Faculty
American Studies
Zareena A Grewal is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies. She is a historical anthropologist and documentary filmmaker and has directed and produced a film about the scrutiny of American Muslims’ patriotism (By the Dawn’s Early Light: Chris Jackson’s Journey to Islam (2004)) featured on the Documentary Channel. She also writes on the intersections of race and religion in American Muslim communities. Currently, she is completing a book on the global dimensions of Islam’s “crisis of authority,” specifically on transnational pedagogical networks that connect American mosques to the intellectual centers of the Middle East, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo, Egypt, Damascus, Syria, and Amman, Jordan. She teaches courses on Muslim in America, US cultural and political interests in the Middle East, and ethnographic and documentary film.
E-mail: zareena.grewal@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/amstud/faculty/grewal.html
Anthropology
Narges Erami is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and of International and Area Studies. She primarily works on the relationship between economy and religion and how it is played out in rituals of everyday life. Her work is centered in the Holy city of Qum in Iran. Her past research was a historical and ethnographic study of carpet merchants and the process of self-fashioning through the acquisition of specialized knowledge. Her current research continues to be focused in Qum, examining the cultural production of authority and knowledge through publications of Islamic texts and their global circulation. Her courses include the anthropology of the Middle East in general and Iran specifically, the ‘economic subject’, the anthropology of religion, field methods, and the politics of legitimacy and representation.
E-mail: narges.erami@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/anthro/anthropology/Narges_Erami.html
Frank Hole is Professor Emeritus and a Senior Research Scientist specializing in the history and development of agriculture and animal husbandry. He has traveled and carried out archaeological, ethnographic and land use research in the Near East, first in Iran and currently in Syria. Hole will receive the Farabi International Award in Tehran on October 29, 2011.
E-mail: frank.hole@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/anthro/anthropology/Frank_Hole.html
Marcia C. Inhorn, PhD, MPH, is the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs in the Department of Anthropology and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. A specialist on Middle Eastern gender and health issues, Inhorn has conducted research on the social impact of infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Arab America over the past 20 years. She is the author of three books on the subject, and the editor or co-editor of eight other volumes. Her newest book, Reconceiving Middle Eastern Manhood: Islam, Assisted Reproduction, and Emergent Masculinities, will be published by Princeton University Press. She has been a visiting faculty member at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, and is the founding editor of JMEWS (Journal of Middle East Women's Studies) of the Association of Middle East Women's Studies. In Fall 2010, she will be the first Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professor at the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge.
E-mail: marcia.inhorn@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/anthro/anthropology/Marcia_Inhorn.html
www.marciainhorn.com
Arabic
Sarab Al Ani is a Lector in Arabic. Her current research interests focus on the challenges that face students of Arabic in the U.S. and how they can best achieve their desired language skills with a minimum of difficulty. Previously, in Iraq, she taught linguistic-related courses in general linguistics, morphology, and phonology and, in Jordan, she taught English as a second language. She has also worked as a professional Arabic-English translator.
E-mail: sarab.alani@yale.edu
Muhammad Aziz is a Lector in Arabic and a certified ACTFL-OPI-Rater. His pedagogical approach involves particularly the integration of new ideas and methodologies that may contribute productively to enhancing the linguistic, communicative, and cultural competencies of learners. He regularly participates in national conferences on the teaching of Arabic as a foreign language. He is currently working on a translation of three medieval treatises written by Ibn Alwan (d. 1266).
E-mail: muhammad.aziz@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/maziz.html
Shady Nasser is a Lector in Arabic.
E-mail: shady.nasser@yale.edu
Hasmik Tovmasyan is a Lector in Arabic. She has an MA in linguistics, and has studied in Armenia, Syria, and Egypt. She is interested in the influence of Islam on the Armenian cult of saints. She has several articles in academic journals in English and Armenian.
E-mail: hasmik.tovmasyan@yale.edu
Architecture
Karla Cavarra Britton is a Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Resident Director of the Berkeley Center at Yale. Her area of teaching and research is in alternative modernisms, including the monograph Auguste Perret (2001), published by Phaidon in both English and French editions. With Dean Sakamoto, she edited Hawaiian Modern: the Architecture of Vladimir Ossipoff (2007). She is editor of the forthcoming Constructing the Ineffable: Contemporary Sacred Architecture, and she is the author of Modern Urbanism to be published by Yale University Press. She teaches the history of architecture and urbanism. She has taught and led a symposium on modern religious architecture, and is organizing an international conference on sacred architecture of the Middle East.
E-mail: karla.britton@yale.edu
Homepage: www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/people/faculty/britton_karla
Art Gallery
Susan B. Matheson is the Molly and Walter Bareiss Curator of Ancient Art and Chief Curator, overseeing the Yale University Art Gallery's collections of ancient art.
E-mail: susan.matheson@yale.edu
Homepage: artgallery.yale.edu/pages/collection/permanent/pc_ancient_over.php
Chaplain's Office
Omer Bajwa is the Coordinator of Muslim Life. His interests include Islam in the United States, Islam and the global media, and transnational religious and intellectual networks. He engages in religious service, social activism, and educational outreach.
E-mail: omer.bajwa@yale.edu
Homepage: http://chaplain.yale.edu/staff
Child Study Center
James F. Leckman is a Professor in the School of Medicine and a child psychiatrist. Among other activities, he is the Founder of ERICE Empowerment & Resilience in Children Everywhere) an initiative to promote mental health among Palestinian and Israeli children, the victims of a violent conflict.
E-mail: james.leckman@yale.edu
Homepage: http://medicine.yale.edu/childstudy/faculty_people/james_leckman.profile
Classics
Joseph Manning is the William K. and Marilyn M. Simpson Professor of Classics and History and Senior Research Scholar, Yale Law School. He specializes in Hellenistic history with particular focus on the legal and economic history of Ptolemaic Egypt. His interests lie in governance, reforms of the state, legal institutions, formation of markets, and the impact of new economic institutions (coinage, banking) on traditional socio-economic patterns in the ancient world. He is also deeply concerned with Papyrology, the interpretation of ancient sources, and bringing to bear the historical social sciences, particularly Economic Sociology and economic and legal theory, to ancient history. His current projects include the writing of a history of the Hellenistic world for the new University of Edinburgh Greek history series and an archaeological survey in Upper Egypt.
