Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at UVA (APAG) promotes the interdisciplinary study of the history, politics, culture, and economy of one of the world’s most important regions. The program seeks to correct what has been a strategic gap in conventional analysis and, through interdisciplinary study of core societies, and incorporate them into the system of trade, economic and political relationships they have forged with economies on the periphery of the seas and oceans around them. APAG acts as a hub for scholarship and programming on the Gulf at UVA. To that end, APAG holds international conferences and lecture series, hosts visiting scholars, provides support for undergraduate and graduate student research, and supports curricular development across the university.

The Gulf is known today as one of the world’s most important exporters of oil; roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Straits of Hormuz. Far from being a cluster of isolated, self-contained statelets, the emirates of the Gulf region constitute a vital element of global interconnectivity, historically and, increasingly, today. The presence there of a substantial percentage of the world’s hydrocarbon resources not only gives them a basis for development but strategic importance for far-flung economies. Even as the centrality of petroleum and gas diminishes over time, these resources will continue to be essential for large portions of the globe for the foreseeable future. The Gulf states thus play an enormous role in regional and global politics, and field some of the world’s most prominent businessmen.

Historically, the Gulf has constituted an important part of one of the world’s most important economic and political arenas: the Indian Ocean world. For centuries if not millennia, the inhabitants of the Gulf have enjoyed close ties to mercantile communities and polities in South Asia and East Africa. Until the advent of oil in the mid-twentieth century, local ships (called dhows) regularly plied the waters of the Western Indian Ocean, and Gulf political actors saw in the oceanic basin a broader stage for their expansionist ambitions as well. APAG’s scope thus necessarily involves the broader the Indian Ocean arena as well, and explores the sinews of transregional and global connectivity that ran through the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula.

When it was created in the mid-1990s, the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies Program was the only academically-based program in this country for the study of this important region and its historic relationships with neighboring societies, including those on the periphery of then Indian Ocean. During the 1970s and 1980s, the late Prof. Rouhollah Ramazani taught courses in the politics of the Persian Gulf, establishing UVA as a research hub for those looking to work on the region. In the 1990s, W. Nathaniel Howell, who holds a PhD in History from UVA and who had a distinguished career as an ambassador around the Middle East, established the university as a place where current and future diplomats from the Gulf states could spend time engaged in the academic study of the region, and from which they might network with embassies and think tanks in Washington, DC. The APAG Program and the Ramazani Chair are the products of both of their tireless efforts.