Middle East Studies at Brown comprises a large community of faculty, staff, visiting professors, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate concentrators. The list below contains biographies and contact information.
Staff
Beshara Doumani
Director, Middle East Studies, Joukowsky Family Distinguished Professor of Modern Middle East History
Beshara Doumani’s primary research has been in recovering the history of social groups, places, and time periods that have been silenced or erased by conventional scholarship on the Modern Middle East, with a specialty in the social and cultural history of peasants, merchants, artisans, and women who live in the provincial regions of the Arab East during the period of Ottoman rule (16th – 20th centuries).
Beshara_Doumani@brown.edu | (401) 863-2131
Anthony Watson
Associate Director
Prior to entering academia, Anthony Watson was a finance and telecommunications executive in the Middle East and Southeast Asia for over a decade. His doctoral work at Cambridge was a comparative study of political and religious authority in medieval Europe, the Middle East, and Persia. He has taught Islamic and Christian History at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and the School of Oriental and African Studies.
Anthony_Watson@brown.edu
Barbara Oberkoetter
Academic Program Administrator
Barbara Oberkoetter comes to MES from Brown University’s Office of International Affairs. She is the point person for the program’s office housed at the Watson Institute. Barbara is a citizen of the world having lived and worked overseas most of her life.
Barbara_Oberkoetter@brown.edu
Jonathan Bateman ’13
Undergraduate student coordinator
Jonathan is concentrating in Middle East Studies and American History. He spent six months in Jordan during his junior year, and is particularly interested in water problems in the Middle East.
Rahel Dette ’13
Undergraduate student coordinator
Rahel is concentrating in Middle East Studies and Political Science. She has been interested in Arabic and the Middle East ever since her gap year work in Palestine and Israel. At Brown, she is involved with a number of related student groups, and has “TAed” in the department. After graduating, the Berlin native hopes to work on Integration Politics.
Andrew White ’13
Undergraduate student coordinator
Andrew is concentrating in Middle East Studies and International Relations. Andrew speaks French and Arabic and has lived in France, Switzerland and Tunisia. Within the MENA region, his particular interests are North Africa and the Gulf as well as conflict resolution and human rights.
Faculty
Sue Alcock
Director, Artemis A.W. and Martha Sharp Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Joukowsky Family Professor in Archaeology
Sue Alcock is a classical archaeologist, with interests in the material culture of the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia, particularly in Hellenistic and Roman times. Much of her research to date has revolved around themes of landscape, imperialism, sacred space, and memory. She has been involved with fieldwork in Greece and Armenia, but she is now directing the Brown University Petra Archaeological Project (BUPAP), exploring numerous aspects of the urban site and rural hinterland of Petra in southern Jordan.
Susan_Alcock@brown.edu
James P. Allen
Wilbour Professor of Egyptology, Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies
James P. Allen received his PhD from the University of Chicago. Before joining Brown in 2007, Prof. Allen was an epigrapher with the University of Chicago’s Epigraphic Survey, Cairo Director of the American Research Center in Egypt, and curator of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is also President of the International Association of Egyptologists. His research interests include ancient Egyptian grammar and literature, religion, and history. He has written extensively on these subjects, and is currently working on publication of material from the Metropolitan Museum’s excavations at Lisht and Dahshur and on an historical study of the phonology and grammar of ancient Egyptian.
Omer Bartov
John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History and Professor of History and Professor of German Studies
Professor Bartov is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject of genocide. He is the author of seven books and the editor of three volumes; his work has been translated into several languages. His most recent book, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton, 2007), examines the politics of memory in Western Ukraine and erasure of both the memory and the few material remains of Jewish culture there.
Omer_Bartov@brown.edu
Ruth Adler Ben Yehuda
Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies
Ruth Alder Ben Yehuda’s research interests include Hebrew language pedagogy, language learning and technology, music in teaching of foreign languages, the history of the Hebrew language, which includes other Semitic languages, and, of course, Judeo-Arabic (especially of the Jews in Yemen).
Ruth_Adler_Ben_Yehuda@Brown.edu
Réda Bensmaïa
Chair, French Studies, Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature
Professor Bensmaïa teaches courses on French literature and philosophy, film theory and French and Francophone postcolonial literature. His last book entitled Experimental Nations of the Invention on the Maghreb has been published by Princeton University Press (Spring 2003). He is presently working on two projects : a monograph on the 20th Century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s work and editing a special issue of CINEMAS on the same author; and a book on North African writers and is entitled: Politiques d’écrivain (Political Writers).
Sheila Bonde
Professor of History of Art and Architecture
Sheila Bonde’s research combines archaeology, architectural history, spatial analysis and digital humanities. She is co-director of the MonArch (Monastic Archaeology) research team that focuses on three monasteries in northern France. This project involves excavation, study of surviving architecture and texts, and digital reconstruction and representation. Recent publications and presentations also consider the revival of antiquity in the Middle Ages, and the ethics of representation.
Melani Cammett
Associate Professor of Political Science, Former Director, Middle East Studies
Melani Cammett specializes in the political economy of development and the Middle East and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on comparative politics, development, and Middle East politics. She has published extensively, including on global economic integration, industrial development, and sectarian organizations allocating social welfare goods, with research being conducted in Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere. Cammett’s current research focuses on public and social goods provision by Islamists and other types of public and private actors in several Middle Eastern countries. In addition, Cammett has consulted for various development policy organizations.
Melani_Cammett@Brown.edu
Mirena Christoff
Senior Lecturer in Language Studies
Before joining the Center for Language Studies at Brown in 2002, Mirena Christoff served as Assistant Professor of Arabic at Sofia University for eight years. In this country, she has taught Arabic at UCLA, Beverly Hills Lingual Institute, the Arabic School at Middlebury College, and UC Santa Barbara. Her professional involvement in the four-year language curriculum at Brown includes teaching several Arabic courses and supervising the Arabic program. She serves as an academic advisor to freshmen, sophomores, and MES concentrators. Mirena Christoff is a member of various professional organizations, including the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA), the American Association of the Teachers of Arabic (AATA), and ACTFL. She has translated extensively from and into Arabic. Her research and publications reflect her pedagogical and scholarly interests in translation studies, language teaching methodology, and the history of Arab culture and literature.
Mirena_Christoff@brown.edu
Robyn Creswell
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
Robyn Creswell is a critic, translator, and scholar specializing in Arabic literature and comparative modernisms. His dissertation is a historical critique of Arabic modernist poetry, a movement that flourished in Beirut between 1955 and 1975 and which radically redefined the parameters of Arabic poetry.
Robyn_Creswell@brown.edu
Leo Depuydt
Professor of Egyptology & Ancient Western Asian
Leo Depuydt’s research addresses all aspects of ancient Egypt and its wider Near Eastern and Mediterranean context, but especially the languages and the history of the area. Specific topics of research include the following: Coptic manuscripts; the grammar of all stages of Egyptian; the history of the Egyptian language; language and logic; the digitalization of rational thought and language; chronology, calendrics, astronomy, and heortology; ancient science and mathematics; and probability theory.
Leo_Depuydt@brown.edu
Miled Faiza
Lecturer in the Center for Language Studies
Miled Faiza published his first collection of poetry in 2004, Remains of a House We Once Entered. Selections from Remains of a House have been published in three anthologies, as well as numerous journals. Miled is currently writing a new poetry collection, selections of which have been published in print publications such as Al Ghaoon as well as in online literary journals like Kikah and Jihat al-Shi’r. English translations from the new collection were also published in World Literature Today and Banipal; a Serbian translation was published in Bagdala. Miled graduated from Université de Sousse, Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de Sousse, Tunisia, in 1998 with a BA in Arabic Language and Literature and received a master’s degree in Near Eastern Languages (Arabic) from Wayne State University in 2009. Miled has taught Arabic at Michigan State University, University of Virginia, and Middlebury College.
