Former Fellows
Academic Year 2023-24
Saqer A. Almarri’s research explores depictions of non-binary subjects in the Arabic and Islamic intellectual tradition. Saqer’s work on this topic began at Binghamton University, where he defended his doctoral dissertation in May 2019 on the depictions of the khunthā in Islamic jurisprudence and translations of the conceptualization of the khunthā across scholarly languages.
Noura’s current research project is the first empirical study that investigates gender dynamics in newsrooms in the UAE, with a focus on the influence of the tribal, patriarchal culture in determining Emirati women’s role as newsmakers. Her research observes and documents the newsroom norms and journalism practices using ethnography to highlight specific themes that are extremely under-examined, including gender dynamics and self-censorship practice in the newsroom.
Eli Dollarhide is an archaeologist and anthropologist who specializes in the prehistory of the Gulf region and the broader Middle East. He received his PhD in Anthropology from NYU in 2019 and is currently Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World at NYU Abu Dhabi. His research investigates the role of small and rural settlements in the development of Bronze Age exchange networks and political systems.
Peter Kitlas is an intellectual and cultural historian of Islam. His work contributes to the field of connected Mediterranean history by examining key concepts in diplomacy and international relations through the eyes of eighteenth-century Moroccan and Ottoman ambassadors. He is currently working on his first book, which explores the role of early modern Islamic thinkers in developing diplomatic concepts such as friendship and justice within an international space.
Marwa Koheji's research investigates the proliferation of air-conditioning in Bahrain and the wider Gulf and the socio-material transformations it has engendered. Bridging archival and ethnographic research, her project began at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she defended her doctoral dissertation in March 2022. As a fellow at NYUAD, she will expand her research by examining thermal comfort and energy futurity through a focus on Abu Dhabi's solar infrastructure.
After completing his PhD at the University of Berne (Switzerland), Dr Jan Loop was awarded a Frances A. Yates long-term research fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London. In September 2012 he joined the School of History at the University of Kent where he had a chair in early modern history. As of August 2020 he is a Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Cultures at the University of Copenhagen.
Burak Sayım's research titled “Transnational Communist Networks in the Post-WW1 Middle East: Anticolonialism, Internationalism and Itinerant Militancy (1919-1928)” examines the communist networks across the borders of the Middle East and North Africa region, based on archival research conducted in over a dozen archives in five countries. In particular, it looks at the fledgling communist organizations' interaction with the anti-colonial rebellions and actors, emerging national frameworks and Islam.
Academic Year 2022-23
Saqer A. Almarri’s research explores depictions of non-binary subjects in the Arabic and Islamic intellectual tradition. Saqer’s work on this topic began at Binghamton University, where he defended his doctoral dissertation in May 2019 on the depictions of the khunthā in Islamic jurisprudence and translations of the conceptualization of the khunthā across scholarly languages.
Noura’s current research project is the first empirical study that investigates gender dynamics in newsrooms in the UAE, with a focus on the influence of the tribal, patriarchal culture in determining Emirati women’s role as newsmakers. Her research observes and documents the newsroom norms and journalism practices using ethnography to highlight specific themes that are extremely under-examined, including gender dynamics and self-censorship practice in the newsroom.
Eli Dollarhide is an archaeologist and anthropologist who specializes in the prehistory of the Gulf region and the broader Middle East. He received his PhD in Anthropology from NYU in 2019 and is currently Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World at NYU Abu Dhabi. His research investigates the role of small and rural settlements in the development of Bronze Age exchange networks and political systems.
Peter Kitlas is an intellectual and cultural historian of Islam. His work contributes to the field of connected Mediterranean history by examining key concepts in diplomacy and international relations through the eyes of eighteenth-century Moroccan and Ottoman ambassadors. He is currently working on his first book, which explores the role of early modern Islamic thinkers in developing diplomatic concepts such as friendship and justice within an international space.
Marwa Koheji's research investigates the proliferation of air-conditioning in Bahrain and the wider Gulf and the socio-material transformations it has engendered. Bridging archival and ethnographic research, her project began at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she defended her doctoral dissertation in March 2022. As a fellow at NYUAD, she will expand her research by examining thermal comfort and energy futurity through a focus on Abu Dhabi's solar infrastructure.