E-mail: joseph.manning@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/classics/faculty_manning.html
Comparative Literature
Benjamin Harshav is the J.& H. Blaustein Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature. He has published widely, especially in Hebrew and in English, on literary theory, semiotics of culture, prosody, Comparative and Hebrew literature.
E-mail: benjamin.harshav@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/complit/harshav.html
Divinity School
Harold W. Attridge is the Reverend Henry L. Slack Dean of Yale Divinity School and Lillian
Claus Professor of New Testament. His areas of research are New Testament exegesis and Hellenistic Judaism and the history of the early Church.
E-mail: harold.attridge@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/divinity/faculty/Fac.HAttridge.shtml
Joel Baden is an Assistant Professor of Old Testament. His areas of research are the Pentateuch and Biblical Hebrew.
E-mail: joel.baden@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/divinity/faculty/fac_baden_j.shtml
Christopher Beeley is the Walter H. Gray Associate Professor of Anglican Studies and Patristics. He teaches early Christian theology and history and modern Anglican tradition.
E-mail: christopher.beeley@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/divinity/faculty/Fac.CBeeley.shtml
Adela Yarbro Collins is the Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation. She specializes in the New Testament and Christian Origins.
E-mail: adela.collins@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/divinity/faculty/Fac.AYCollins.shtml
John J. Collins is the Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation. He has published widely on the subjects of apocalypticism, wisdom, Hellenistic Judaism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
E-mail: john.j.collins@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/divinity/faculty/Fac.JCollins.shtml
Joseph Cumming serves as the Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture Reconciliation Program, promoting reconciliation between Muslims and Christians, and between Muslim nations and the West, drawing on the resources of the Abrahamic faiths and the teachings and person of Jesus.
E-mail: joseph.cumming@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/faith/about/abou-cumming.htm
David Eastman is a Lecture in New Testament Greek and Christian History. His research centers on the early Christian veneration of the apostle Paul. He is particularly interested in the ways in which Christians imagined and created missing biographical details of Paul’s life in the context of disputes over ecclesiastical prominence and authority. His first book, Paul the Martyr: The Cult of the Apostle in the Latin West, will be published in the fall of 2010. In this study he integrates literary, archaeological, artistic, and liturgical evidence in describing the development of the Pauline cult within the cultural context of the late antique West. His current research includes Paul in the Syriac tradition and a book on ancient Greek, Latin, and Syriac martyrdom accounts of Peter and Paul.
E-mail: david.eastman@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/divinity/faculty/Fac.DEastman.shtml
Victoria Hoffer is a Lecturer in the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible. Her main areas of interest are Biblical Hebrew and the literary structures of the biblical text. She has done significant research in the area of Jewish and Christian interpretive traditions from intra-biblical interpretation to present-day readings and usages of the text. Her present area of research is in the poetry of the Writings.
E-mail: victoria.hoffer@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/divinity/faculty/Fac_Hoffer_Victoria.shtml
Lamin Sanneh is the D. Willis James Professor of Missions & World Christianity in Yale Divinity School and a Professor of History. He has studied classical Arabic and Islam and worked in the Middle East, as well as with the churches in Africa and with international organizations concerned with inter-religious issues. He is the author of over a hundred articles on religious and historical subjects, and of several books including Faith and Power: Christianity and Islam in “Secular” Britain (with Lesslie Newbigin and Jenny Taylor, 1998) and The Crown and the Turban: Muslims and West African Pluralism (1997).
E-mail: lamin.sanneh@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/history/faculty/sanneh_l.html
Carolyn Sharp is an Associate Professor of Hebrew Scriptures. Her research explores aspects of the composition, redaction, and rhetoric of Hebrew Scripture texts. In recent articles, she has examined the representation of Hebrew Bible traditions in the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls, urged the creation of a multivocal Old Testament theology shaped by the notion of diaspora identity, and explored the potential of Old Testament hermeneutics to address contemporary ecclesial debates.
E-mail: carolyn.sharp@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/divinity/faculty/Fac.CSharp.shtml
Personal Webpage: https://sites.google.com/site/zayit5210raanan/
Bryan Spinks is a Professor of Liturgical Studies. His research interests include East Syrian rites, Reformed rites, issues in theology and liturgy, and worship in a postmodern age. He teaches courses on marriage liturgy, English Reformation worship traditions, the eucharistic prayer and theology, Christology, and liturgy of the Eastern churches.
E-mail: bryan.spinks@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/divinity/faculty/Fac.BSpinks.shtml
Robert R. Wilson is the Hoober Professor of Religious Studies and a Professor of Old Testament. His interests include Israelite prophecy, the Deuteronomistic history, and ancient Israelite religion in its social and cultural context.
E-mail: robert.wilson@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/divinity/faculty/Fac.RWilson.shtml
Economics
Tolga Köker is a Senior Lecturer in Economics. He works on the economics of conflict and the Middle East, and on political economy of Islamism and secularism in Turkey. In particular, his research examines the repercussions of dissimulating revealed preferences under social pressures. He has also written on the political economy of Turkey and Iraq as well as on refugee studies in the Balkans.
E-mail: tolga.koker@yale.edu
Homepage: www.econ.yale.edu/faculty1/koker.htm
Fox Fellows
Özge Zihnioğlu is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science and International Relations at Bogaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. Her research project is “The Promotion of Democracy in Post-war Societies: A US/EU Comparison.”
E-mail: ozge.zihnioglu@yale.edu
Liram Koblentz is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv, Israel. Her research project is “Democratic Countries and the War on Terrorist Organizations and Guerilla Movements.”
E-mail: liram.koblentz@yale.edu
French
Edwige Tamalet is an Assistant Professor of French. Her research interests include Francophone Maghrebi literature; postcolonial theory; non-Western modernities and transnational modernisms. She has published on North African colonial and postcolonial literatures and on issues of modernity in European and non-European contexts. Her current book project considers Maghrebi writing in various languages in a transnational Mediterranean context.
E-mail: edwige.tamalet@yale.edu
Maurice Samuels is a Professor of French specializing in nineteenth-century literature and culture. He has published on romanticism and realism, historical representation, modernity, and visual culture and has recently finished a book on France's first Jewish fiction writers. He is currently working on French Philosemitism, or positive representations of Jews in modern French culture. Samuels teaches undergraduate seminars on “Jewish Identity and French Culture,” “Paris in the 19th Century,” and “Money and the Novel,” and graduate seminars on “Modernity,” “Realism and Naturalism,” and “Fin-de-siecle France.”
E-mail: maurice.samuels@yale.edu
Homepage: http://french.yale.edu/samuels
Hebrew
Ayala Dvoretzky is a Senior Lector in Hebrew and Coordinator of Hebrew Program. Among her academic interests are the incorporation of media and especially film into the instruction of language, as well as the use of popular music as a pedagogical tool for in-class cultural exposure. Currently she is creating and developing a web-based picture dictionary for Elementary Modern Hebrew, as well as an advanced level, on-line multi-media reading module about Ethiopian immigration to Israel. She is also interested in post–Holocaust reactions of the Israeli society, as reflected in literature and film and has created courses in Israeli literature, film, culture, and identity and gender.
E-mail: ayala.dvoretzky@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/advoretzky.html
Dina Roginsky is a lector of Modern Hebrew language and culture. Her research interests focus on the intersection between culture, history, politics and performance. Her doctoral dissertation Performing Israeliness analyzes the 100 year social history of the Israeli Folk Dance Movement. Roginsky is the co-editor of the book Dance Discourse in Israel, which explores the field of Israeli dance research. She teaches on Israeli cultural politics and popular music and on the sociological aspects of Hebrew, in addition to teaching modern Hebrew language courses.
E-mail: dina.roginsky@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/droginsky.html
Shiri T. Goren is a Senior Lector in Modern Hebrew. She is interested in Hebrew Literature and Israeli Culture, Yiddish Studies, Gender and Queer theory, and Israeli Film. Her current book project, Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture, highlights a transnational generation of scholars revitalizing the field of Yiddish Studies. She teaches Israeli literature, identity and culture, and society and film, as well as modern Hebrew language courses.
E-mail: shiri.goren@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/sgoren.html
History
Adel Allouche is a Lecturer in History and Religious Studies. He teaches and researches Medieval Islamic history, in particular proto-dynastic rule in early Islamic history and Shi’i-Sunni polemics under the Safavids. He is the author of Mamluk Economics: A Study and Translation of al-Maqrizi's Ighathah (1994) and The Origins and Development of the Ottoman-Safavid Conflict (906-962/1500-1555) (1983) as well as several articles and book reviews.
E-mail: adel.allouche@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/history/faculty/allouche.html
Abbas Amanat is a Professor of History and of International and Area Studies and is Director of the Iranian Studies Initiative. His teaching and research interests include modern Iran and the Middle East, Shi’ism, and apocalypticism. He is the consulting editor of “Encyclopaedia Iranica” for the 19th century. His publications include ‘In Search of Modern Iran: Authority, Nationhood and Culture (1501-2001),’ a survey of Iranian history (2005), Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831-1896 (1997) and Resurrection and Renewal: the Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844-1850 (1989). His recent courses include State, Society, and Culture in the Middle East and From the Great Game to the Great Satan.
E-mail: abbas.amanat@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/history/faculty/amanat.html
Paula Hyman is the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History. She is a social historian specializing in the Jews of France and on Jewish women, and is a founding member of Ezrat Nashim. She is the author of The Jewish Woman In America (1976), From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906-1939 (1979), The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace (1991), Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (1995), and The Jews of Modern France (1998). She offers courses on topics in modern European and American Jewish history, with a special emphasis on the history of women and gender.
E-mail: paula.hyman@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/history/faculty/hyman.html
Ivan Marcus is the Frederick P. Rose Professor of Jewish History and a Professor of Religious Studies. His specializations include the history of Jewish-Christian-Muslim representations of each other, the history of childhood and of life cycle rites of passage. He teaches Jewish history from late antiquity through the e arly modern period. He has offered courses on the history of Jews in Muslim Lands, Jewish-Christian relations, and the Jews in medieval and early modern Europe and the Middle East.
E-mail: ivan.marcus@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/history/faculty/marcus.html
Alan Mikhail is an Assistant Professor of History. His research and teaching lie in the fields of Ottoman history, the comparative history of early modern empires, the history of Islamic science and medicine, and environmental history. His first book, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. He is currently editing a collection of essays on the environmental history of the Middle East and North Africa and beginning a new book-length project on the history of human-animal relations in Ottoman Egypt. Future projects include studies of Ottoman bureaucratic practice, various environmental histories of the early modern Middle East, and a history of coffee in the Ottoman Empire.
E-mail: alan.mikhail@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/history/faculty/mikhail_a.html
Personal Webpabe: www.alanmikhail.org/
History of Art
Robert S. Nelson is the Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art, specializing in the art of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages, especially that of the Byzantine Empire. His current work focuses on the relation of Byzantine art to culture and society, and the constitution of Byzantine art and history from 1750 to the present. He is also interested in vision and visuality and the functioning of holy objects in society. He teaches medieval art, mainly in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the history and methods of art history. Recently he has developed a new course on the long history of the city of Byzantion/Constantinople/Istanbul from antiquity to the present.
E-mail: robert.nelson@yale.edu
Homepage: arthistory.yale.edu/faculty/faculty/faculty_nelson.html
Kishwar Rizvi is an Assistant Professor in History of Art, specializing in Islamic art and architecture. She has written on representations of religious and imperial authority in the art and architecture of Safavid Iran, as well as on issues of gender, nationalism and religious identity in modern Iran and Pakistan. Her current research focuses on ideology and transnationalism in contemporary mosque architecture in the Middle East. She teaches introductory surveys on Islamic art and architecture, as well as seminars on pilgrimage, gender, and representations of kingship. Her graduate courses focus on modernism and the Middle East, Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal art and architecture, and on the artistic, cultural, and political significance of the documentary survey in Europe and the Middle East from the medieval period to the present.
E-mail: kishwar.rizvi@yale.edu
Homepage: arthistory.yale.edu/faculty/faculty/faculty_rizvi.html
Office of International Affairs
James Cohen is the Assistant Secretary of the University responsible for coordination of university activities in Africa and the Middle East.
E-mail: james.cohen@yale.edu
Homepage: world.yale.edu/about/bios.html
International Security Studies
Charles Hill is a Lecturer with the International Affairs Council (MacMillan Center) and Distinguished Fellow in International Security Studies. His interests are in international diplomacy and the United Nations with special reference to the Middle East. He teaches courses in international security, grand strategy and lectures on the great books of Western traditions.
E-mail: charles.hill@yale.edu
School of Law
Owen M. Fiss is Sterling Professor of Law. He teaches procedure, legal theory, and constitutional law. He also directs extensive Law School programs in Latin America and the Middle East, working to create a forum in which influential judges, lawyers, and scholars from the region can exchange ideas and forge ties with one another.
E-mail: owen.fiss@yale.edu
Homepage: www.law.yale.edu/faculty/OFiss.htm
Anthony Kronman is Sterling Professor of Law. He teaches in the areas of contracts, bankruptcy, jurisprudence, social theory, and professional responsibility. He also directs The Middle East Legal Studies Seminar (MELSS), an annual meeting held since 1998 in which lawyers, judges, and law professors from the Middle East gather with Yale professors and students. The Seminar has successfully brought together established and emerging leaders who are open to reform and committed to democracy in their own countries. Past topics have included the concept of legal authority, fundamental rights, and religious pluralism.
E-mail: anthony.kronman@yale.edu
Homepage: www.law.yale.edu/faculty/AKronman.htm
University Library
Ulla Kasten is the Associate Curator and Museum Editor of the Yale Babylonian Collection. She studied archaeology at the universities of Athens and Copenhagen and cultural history at Istanbul University.
E-mail: ulla.kasten@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/babylonian.html
Nanette Stahl is Curator for the Judaica Collection. She is responsible for giving focus and direction to the Judaica Collection, for locating rare and unusual items, and for assisting students, faculty, and visiting scholars.
E-mail: nanette.stahl@yale.edu
Homepage: www.library.yale.edu/judaica/site/collection/curator.php
Linguistics
Stanley Insler is Salisbury Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology. His studies include Rigveda, Zarathustra and the history of Zoroastrianism, Metrical texts of the Pali Buddhist Canon, History and structure of the old languages of India and Iran, Indian narrative literature, Silk Road Studies, and Avesta.
E-mail: stanley.insler@yale.edu
Homepage: www.ling.yale.edu/faculty/insler.html
School of Management
Paul Bracken is a Professor of Political Science and of the Yale School of Management. His research concerns international relations, national security, and the multinational corporation. He teaches classes in business, government, and globalization, and strategy, technology, and war.
E-mail: paul.bracken@yale.edu
Homepage: mba.yale.edu/faculty/profiles/bracken.shtml
Edward Kaplan is the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Management Sciences and a Professor of Public Health. His current research focuses on the application of operations research to problems in counterterrorism and homeland security. He has also twice received the prestigious Lady Davis Visiting Professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has investigated AIDS policy issues facing the State of Israel. He co-directs the Daniel Rose Yale University-Technion Initiative in Homeland Security and Counterterror Operations Research.
E-mail: edward.kaplan@yale.edu
Homepage: http://mba.yale.edu/faculty/profiles/kaplan.shtml/; The Rose Initiative
(Ahmed) Mushfiq Mobarak is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Management. He is a development economist with interests in public finance (environmental and political economy) issues and has done research on financial sector development and economic growth in the Middle East and North Africa. His current research interests include projects on water management and hydropower in Brazil, and field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to be welfare improving. He teaches on the challenges to doing for-profit or non-profit business in developing countries and also leads MBA international experience trips to developing countries, including one to Egypt in 2009.
E-mail: ahmed.mobarak@yale.edu
Homepage: mba.yale.edu/faculty/profiles/mobarak.shtml
School of Medicine
Sulayman Dib-Hajj is a Research Scientist in Neurology. His current research focuses on the molecular basis of neurological disorders including neuropathic pain.
E-mail: sulayman.dib-hajj@yale.edu
Homepage: medicine.yale.edu/neurology/people/sulayman_dib-hajj.profile
Hamada Hamid is a Clinical Fellow in Neurology. He has published on mental health and Muslim cultures and is the founding and current managing editor of the Journal of Muslim Mental Health. His current research interests include epilepsy and depression, the role of culture in the presentation and management of neuropsychiatric illnesses, and mental health policy in the Middle East. As the Director for Center of Global Health at the Institute for Social Policy & Understanding, he coordinates health policy research as it relates to Muslim populations.
E-mail: hamada.hamid@yale.edu
Homepage: ispu.org/cgh/home.html
Asghar Rastegar is Professor of Medicine and Director of Global Health Program and Co-Director of Yale/Stanford Johnson & Johnson Global Health Scholar Program. His primary interest is in the broad area of health care workforce development in developing world, with special emphasis on internal medicine and nephrology. For the past three decades he has been involved internationally in developing educational programs for training of physicians in the developing world. He has worked extensively in Iran, Russia and most recently sub-Saharan Africa.
E-mail: asghar.rastegar@yale.edu
Homepage: medicine.yale.edu/intmed/people/asghar_rastegar.profile; Yale/Stanford Johnson & Johnson Global Health Scholar Program
Middle East Studies
Amaar Al-Hayder is the Administrator for CMES. He has a Bachelor degree in Agriculture from Baghdad University. He has also worked as a translator/Interpreter and a cultural advisor for several years in Iraq and the United States.
E-mail: amaar.al-hayder@yale.edu
Lora LeMosy is the Program Manager and Registrar for CMES. She received a B.S. in Business Administration from Charter Oak State College.
E-mail: lora.lemosy@yale.edu
Bonnie Rose Schulman is Managing Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies and Program Associate. Schulman previously worked for Columbia University’s Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies as Program Assistant and as Special Assistant to Senior Research Scholar Kenneth N. Waltz. She also served as Senior Editor of Columbia Journal of International Affairs. In 2008, Schulman received a Harold W. Rosenthal Fellowship in International Affairs to work at the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe. She has studied Hebrew, Arabic, and Japanese. Schulman received a B.A. from Tufts University and an M.I.A. from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. She has also studied at Kanda University of International Studies in Chiba, Japan and at the University of Judaism in Jerusalem, Israel.
E-mail: bonnie.rose.schulman@yale.edu
School of Nursing
Mark Lazenby is an Assistant Professor of Nursing. In addition to holding a Master’s of Science in Nursing, specializing in oncology, from Yale School of Nursing, he also holds a Master’s in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion from Boston University. Immediately after graduating from YSN in 2009, he worked with his hands as a Fulbright Scholar at the King Hussein Cancer Center (KHCC) in Amman, Jordan, where he and his colleagues are researching the role of religion and spirituality in the well-being of cancer patients treated at KHCC. He has translated into Arabic and validated a questionnaire that assesses spiritual well-being of those with life-limiting illness. He is particularly interested in the phenomenon of existential distress at the time of death of those who consider themselves religiously devout.
E-mail: mark.lazenby@yale.edu
Homepage: http://nursing.yale.edu/Faculty/lazenby.html
Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
John C. Darnell is a Professor of Egyptology and director of the Yale Egyptological Institute in Egypt and of the Yale Toshka Desert Survey. His interests include ancient Egyptian religion, cryptography, the scripts and texts of Graeco-Roman Egypt, and the archaeological and epigraphic remains of ancient activity in the Egyptian Western Desert. He is an expert on Ancient Egyptian rock inscriptions and lapidary hieratic. He teaches image-assisted courses on Egyptian religion and religious architecture, and a survey of Egyptian history, focusing on the mechanics of unity and disunity within the Nile Valley, as well as a wide range of courses in ancient texts, from those dealing with the underworld and cosmography to love poetry and magic spells.
E-mail: john.darnell@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/jdarnell.html; Egyptology website
Benjamin Foster is the Laffan Professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature and the Curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection. His primary areas of research are Mesopotamian, especially Akkadian, literature, and the social and economic history of Mesopotamia. His current research includes a history of oriental scholarship in the United States, of which preliminary studies have appeared in periodicals. His teaching experience includes all periods and text types of Sumerian and Akkadian and all periods of Mesopotamian history from the fourth millennium B.C.E. to the Muslim conquest.
E-mail: benjamin.foster@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/bfoster2.html
Karen Polinger Foster is a Lecturer in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and History of Art. She specializes in the art and archaeology of the Bronze Age Aegean, with particular interests in interconnections with Egypt and the ancient Near East. Her most recent book, Civilizations of Ancient Iraq (2009), co-authored with Benjamin R. Foster, is a substantial revision of Iraq Beyond the Headlines: History, Archaeology, and War (2005), co-authored with Benjamin R. Foster and Patty Gerstenblith. Her current major research project involves the final preparation of Strange and Wonderful: Exotic Flora and Fauna in Image and Imagination, a comprehensive study of this material from ancient to modern times.
E-mail: karen.foster@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/kfoster.html
Eckart Frahm is a Professor of Assyriology. His main research interests are Assyrian and Babylonian history and Mesopotamian scholarly texts of the first millennium B.C.E. He is the author of two books on Assyrian historical texts, and of numerous articles on subjects including cuneiform grammatology, the ancient reception of the Gilgamesh epic and the Babylonian epic of creation, Mesopotamian prophecy, Sumerian royal inscriptions and proverbs, Babylonian prisons, and the history of modern scholarship on the ancient Near East. A book by Frahm on Mesopotamian text commentaries and the origins of interpretation is currently in press. Frahm teaches on Mesopotamian history, religion, and literature, and the Bible in its ancient Near Eastern setting.
E-mail: eckart.frahm@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/efrahm.html
Beatrice Gruendler is a Professor of Arabic Language and Literature. She is engaged in four areas of research: the development of Arabic script, classical Arabic poetry and its social context, the integration of modern literary theory into the study of Near Eastern literatures, and early Islamic book-culture (3rd/9th century C.E.) viewed within the history of communication. Current projects are a study of the communicative strategies of literati in the ninth century and a media history of early Arabic-Islamic book culture, which she will pursue in 2010-11 as a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin. She teaches on classics of the Arabic-Islamic world in translation, classical Arabic linguistics, literature (e.g., Layla and Majnun, Abbasid poetry and its social context, al-Mutanabbi, the Maqamat), poetics, Islamic geography, and the history of the Arabic language worldwide from the time before Islam to the present.
E-mail: beatrice.gruendler@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/bgruendler2.html
Dimitri Gutas is a Professor of Arabic and Graeco-Arabic. He studies and teaches medieval Arabic and the medieval intellectual tradition in Islamic civilization from different aspects. At the center of his concerns lies the study and understanding of classical Arabic in its many forms as a prerequisite for the proper appreciation of the written sources which inform us about the history and culture of Islamic societies. He also has an abiding interest in the transmission of Greek scientific and philosophical works into the Islamic world through the momentous Graeco-Arabic translation movement in Baghdad during the 8th-10th centuries AD (2nd-4th Hijri). Within Arabic philosophy, Gutas has concentrated in particular on its greatest exponent, Ibn Sina (known as Avicenna in the medieval Latin world), on whom he wrote the fundamental Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition. Introduction to Reading Avicenna's Philosophical Works (Leiden 1988).
E-mail: dimitri.gutas@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/dgutas.html
Colleen Manassa is the Marilyn M. and William K. Simpson Assistant Professor of Egyptology. Her research interests include Egyptian grammar, New Kingdom literary texts, military history, funerary religion, and social history. Her current projects include the joint monographs An Introduction to Middle Egyptian Grammar (with Cara Sargent) and Inscribed Material from the Quarries of Gebel el-Asr (with John Darnell). She teaches widely on the history and literature of ancient Egypt, including surveys of Egyptian Middle Kingdom literature and historical texts, and has also offered text courses on Egyptian and Nubian historical texts and late Egyptian stories.
E-mail: colleen.manassa@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/cmanassa.html
Elizabeth Payne is Conservator of the Babylonian Collection, located in Sterling Memorial Library. She occasionally teaches courses on the Akkadian language and Neo-Babylonian Texts.
E-mail: elizabeth.payne@yale.edu
Homepage: www.library.yale.edu/libraries/babylonian.html
William K. Simpson is Professor Emeritus of Egyptology. His interests embrace nearly every aspect of Egyptology, including history, literature, art, and archaeology.
E-mail: william.simpson@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/wsimpson.html
Kathryn Slanski is a Lecturer in Assyriology and Humanities. She studies ancient Mesopotamia at the intersections of sources and approaches and has written on Mesopotamian social and economic history as well as verbal and visual representation of the divine. She teaches Mesopotamian and ancient Near Eastern literature, history, religion, law and justice, visual arts, and ancient languages. Recent course offerings include “The Hero in the Ancient Near East,” an interdisciplinary investigation of the Hero through written, archaeological, and art historical evidence, as well as an advanced Babylonian language course on archival and judicial inscriptions from the second millennium BCE.
E-mail: kathryn.slanski@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/kslanski.html
Harvey Weiss is a Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and of Anthropology and in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. His research interests include Mesopotamia, early agriculture, early cities and empires, Holocene paleoclimatology and the social adaptations to environmental change. He is also the Director of the Tell Leilan Project, which has redefined the relationships between dynamic natural and social forces in the third millennium B.C. through excavation, GPS/GIS-implemented regional survey and paleoclimatology investigations at one of the largest archaeological sites in Syria. The project is now engaged in the retrieval and analysis of the Akkadian Palace, and its collapse (2200 BC), at Tell Leilan.
E-mail: harvey.weiss@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/archaeology/f.harveyweiss.html; Tell Leilan Project
Persian
Fereshteh Kowssar is a Senior Lector in Persian. She teaches courses in modern Persian language and literature and is planning courses on Iranian cinema as a medium of change and about women in Iranian cinema in contemporary Iran for the coming academic year.
E-mail: fereshteh.kowssar@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/amanat-kowssar.html
Mahshad Mohit is a Lector in Persian and teaches courses in modern Persian language. Mohit is presently conducting historical research and writing a manuscript on the state and structure of power in Iran during the sixteenth-century. She has a Master’s degree in Political Science from the New School for Social Research, New York.
E-mail: mahshad.mohit@yale.edu
Political Science
Adria Lawrence is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International and Area Studies. She is a scholar of conflict in the Middle East and North Africa, studying how people come to mobilize in favor of ideologies such as ethnicity, nationalism, religion, and democracy. Her current manuscript, Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism, provides an account of how and why nationalist mobilization against colonial rule erupted in the 20th century French Empire. She has also published on the use of violence by non-state actors. She teaches seminars on “Middle East Exceptionalism” and qualitative field research.
E-mail: adria.lawrence@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/polisci/people/alawrence.html
Ellen Lust is an Associate Professor of Political Science. Her work broadly examines the politics of authoritarianism, and through this, the prospects for development and democracy in the region. She is currently working on a book manuscript examining the politics of elections in the Arab world, as well as a collaborative project focusing on the ways in which ongoing social and economic transformations in Africa and the Middle East affect governance programs (with Stephen Ndegwa, World Bank). She is also an associate editor of a the newly launched journal, Middle East Law and Governance, sponsored by the University of Toronto and Yale University Law Schools. She has studied, conducted research, and led student and alumni groups in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Israel, Palestine and Syria.
E-mail: ellen.lust-okar@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/polisci/people/elokar.html
Andrew F. March is an Associate Professor of Political Science. He teaches political theory and has a special interest in Islamic political thought, especially the Islamic legal tradition. He is currently at work on a number of projects on Islamic legal theories of the maqasid al-shari‘a (“the purposes of the law”), Islamic moral psychology and the problem of “taking people as they are” in normative ethics, and contemporary Islamic treatments of apostasy and is also developing a book project on Islamic legal theory, Muslim minorities and conceptions of religious freedom. He has written on the problem of Islam and liberal citizenship, namely on the intersection of liberal theory and the Islamic jurisprudence of Muslim minorities (fiqh al-aqalliyyat). He teaches courses on Islamic Political Thought, Islamic Law & Ethics, and Islam & Liberalism.
E-mail: andrew.march@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/polisci/people/amarch.html
Nikolay Marinov is an Assistant Professor of Political Science. His areas of specialization include elections and democracy, the future of the Coup d’Etat, and international relations. His current research looks at the effectiveness of economic sanctions, at the role of the international community in the spread of democracy around the world, and at the effects of international institutions.
E-mail: nikolay.marinov@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/polisci/people/nmarinov.html
School of Public Health
Howard Forman is a Professor of Diagnostic Radiology and is the faculty founder and director of the MD/MBA program between Yale School of Medicine and Yale School of Management as well as the co-director of the School of Management's MBA for Executives Program. He is a health services researcher focusing on diagnostic radiology, health policy, and healthcare leadership.
E-mail: howard.forman@yale.edu
Homepage: info.med.yale.edu/diagrad/faculty/forman.html
Kaveh Khoshnood is an Assistant Professor in Public Health Practice. His primary research interests are the epidemiology, prevention and control of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis among drug users, prisoners and other at risk populations in United States and in resource-poor countries. His other interests include the examination of the links between health and human rights, health and conflict, the role of health in international relations and the ethical dilemmas in research involving vulnerable populations. He conducts research and mentors researchers from China, Russia, and Iran and teaches courses on HIV/AIDS, global health and research ethics.
E-mail: kaveh.khoshnood@yale.edu
Homepage: http://medicine.yale.edu/ysph/people/kaveh_khoshnood.profile
Religious Studies
Gerhard Böwering is a Professor of Islamic Studies. His books include Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam (1980), Sulami's Minor Qur'an Commentary (Ziyadat haq'iq al-tafsir, 1995), Islam and Christianity: the Inner Dynamics of Two Cultures of Belief (2007), Sulami's Sufi Treatises (Rasa'il sufiya, 2009) and Sulami's Sufi Inquiries (Masa'il sufiya, 2010), Negah-e 'Erfani be-vojud (2010), as well as numerous articles, including those in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, the Encyclopedia of the Qur'an, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica. He is currently working on The Dreams and Labors of a Central Asian Muslim Mystic.
E-mail: gerhard.bowering@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/religiousstudies/facultypages/bowering.html
Stephen Davis is a Professor of Religious Studies. He serves as Executive Director of the Yale Monastic Archaeology Project (YMAP), where he is engaged in the excavation and conservation of early Christian monastic sites in both Upper and Lower Egypt. He specializes in the history of Christianity in late antiquity and offers courses on the social and theological history of ancient Christianity from its beginnings to the seventh century, with a special focus on the latter half of this period. His areas of teaching and research include the study of women and gender, pilgrimage and the cult of the saints, the history of biblical interpretation and canon formation, Egyptian Christianity, the Arabic Christian theological tradition, early Christian art and material culture, and the application of anthropological, sociological, and literary methods in the study of historical texts.