Miled_Faiza@brown.edu
Lina Fruzetti
Professor of Anthropology
Lina Fruzetti’s work evolves around the Middle East, though her main focus in social anthropology is India. Therein she studies the relationship between kinship, marriage, and rituals as well as the meaning of the construction of gender. Her work has also covered caste and the life cycle rites of Hindus, and is now addressing recent structural changes to the institution of marriage and also what constitutes the person. Taking a more comparative approach, her research on nationalism and post-colonial studies has taken is addressing the feminist movement, and the problems and politics of identity and citizenship within Islam and Hinduism. Her other research interests focus on East and North Africa communities, including Islamic societies and notions of identity.
Lina_Fruzzetti@brown.edu
Sherine Hamdy
Kutayba Alghanim Assistant Professor of the Social Sciences
Sherine Hamdy is an anthropologist with long-standing interests in cross-cultural approaches to medicine, health, and the body. She received her Ph.D. from New York University Department of Anthropology in 2006. Her first large research project was based on two years of fieldwork in the Egyptian cities of Tanta, Mansoura, and Cairo, and centered on ethical debates around organ transplantation. This culminated in her book Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt (University of California, 2012).
Ömür Harmanşah
Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
Ömür Harmanşah specializes in the archaeology of the ancient Near East, with emphasis on Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia. Born and raised in Turkey, Ömür studied architecture and architectural history at the Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey), and received his PhD from University of Pennsylvania (2005), with a dissertation on the practice of founding cities in the ancient Near East. At Brown, he works and teaches in the field of archaeology, architectural history and material culture of the ancient Near East. His academic interests are increasingly focused on the intersections of place and landscape, bodily performance and collective memory. He is particularly influenced by the developing fields of material culture studies, anthropological theories of art, technology and agency, ethnographies of space, place and landscape, and phenomenological approaches to spatiality.
Omur_Harmansah@brown.edu
Susan A. Harvey
Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of Religious Studies
Susan Ashbrook Harvey specializes in late antique and Byzantine Christianity, with Syriac studies as her particular focus. She is the author of Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (2006), Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern Saints (1990), co-author, with Sebastian P. Brock, of Holy Women in the Syrian Orient (1998, 1987), and co-editor with David G. Hunter of the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (2008). She has published widely on topics relating to asceticism, hagiography, women and gender, hymnography, homiletics, and piety in late antique Christianity.
Susan_Harvey@brown.edu
Dennis Hogan
Professor of Sociology
Dennis Hogan’s research involves the interrelationships of the family lives of individual persons and the influence of social environments (family and community origins, educational opportunities, employment opportunities, cultural definitions of expected roles). His approach is broadly comparative, including studies of race, ethnic and immigrant groups and majority populations in the United States over the 20th century, Italian social history, contemporary Ethiopia and Palestine.
Dennis_Hogan@brown.edu
David Jacobson
Professor of Judiac Studies
The focus of David Jacobson’s research has been on the relationship of modern Hebrew literature to the Jewish tradition. His more recent research has focused on the relationship of contemporary Israeli poetry to the Jewish tradition. He has also written on the portrayal of the Arab-Israeli conflict in contemporary Israeli fiction and on responses to the Arab-Israeli conflict in early Passover haggadot of the kibbutz movement.
David_Jacobson@brown.edu
Martha Joukowsky
Professor Emerita, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Director, Petra, Jordan Great Temple excavations
Trained as a Middle Eastern archaeologist and involved in archaeological excavations for 35 years, Joukowsky researches domestication, Middle East urbanism and the varied cultural regional developments from the earliest times to the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Moreover, she has been overseeing the Brown University Petra Great Temple excavations in Jordan for over 10 years, where her primary research interests concentrate on researching Nabataean cultural history. In the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology, she also works with scientific applications including surveying with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Global Positioning Systems (GPS), and more, as well as analyses including Instrumental Neutron Activation (INAA), fresco pigment analysis, palynology, marble isotopes, stone weathering, and dendrochronology, as well as multi-disciplinary approchaes such as a digital archaeology project. Martha Sharp Joukowsky has published 6 books and over 50 scholarly articles. She has also been the invited speaker at seminars and lectures around the world.
Martha_Joukowsky@brown.edu
Nancy Khalek
William A. Dyer Jr. Assistant Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies
Nancy Khalek specializes in Late Antiquity and early Islam. She received her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 2006. In addition to her focus on the formative period of Islamic history, other interests include hagiography and historiography in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, relic and saint veneration, Christian-Muslim dialogue, and the relationship of material culture to religious life. Professor Khalek has conducted archaeological and ethnographic field work in Jordan, Syria, Greece and Turkey. Her first book is entitled Damascus after the Muslim Conquest: Text and Image in Early Islam (Oxford University Press, 2011). At Brown, Professor Khalek has connections and afiliation with several departments and programs, including the Political Theory Project, Medieval Studies, the Joukowski Institute for Archaeology, and the Department of History.
Nancy_Khalek@brown.edu
Maud Mandel
Associate Professor of Judaic Studies and History, Director of the Program in Judaic Studies
Maud Mandel is an associate professor of history and Judaic studies. Mandel specializes in modern Jewish history and has focused particularly on the 20th-century French Jewish experience. She has written extensively on the impact of genocide on the reconstruction of community and on inter-ethnic relations. Her work has been marked by an on-going engagement with comparative historical methodology, and she has written extensively about Armenian and Muslim communities in France as well. She has published extensively on various topics, and teaches courses on many aspects of modern Jewish history, including history of the Holocaust, Zionism and the birth of the state of Israel, and history of American Jews.
Maud_Mandel@Brown.edu
Elias Muhanna
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
Elias Muhanna is a scholar of classical Arabic literature and Islamic intellectual history. His current research focuses on the Arabic encyclopedic production of the Mamluk Empire (1250-1517), and more broadly on encyclopedism in different cultural contexts. Other interests include the history of the book, literary theory and philosophies of language, the cultural history of the Mamluk Empire, and comparative literary diglossia. Elias joined Brown in 2012, coming from Harvard University via Stanford’s Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. In his spare time, he writes about contemporary Middle Eastern politics for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Nation, and his own blog, Qifa Nabki.
Saul Olyan
Professor of Judaic Studies
Saul M. Olyan is the author most recently of Social Inequality in the World of the Text: The Significance of Ritual and Social
Distinctions in the Hebrew Bible (2011); Disability in the Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences (2008); Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions (2004); and Rites and Rank: Hierarchy in Biblical Representations of Cult (2000).
Saul_Olyan@brown.edu
Stratis Papaioannou
Assistant Professor of Classics
Stratis Papaioannou studies post-classical Greek literary and cultural history, especially late antique and Byzantine writing in its social context. His wider interests are in premodern book and letter-writing cultures, literary aesthetics, and concepts of gender, self, and desire. Papaioannou has published on Gregory of Nazianzus and, especially, Michael Psellos, while his work is divided in interpretative study, critical edition, and translation.
Amy Remensnyder
Associate Professor of History
Amy G. Remensnyder’s research focuses on the cultural and religious history of medieval Europe. The author of numerous articles and of a book about monastic culture and memory in southern France, she is currently finishing a book about how pre-modern Spanish Christians used the Virgin Mary as a symbol of the conquest and conversion of non-Christians in the Iberian Peninsula and in early colonial Mexico.
Amy_Remensnyder@brown.edu
Rachel Rojanski
Adjunct Associate Professor of Judaic Studies
Rachel Rojanski’s main field of interest is Modern Jewish History with a special focus on cultural and political history of East European Jewish immigrants in the United States and Israel. Other fields of interest include Yiddish studies, American Jewish History and Culture, Jewish Socialism, Jewish Gender studies and the Yiddish/Jewish Press
Rachel_Rojanski@brown.edu
Matthew Rutz
Assistant Professor of Egyptology and the Ancient World
Matthew Rutz works in the field of Assyriology, the interdisciplinary study of texts written in the cuneiform (“wedge-shaped”) writing system from ancient Mesopotamia, traditionally the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (present-day Iraq, Syria, and Turkey). He specializes in the languages and cultures of this region with an emphasis on Akkadian (Babylonian/Assyrian) and Sumerian documents from the latter half of the second millennium BCE, the social and political history of Late Bronze Age Syria, Babylonian literary and scholastic texts from the site of Nippur (Iraq), ancient Mesopotamian intellectual and religious history, and the study of ancient texts as archaeological objects.
Matthew_Rutz@brown.edu
John Steele
Professor of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies
John Steele is a historian of the exact sciences in antiquity. He specializes in the history of astronomy, with a particular focus on Mesopotamian astronomy. He is the author of Observations and Predictions of Eclipse Times by Early Astronomers (Kluwer 2000), A Brief Introduction to Astronomy in the Middle East (Saqi 2008), and Ancient Astronomical Observations and the Study of the Moon’s Motion (1692-1857) (Springer 2012). Before coming to Brown, John Steele has been a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Durham University, E. P. May Fellow at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, and Dibner Institure Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology.
John_Steele@brown.edu
Ian Straughn
Joukowsky Family Middle East Studies Librarian
Ian Straughn’s research and teaching interests focus on the emerging study of the archaeology of the Muslim World. This work was first developed while a graduate student in Anthropology at the University of Chicago and has continued as a member of the Joukowsky Institute faculty, and currently the University Library. His work has concentrated on understanding how Muslim societies have been shaped by the landscapes which they have constructed and conceived and by their relationship to the material world. A major aspect of this research has consisted of developing a methodology for bringing the archaeological and textual records into a productive dialogue about past societies.
Adam Teller
Associate Professor of Judaic Studies
Adam Teller is an early modern historian, specializing in the history of the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He focuses on the ways in which they became an integral part of society there and the tensions this aroused. He has written two monographs (in Hebrew), one on living conditions in the Jewish quarter of Poznan, the other on the roles played by Jews in Lithuania’s eighteenth century magnate economy, as well as numerous articles (in English) on social and cultural issues.
Adam_Teller@brown.edu
Nina Tannenwald
Associate Professor of International Studies, WIIS, Senior Lecturer in Political Science
Nina Tannenwald’s research focuses on the role of international institutions, norms and ideas in global security issues, efforts to control weapons of mass destruction, and human rights and the laws of war. Before joining the Brown Department of Political Science staff in the fall of 2011, she was previously Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Assistant and then Associate Research Professor at Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies. She has been a visiting professor at Cornell and Stanford Universities, a Carnegie Scholar, and an MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Fellow in International Peace and Security. Moreover, she has been a commentator on local radio and television, and in the op-ed pages, on foreign policy issues, and a consultant to the United Nations Association. She holds a master’s degree from the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs and a Ph.D in international relations from Cornell University.
Nina_Tannenwald@brown.edu
Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar
Assistant Professor of History
Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar is interested in cross-border and interdisciplinary histories for rethinking a divided South Asia, as well as the politics of violence and its impact on history-writing itself. Her first book, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, was published by Columbia University Press in 2007, and Indian and Pakistani editions of the book came out in 2008. At present she is working on a second book on the history of archaeology and war on the northwest frontier of British India, on the borderlands with Afghanistan.
Visiting Professors and Post-Doctoral Fellows
Iraj Anvar
Visiting Lecturer in Language Studies
Iraj Anvar was born in Tehran, Iran. As a teen he moved to Italy with his family where later on he studied theater with Alessandro Fersen in Rome. In the mid 60′s he went back to Iran and while pursuing a career in the theater he followed also his interest in Persian Literature and translation. After a very good career at Tehran Theatre Workshop, which he co-founded, he was offered a scholarship by the Iranian government and went to NYU in 1978 to continue his theatrical research. With the advent of the Iranian Revolution he transferred to the Department of the Near Eastern Studies as a TA and pursued a PhD, which he obtained in 1991. For the past three decades he has been teaching Persian Language and Culture at NYU, Harvard, Columbia and University of Wisconsin. He joined Brown in the fall of 2008 and has been teaching Persian Language and Culture.