After completing his PhD at the University of Berne (Switzerland), Dr Jan Loop was awarded a Frances A. Yates long-term research fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London. In September 2012 he joined the School of History at the University of Kent where he had a chair in early modern history. As of August 2020 he is a Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Cultures at the University of Copenhagen.
Nathaniel Miller completed his PhD in Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Chicago (2016). His second project, “The Poetics of Sunnism,” forms the basis for his current research at NYUAD. This project focuses on the 10-manuscript-volume poetry anthology of ʿImād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī (d. 1201), entitled Pearl of the Palace and Annal of the Age.
Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Director of the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa. Salem studies religion and politics with a special focus on Islam and Muslim politics in Africa in comparative perspective.
Burak Sayım's research titled “Transnational Communist Networks in the Post-WW1 Middle East: Anticolonialism, Internationalism and Itinerant Militancy (1919-1928)” examines the communist networks across the borders of the Middle East and North Africa region, based on archival research conducted in over a dozen archives in five countries. In particular, it looks at the fledgling communist organizations' interaction with the anti-colonial rebellions and actors, emerging national frameworks and Islam.
Nada Shabout is a regent professor of art history and coordinator of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Initiative at the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, U.S. She is the founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran and Turkey.
Julia Stephens is a historian who studies entangled histories of law, religion, family, and economy in South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and global diasporas. Her early work focused on law and Islam in colonial South Asia, including her first book, entitled Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in South Asia (Cambridge. 2018). More recently Professor Stephens interests have shifted to wider geographies as she has traced the lives and legacies of Asian migrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Academic Year 2021-22
Saqer A. Almarri’s research explores depictions of non-binary subjects in the Arabic and Islamic intellectual tradition. Saqer’s work on this topic began at Binghamton University, where he defended his doctoral dissertation in May 2019 on the depictions of the khunthā in Islamic jurisprudence and translations of the conceptualization of the khunthā across scholarly languages.
Noura’s current research project is the first empirical study that investigates gender dynamics in newsrooms in the UAE, with a focus on the influence of the tribal, patriarchal culture in determining Emirati women’s role as newsmakers. Her research observes and documents the newsroom norms and journalism practices using ethnography to highlight specific themes that are extremely under-examined, including gender dynamics and self-censorship practice in the newsroom.
Eli Dollarhide is an archaeologist and anthropologist who specializes in the prehistory of the Gulf region and the broader Middle East. He received his PhD in Anthropology from NYU in 2019 and is currently Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World at NYU Abu Dhabi. His research investigates the role of small and rural settlements in the development of Bronze Age exchange networks and political systems.
Marcel Kupershoek joined NYUAD in January 2015, as a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program.
His research subject is Nabati poetry, a traditional art in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, and Bedouin culture. Its roots go back to the pre-Islamic classical Arabic poetry of famous bards like Imru ‘l Qays. His fieldwork started in 1989 in central-Arabia, at the edge of the Empty Quarter, where he found illiterate poets who were great masters of this poetry’s more recent Nabati version, with vernacular elements.Lenssen is the author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press, 2020), a study of avant-garde painting and the making of Syria as a contested territory, 1900 to 1965. She is currently writing a book about radical art pedagogies in the socialist Eastern shore of the Mediterranean, with a focus on sites in Egypt, Syria, and Algeria in the 1960s.
After completing his PhD at the University of Berne (Switzerland), Dr Jan Loop was awarded a Frances A. Yates long-term research fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London. In September 2012 he joined the School of History at the University of Kent where he had a chair in early modern history. As of August 2020 he is a Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Cultures at the University of Copenhagen.
Dr. Kathryn A. Miller is an Associate Professor of Mediterranean History and International Studies. She lived in Amman Jordan from 2010-2021 where she was Chief of Party (USAID) for the American Center of Oriental Research’s pilot initiative to employ local communities in preserving cultural heritage sites in Jordan.
Nathaniel Miller completed his PhD in Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Chicago (2016). His second project, “The Poetics of Sunnism,” forms the basis for his current research at NYUAD. This project focuses on the 10-manuscript-volume poetry anthology of ʿImād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī (d. 1201), entitled Pearl of the Palace and Annal of the Age.
