From February 19 through 21, 2016, Stanford University hosted an intensive workshop entitled “New Directions in Political Economy of the Middle East.” Leading universities and programs from outside of Stanford — specifically, Rutgers, NYU, Arab Studies Institute, The Political Economy Project — and multiple Stanford units — specifically, Stanford’s Anthropology and History departments, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and the Humanities Center Geballe Research Workshop — contributed their support toward the organization. Top historians, political scientists, economists, and anthropologists from these universities as well as from UC Irvine, The New School, Ohio University, and Western Washington University participated in lively debates on the reinvigoration and direction of the political economy field in the Middle East since the 2007-08 economic crisis. Speakers presented on the future directions for the political economy field and also the novel and familiar developments in regional and global studies. Moreover, graduate students from Stanford’s history and political science departments, and Cornell’s history department shared novel findings on many exciting topics such as real estate in Ottoman Amman, tobacco in Mandate Palestine, Kurdish collective towns in Iraq, U.S. Food Aid to Tunisia, and Levantine joint-stock companies. Political science and history professors spoke about scholarly reevaluations of the so-called ‘Arab Spring.’ The New Directions in Political Economy of the Middle East workshop was born out of a 2012 call for a closer look at political economic themes in Middle East studies. This endeavor is ongoing and the workshop organizers and participants have expressed their desire and willingness to reconvene in future years. For further information, please contact faculty organizer Prof. Joel Beinin and graduate coordinators Kristen Alff and Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky.