The University of Washington has offered Middle East language and area courses for more than 100 years. With over sixty faculty members conducting research and teaching on the Middle East, the institution has broad and deep coverage of Middle East languages and area studies. In addition to the modern languages of the Middle East, the University offers courses in ancient Middle East languages including Akkadian and Aramaic. Middle East coursework ranges across the departments of Anthropology, Art History, Communications, Comparative Religion, Economics, English, Ethnomusicology, Geography, Global Health, History, Information, International Studies, Jewish Studies, Law, Linguistics, Music, Near East Languages and Civilization, Oceanography, Political Science, Sociology, Social Work, and Women Studies. The University of Washington offers area-specific Middle East degree programs as follows: (1) BA and MA degrees in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization; (2) undergraduate minor and MA degree in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies; (3) Ph.D. degree in the Interdisciplinary Near and Middle East Program; and (4) Middle East-focused BA, MA, and Ph.D. degrees in disciplinary departments.

Prominent among University of Washington faculty who work on Iraq are:

Walter G. Andrews, Research Professor, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, and Director of the Svoboda Diaries Project
Arbella Bet-Shlimon, Assistant Professor, Department of History, a specialist in the history of twentieth-century Iraq. She currently has a book in progress on city of Kirkuk since World War I.
Terri De Young, Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, a specialist in the modern poetry of Iraq and author of Placing the Poet: Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab and Postcolonial Iraq
Joel Walker, Associate Professor, Department of History, a specialist in the late antique Middle East and author of The Legend of Mar Qardagh: Narrative and Christian Heroism in Late Antique Iraq

Recent graduate student research on Iraq has included work on such diverse topics as: state responses to Iraqi refugees; Muqtada al Sadr and the competition for power in Iraq; Turkish foreign policy and the Iraq war; social networks in nineteenth-century Iraq; and disease and medicine in Iraq.