Two distinct social contexts are involved in the creation of knowledge about the Middle East in the Western academia – the knowledge about the Middle East (first social setting) should be converted into knowledge which is comprehensible in another social context. Recognizing the political and economic power that has motivated Middle Eastern studies, this project seeks to investigate the intellectual linkages between Middle Eastern and non-Middle Eastern scholars in the process of the creation and circulation of knowledge. The research question asks whether the field of Middle Eastern studies is clustered based on scholars’ insider/outsider statuses. Assuming that the citation networks area valid representation of the intellectual linkages, I conduct an author co-citation analysis to draw a map of the intellectual structure of the field with a focus on authors’ insider/outsider statuses; the greater the number of co-citations, the stronger the cognitive relationship between two author. I employ Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGM) to study insider/outsider homophily in the co-citation network, and Temporal Exponential Random Graph Models (TERGM) to conduct a longitudinal study of the changes in homophily over the time.