The Middle East Water Collection

The Middle East Water Collection

The Middle East Water Collection provides access to roughly 9000 items on political, socio-economic, demographic, and legal issues of water in the Middle East. Materials include data, books, journal and newspaper articles, and documents published in the Middle East, Europe, and North America originating from a variety of publishers and national and multinational agencies and organizations.

Materials in the public domain are available in full text from this website. More materials from the original collection will be added online as copyright permissions are granted. This website may be used as a search interface for the complete collection of M|E Water materials housed on the 3rd floor of the OSU Valley Library.

Users may search or browse the collection using the menu on the left.

Middle East Water Research

We hope that students and researchers will use this online access to this collection to gain a better perspective on how water issues thread through and across many disciplines of thought - irrespective of borders or boundaries, cultures or historical differences. The collection reflects this representing the combined efforts from a mixture of professionals with extensive and varied experience in the Middle East. While founded and initiated by Dr. Naff, its use is intended to provide a greater understanding of the multi-disciplinary nature of water and its interactions with politics, development, social issues, culture and religion. 

Thomas Naff is Professor Emeritus of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IES) at the University of Pennsylvania. After receiving advanced degrees at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London and at the University of California at Berkeley, Prof. Naff taught at the American University at Cairo, where he was the co-founder of the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad (CASA). He then became the Director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and later founder and director of Penn's Middle East Research Institute which later became the Middle East Water Information Network and finally, the IES Water Resources Database. 

In his decades at the University of Pennsylvania, Prof. Naff has taught, published, and lectured on a wide range of Middle Eastern subjects, covering the period from the advent of Islam to the present day. He pioneered study of the interaction of water resources and political decision-making with his landmark book, Water in the Middle East, co-authored with Ruth Matson in 1984, in addition to dozens of other seminal articles on the topic.