Shiva Balaghi
Laya Khadjavi Visiting Professor of Iranian Studies
Shiva Balaghi is a cultural historian of the Middle East, who teaches Art History and History at Brown University as the Laya Khadjavi Visiting Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies. Balaghi is a Contributing Editor of Jadaliyya, Associate Editor of Review of Middle East Studies, and Vice-President of the American Institute of Iranian Studies. Her books include Saddam Hussein: A Biography (2005); Picturing Iran: Art, Society, and Revolution (co-edited, 2002); and Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East (Co-edited, 1994). Balaghi has published widely on Iranian visual culture and contemporary Islamic Art. She is currently completing the book, Knowledge and Power in Iran, 1848-1953. Her next book project is on Culture, Society, and Islam in Iran. Before coming to Brown, she was Associate Director of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at NYU for a decade. She has taught at the University of Vermont and the University of Michigan.
Palmira Brummett
Visiting Professor of History
Palmira Brummett received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Middle Eastern History and Islamic Studies. She is a historian of the Ottoman empire and the Mediterranean world whose work focuses on the rhetorics and genres of cross-cultural encounter. Current projects include completing a monograph on early modern mapping of the Ottoman empire in text and image, and launching another on the flow of culture, information, and people in the early modern Ottoman Adriatic. In classes ranging from The Ottomans and Europe, to Women in the Islamic Middle East, to The U.S. and the Middle East: Image and Imperialism, she explores textual and visual imagery to examine the layering of history, and the ways in which peoples envision themselves and their neighbors (near and distant), and she has published on extensively on these and other subjects.
Parmenion Papamichos Chronakis
Visiting Assistant Professor of History
Paris Papamichos Chronakis’ research interests focus on the interplay of class, gender and ethnicity and extend to the fields of Late Ottoman, Modern Greek and Sephardic History, the history of the Mediterranean middle classes, and urban history. He is a founding member of the Group for the Study of the History of the Jews in Greece.
Paris_Papamichos_Chronakis@brown.edu
Nicola Denzey Lewis
Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Nicola Denzey Lewis’s research interests include the social and intellectual contexts of the ancient world, particularly the intersection of early Christianity and the Roman Empire from the first to the fourth century CE. Her work is interdisciplinary, incorporating methods and insights from Religious Studies, Classics, History, Art History and Archaeology. Particular areas of interest include Gnosticism, the social history of women in antiquity, and death in ancient Rome.
Nicola_Denzey@brown.edu
Elizabeth Giorgis
Visiting Professor of the Humanities, Cogut Center for the Humanities
Eliabeth Giorgis teaches Art Theory and Criticism in the Graduate Schools of the College of Performing and Visual Art and the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and is the author of several publications among which are, “Charting Ethiopian Modernity and Modernism”, a special issue on Ethiopian art and literature in Callaloo, Journal of the African Diaspora (Johns Hopkins University Press,2010), “Salem Mekuria, Ruptures: A Three-Sided Story”, Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes; “Ethiopian Cities in Ruins: Modernity and its Discontents”, Fera Internacional de Arts Contemporiano, IFEMA Madrid, 2010); “Contemporary Ethiopian Art in a Changing World, Art Criticism and Curatorial Practices in Marginal Contexts”, (International Press of the Association of Art Critics, 2005).
Katharina Galor
Visiting Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies
Katharina Galor is the Hirschfeld Visiting Assistant Professor at the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown University. She has excavated at a number of sites in Italy (Vigna Barberini in Rome), France (Old Jewish quarter of Cavaillon and the Byzantine church at Roquevert) and Israel (Jerusalem, Sepphoris, Qumran, Ein Gedi, Ramat Hanadiv and Tiberias). Her research focuses on Roman and Byzantine Palestine, with topics related to sacred, civic and domestic architecture, town planning, water installations and mosaics. She is a PI on a NSF grant NSF Grant on Core Computer Vision Research devoted to Promoting Paradigm Shifts in Archaeology
Katharina_Galor@brown.edu
Alla Hassan
Visiting Lecturer in Language Studies
Alla_Hassan@brown.edu
Shahriar Mondanipour
Visiting Professor of Literary Arts
Shahriar Mondanipour is regarded as one of the most accomplished writers of contemporary Iranian literature. His creative approach to the use of symbols and metaphors, his inventive experimentation with language, time and space, as well as his unique awareness of sequence and identity have made his work fascinating to critics and readers alike. His honors include the Mehregan Award for the best Iranian children’s novel of 2004, the 1998 Golden Tablet Award for best fiction in Iran during the previous two decades, and Best Film Critique at the 1994 Press Festival in Tehran.
