specialized libraries all over the world. Check Worldcat for holdings of material that are not available at Penn. Available items may be requested through Interlibrary Loan.

OAIster

Subcatalog within Worldcat, which acts as the union catalog for digital resources from open archive collections representing multidisciplinary resources from more than 1,100 contributors worldwide. Records contain a digital object link allowing users access to the object with just a click