E-mail: stephen.davis@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/religiousstudies/facultypages/davis.html; Yale Egyptological Institute
Steven Fraade is the Mark Taper Professor of the History of Judaism. He currently chairs the Program in Judaic Studies and the university's Language Study Committee. His research interests include the history of Judaism (in its varieties) in Second Temple and rabbinic times; biblical translation and exegesis in ancient Judaism and Christianity; the history and rhetoric of ancient Jewish law; the Dead Sea Scrolls; literary-rhetorical analysis of tannaitic and amoraic rabbinic texts; attitudes towards ascetic piety in early Judaism; and multilingualism in ancient Jewish culture. He teaches courses on rabbinic literature, the history of Second Temple and rabbinic Judaism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls and regularly offers seminars on midrashic, mishnaic, and talmudic texts, and topics in ancient Jewish history.
E-mail: steven.fraade@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/religiousstudies/facultypages/fraade.html
Frank Griffel is Professor of Islamic Studies and Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies. His research and teaching is on the intellectual history of Islam, its philosophy and theology (both classical and modern), and the way Islamic thinkers react to Western modernity. Much of his published work covers the contribution that al-Ghazali (d. 1111) made to the development of Islamic theology and the history of philosophy, be it written in Arabic, Latin, or Hebrew. Al-Ghazali marks one of the turning points of Islamic thought, when the role of major intellectual movements such as the Arabic tradition of Aristotelianism (falsafa) and Islamic mysticism (Sufism) were reassessed. Frank Griffel recently published Al-Ghazali's Philosophical Theology (2009), where he studies his life and the way al-Ghazali made philosophical metaphysics and cosmology compatible with Muslim theology. Currently Frank Griffel conducts a research project on the 12th and 13th centuries in Islamic thought, supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, that aims at explaining how the two discourses of falsafa and kalam in Islam grew together.
E-mail: frank.griffel@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/religiousstudies/facultypages/griffel.html
Christine Hayes is a Professor of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica. She is a specialist in talmudic-midrashic studies and the history and literature of Judaism in Late Antiquity. She offers courses on the literature and history of the biblical and talmudic periods (including Introduction to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible) and on Judaism, as well as advanced text courses.
E-mail: christine.hayes@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/religiousstudies/facultypages/hayes.html
Bentley Layton is the Goff Professor of Religious Studies and a Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. His specializations include gnosticism and heresies, asceticism and monasticism, textual editing and manuscript studies, and Coptic linguistics. He is currently writing on the social history of ancient monasteries, and editing works of the ancient monastic leader Apa Shenoute. He teaches the literary, intellectual, and social history of ancient Christianity in the Mediterranean regions; and the Coptic language.
E-mail: bentley.layton@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/religiousstudies/facultypages/layton.html
Dale Martin is the Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies, specializing in New Testament and Christian Origins, including attention to social and cultural history of the Greco-Roman world.
E-mail: dale.martin@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/religiousstudies/facultypages/martin.html
Semitic Languages
Aaron Butts is a Lector in Semitics. Among the Semitic languages, he specializes primarily in Aramaic (including Syriac) and secondarily in Arabic, Classical Ethiopic, and Northwest Semitic more broadly (Hebrew, Ugaritic, Phoenician, etc.). His research focuses on the dialectology and reconstruction of the Semitic language family. In addition, he has interests in the history and literature of Christianity in the Near East, including Syriac, Ethiopic, and Arabic Christianity.
E-mail: aaron.butts@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/nelc/abutts.html
Slifka Center
Rabbi James Ponet is the Howard M. Holtzmann Jewish Chaplain and Head of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. He teaches a college seminar with Dr. Ruth Westheimer on “The Family in the Jewish Tradition,” and he and his wife, Elana, lead a weekly discussion in Slifka Dining Room on the value of peace in Jewish life and thought.
E-mail: james.ponet@yale.edu
Homepage: www.slifkacenter.org/about/people/rabbi-james-ponet/
Sociology
Jonathan Wyrtzen is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Affairs. He is a comparative-historical sociologist with teaching and research interests on the areas of state formation, colonialism and empire, ethnicity and nationalism, urban and rural contentious politics, and Islamic social movements, in North Africa and the Middle East. He is completing a book manuscript entitled Constructing Morocco: Colonial State-Building and the Struggle to Define the Nation (1912-1961) that examines the relationships among European imperial expansion, colonial policies of modernization and state formation, and the rise of Arabo-Islamic nationalism in North Africa in the mid-20th century. This study also explores the central roles of three marginal groups – Imazighen (Berbers), Jews, and women – in defining Moroccan identity during the mobilization of anti-colonial nationalism. He is also beginning another project comparing tribal insurgency movements against the colonial state in the 1920s in North Africa and the Middle East.
E-mail: jonathan.wyrtzen@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/sociology/faculty/pages/wyrtzen/
Turkish
Etem Erol is a Lector in Turkish. His research interests are in modern Middle East history, Islam in Anatolia, and comparative economic history. He teaches elementary, intermediate, and advanced Modern Turkish, as well as courses in Ottoman Turkish and Paleography.
E-mail: etem.erol@yale.edu
Özge Yücel is a Fulbright FLTA in Turkish from August 2011 to June 2012. Her interest areas are Generative Syntax (Verb Complementation, Finiteness, Control Theory, Information Structure, Q(uestion Particle) Movement) and Second Language Acquisition/Teaching.
E-mail: ozge.yucel@yale.edu
Undergraduate Affairs
Kirk Hooks is Special Assistant to the Dean of Student Affairs for Intercultural and Intergroup Relations, Intercultural Affairs Council Coordinator, and Acting Director of the Native American Cultural Center. He has also provided student counseling services in cross-cultural settings in the Middle East.
E-mail: kirk.hooks@yale.edu
Homepage: www.yale.edu/yalecollege/cultural/nacc/about/advisors.html
Visiting Scholars
Oliver Bast is a Visiting Fellow in Iranian Studies for the 2011-12 academic year.
Oliver Bast, Dr. phil., Maître-ès-Lettres, is Senior Lecturer [Associate Professor] in Middle Eastern History and Persian at the University of Manchester [UK] where he was the head of the department of Middle Eastern Studies until September 2011. He read History and Persian Studies at Berlin (Humboldt-Universität), Tehran (University of Tehran), Paris (Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3) and Bamberg (Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg). Bast holds a joint doctorate (thèse en co-tutelle) from the Sorbonne and Bamberg.