Shahriar_Mondanipour@brown.edu
Linda Quiquivix
Postdoctoral fellow in Critical Global Humanities, Cogut Center for Humanities
Linda’s scholarship draws from spatial theory and critical cartography, with interests in liberation movements in the Middle East, Latin America, and the U.S. Her current work focuses on the theoretical and empirical intersections of cartography and political strategy within the Palestinian national movement. Her dissertation produced a genealogy of Palestinian map-making and map-use, investigating the leadership’s political shift from liberation to statecraft following the Oslo Accords. In tracing how the map became ubiquitous in the Palestinian state-building project, her work also makes visible colonial cartography’s influence into determining today what constitutes the political realm. This Fall she is teaching a course entitled, “The Israel-Palestinian Conflict in the Global Scene.”
Nukhet A. Sandal
Postdoctoral Fellow in International Studies
Nukhet A. Sandal is a postdoctoral scholar in international studies at the Watson Institute. At Brown Unviersity, she is also one of the co-founders of the Religion and Internationalism Project. Her research interests include religion and international affairs, politics of divided societies and international relations theory. Sandal has articles (published or forthcoming) in the European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, Alternatives, Political Studies, Human Rights Quarterly and Canadian Journal of Political Science. Her book (with Jonathan Fox), Religion in International Relations Theory: Concepts, Tools, and Debates, is forthcoming in 2013 from Routledge.
Graduate Students
- Osman Safa Bursali, Visiting Researcher 2012-13
- Marcus Walton, Political Science
- Michael Marcusa, Political Science
- Yara Jarallah, Sociology
- Weeam Hammoudeh, Sociology
- Zoe Griffith, History
- Alexei Sisulu Abrahams, Economics
Undergraduate Concentrators
- Samuel Torres | 2014-2015 – Spring
- Sophia Sepulveda | 2014-2015 – Spring
- Lara Savenije | 2014-2015 – Spring
- Lauren Rouse | 2014-2015 – Spring
- Layla Heidari | 2014-2015 – Spring
- Talia Xefos | 2014-2015 – Spring
- Zakaria Enzminger | 2014-2015 – Spring
- Abby Linn | 2014-2015 – Spring
- Simon DeJesus Rodrigues | 2014-2015 – Spring
- Daniel Wilkofsky | 2012-2013 – Spring
- Harry Samuels | 2012-2013 – Spring
- Samier Saeed | 2012-2013 – Spring
- Ezra Mauer | 2012-2013 – Spring
- Meghana Koushik | 2012-2013 – Spring
- Sureya Koprulu | 2012-2013 – Spring
- Sarah Forman | 2012-2013 – Spring
- Rahel Dette | 2012-2013 – Spring
- Laura Curlin | 2012-2013 – Spring
- Jonathan Bateman | 2012-2013 – Spring
- Andrew White | 2012-2013 – Spring
- Yasmin Or | 2012-2013 – Spring
- Tiffany Zarabi_Aazam | 2013-2014 – Fall
- Michael J. Dawkins
- Amanda Labora
- Elana Wenger | 2014-2015 – Fall
- Kathryn Thornton | 2013-2014 – Spring
- Julia Thompson | 2013-2014 – Spring
- Katherine Sola | 2013-2014 – Spring
- Elizabeth Resnick | 2013-2014 – Spring
- Casey O’Dea | 2013-2014 – Spring
- Claudia Norton | 2013-2014 – Spring
- Jennifer Morgan | 2013-2014 – Spring
- Katherine Long | 2014-2015 – Fall
- Annika Lichtenbaum | 2013-2014 – Spring
- Christina Kata | 2013-2014 – Spring
- Marc Briz | 2013-2014 – Spring
- Nasim Azizgolshan | 2013-2014 – Spring
- Molly Ratner | 2013-2014 – Spring