Bast’s research interests include the diplomatic and political history of Modern Iran as well as the interface between historiography, politics and cultural memory. He is the author of Les allemands en Perse pendant la Première Guerre mondiale (Paris: Peeters, 1997) and editor of La Perse et la Grande Guerre (Tehran/Paris: IFRI/Peeters, 2002). Other publications include writings on German-Iranian relations as well as on various aspects of Qajar Iran, including ‘Disintegrating the ‘discourse of disintegration’: Some reflections on the historiography of the late Qajar period and Iranian cultural memory’, in Touraj Atabaki (ed.) Iran in the Twentieth Century: Historiography and Political Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009).
Currently, Bast is finishing the manuscript for a book on Iran’s policy vis-à-vis the Great Powers during World War I and its immediate aftermath up to 1921. Based extensively on the Iranian archival record, this study fundamentally challenges the existing interpretive orthodoxy by giving a voice to the hitherto mostly ignored Iranian protagonists of this key period in Iran’s history.
Furthermore Bast is embarking on a new research project (tentatively) entitled The Performance of Power and the Power of Performance: An investigation into the role of Secular Ritual, Ceremonial and Celebration for the Emergence of the Nation-State in Iran (1848-1979) which intends to look at the nexus between ritual, ceremonial, festivity on the one hand and power on the other hand.
E-mail: oliver.bast@yale.edu; oliver.bast@manchester.ac.uk
Rabab El-Mahdi is a Visiting Assistant Professor and the Rice Family Foundation Visiting Scholar for the 2011-12 academic year.
Rabab El-Mahdi is an assistant professor of political science at the American University in Cairo. She finished her PhD at McGill University in Montreal. She is the co-editor of Egypt: Moment of Change (2009) and the author of a number of articles about the pro-democracy movement, women’s movement, and labor movements in Egypt. She was an Open Society fellow from July 2010-January 2011, during which time she studied prospects for democratization and social change in the Arab world. Her field of specialization is comparative politics with a focus on Latin America and the Middle East. El-Mahdi's research interests cover the areas of state-civil society relations, social movements and resistance, as well as the political economy of social policy.
E-mail: relmahdi@aucegypt.edu
Nadja Germann is a Visiting Scholar in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Council on Middle East Studies for the 2011-12 academic year.
Nadja Germann is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy whose research is centered on medieval metaphysics and logic, with an emphasis on Arabic-Islamic thinkers. Among other things, she has published on Avicenna’s metaphysics, Ibn Ṭufayl’s concept of philosophy, and the relation between natural and revealed religion in classical Islamic thought. Her current research focuses on philosophy of language (broadly conceived) during the ninth through eleventh centuries, the metaphysical presuppositions underlying the various debates, and the different schools of thought involved. In a monograph she aims to explore the emergence of philosophy of language and logic in Arabic-Islamic thought against the background of late ancient philosophy on the one hand and the rising Islamic religious sciences on the other.
E-mail: nadja.germann@yale.edu
Emily McKee completed her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Michigan in 2011. Her dissertation, entitled Socializing Landscapes, Naturalizing Conflict: Environmental Discourses and Land Conflict in the Negev Region of Israel, examines land relations, social conflict, governance and activism among Jewish and Bedouin Arab residents. Her ongoing research interests include phenomenology, environmental anthropology and political ecology, the drawing and policing of group boundaries, social movements, and anthropology of the Levant.
E-mail: emily.mckee@yale.edu
Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar is a Post-doctoral Associate and Lecturer at the MacMillan Center in the Council for Middle East Studies.
She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2010. Her dissertation was titled "Andalusian Encounters: Immigration, Islam, and Regional Identities in Southern Spain." Her research interests include the anthropology of Europe, Spain, North Africa, Islam, Immigration and Diaspora, Gender and Feminist Theory, and Performance.
E-mail: mikaela.rogozen-soltar@yale.edu
Sallama Shaker is Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies and Middle East Studies (2008-present)
Sallama Shaker was the first appointed woman Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Americas in the history of the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She was appointed Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for Cultural, Educational Relations, Technical Cooperation, and Dialogue for Egypt in September of 2004. For four years prior to that, she was Egypt’s ambassador to Canada. She has held several positions within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including Deputy Minister for North and Latin America, Advisor to the Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs on Egyptian/American Relations and NATO, First Secretary at the office of the Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs, and attaché at the Soviet Desk within the ministry. From 1985-1990, Dr. Shaker served as the Consul General at the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, D.C. She has also served as Economic and Political Counselor at the Embassy in Turkey, as well as Cultural and Political attaché at the Embassy of Egypt in Malta.
Dr. Shaker began her education at the American College for Girls in Cairo, Egypt. She went on to earn her B.Sc. in Political Economy at Cairo University. She holds two Masters Degrees in Political Economy and Economics, from Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Economics/Malta University respectively. In 1993 she received her Ph.D. in International Development from American University in Washington, D.C. Dr. Shaker was a Senior Associate at the Woodrow Wilson Center from 1992-1994, where she did research on the impact of the first Gulf War on the economies of Egypt and Turkey.
Dr. Shaker has published many articles on the issues of peace and development in the Middle East. Additional papers include “Building Peace in the Middle East,” “Feminization of Poverty,” “Women in Islam,” “Diversity in Islam,” and “Inter-faith Respect.” She has published a book entitled State Society and Privatization in Turkey, and is fluent in Arabic, English, French, Turkish and Maltese.
E-mail: sallama.shaker@yale.edu
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Geetanjali Singh Chanda is a Senior Lecturer. Her research interests include popular culture and feminist and trans-cultural pedagogy, masculinities and religion. She teaches courses on globalization, autobiographies, family, cultural identity, popular culture, international feminisms and postcolonial India.
E-mail: geetanjali.chanda@yale.edu
Homepage: www.cis.yale.edu/wgss/faculty/chanda-g.html
Yale World Fellows
Orit Marom-Albeck (Israel), Founder & CEO, Pure Drop Ltd.; Partner, Shibolet & Co.. Marom-Albeck is a leading environmental lawyer and business entrepreneur. She specializes in clean tech, particularly in solar and water issues.
E-mail: orit.maromalbeck@yale.edu
Habib Ur Rahman (Afghanistan), Senior Researcher and Analyst, Hambastagi Consultancy Group. An influential policy maker, Rahman has been a senior advisor in the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Education, and Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development.
E-mail: habib.wayand@yale.edu