Rachel Schine holds a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. Her current book project, Black Knights: Arabic Epic and the Making of Medieval Race, explores the origins, literary functions, and social histories of Black protagonists in Arabic popular literature, and particularly in the language’s longest epic, Sīrat al-Amīra Dhāt al-Himma.
Leila Tayeb is a performance studies scholar focused on contemporary Libya. Her interdisciplinary research uses performance ethnography and unconventional archives to explore the politics of cultural performance and the performativity of political life.
Nadia Yaqub is the author of Pens, Swords, and the Springs of Art: the Oral Poetry Dueling of Weddings in the Galilee (Brill, 2006), Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2018), and numerous articles and book chapters about Arab film and literature. At NYU Abu Dhabi she will be researching and writing engaged Arab cinema of the 1970s and 1980s with a focus on transnational connections and regional initiatives during that period.
Academic Year 2020-21
Saqer A. Almarri’s research explores depictions of non-binary subjects in the Arabic and Islamic intellectual tradition. Saqer’s work on this topic began at Binghamton University, where he defended his doctoral dissertation in May 2019 on the depictions of the khunthā in Islamic jurisprudence and translations of the conceptualization of the khunthā across scholarly languages.
Noura’s current research project is the first empirical study that investigates gender dynamics in newsrooms in the UAE, with a focus on the influence of the tribal, patriarchal culture in determining Emirati women’s role as newsmakers. Her research observes and documents the newsroom norms and journalism practices using ethnography to highlight specific themes that are extremely under-examined, including gender dynamics and self-censorship practice in the newsroom.
Eli Dollarhide is an archaeologist and anthropologist who specializes in the prehistory of the Gulf region and the broader Middle East. He received his PhD in Anthropology from NYU in 2019 and is currently Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World at NYU Abu Dhabi. His research investigates the role of small and rural settlements in the development of Bronze Age exchange networks and political systems.
Marcel Kupershoek joined NYUAD in January 2015, as a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program.
His research subject is Nabati poetry, a traditional art in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, and Bedouin culture. Its roots go back to the pre-Islamic classical Arabic poetry of famous bards like Imru ‘l Qays. His fieldwork started in 1989 in central-Arabia, at the edge of the Empty Quarter, where he found illiterate poets who were great masters of this poetry’s more recent Nabati version, with vernacular elements.After completing his PhD at the University of Berne (Switzerland), Dr Jan Loop was awarded a Frances A. Yates long-term research fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London. In September 2012 he joined the School of History at the University of Kent where he had a chair in early modern history. As of August 2020 he is a Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Cultures at the University of Copenhagen.
Michael Christopher Low’s primary research interests include the late Ottoman Empire, the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian Ocean world, and Environmental History. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2015 and is currently Assistant Professor of History at Iowa State University.
Caitlyn's research focuses on the early modern history of the Maghrib, examining both intellectual and social trends in Islamic theology. In August 2020, Caitlyn defended her dissertation in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Her studies and research have taken her to Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Spain, and Jordan.
As a fellow at NYUAD, Caitlyn will complete a monograph on the attitudes and practices of Maghribi scholars in the 15th-17th centuries toward the creedal beliefs of the broader, non-elite Muslim populace.Ayman Shihadeh is an intellectual historian specialized in philosophy and theology in the pre-modern Islamic world. After studying at the Universities of Oxford and London, he worked at the University of Edinburgh before moving in 2008 to SOAS University of London, where he is currently Reader in Arabic Intellectual History at the School of History, Religions, and Philosophy.
Leila Tayeb is a performance studies scholar focused on contemporary Libya. Her interdisciplinary research uses performance ethnography and unconventional archives to explore the politics of cultural performance and the performativity of political life.
John’s research examines Christian and Muslim writing on ascetic practice within the early Islamic world. His work in this field began at Harvard University, where he defended his doctoral dissertation in April 2019. John’s studies have also led him to archival research at mosque libraries in Cairo, Fes, and Istanbul, as well as at Western European manuscript libraries.
William Gerard Zimmerle is both the Director of the Dhofar Ethnography Preservation Project: Documenting the Cuboid Incense Burner in the Sultanate of Oman, and the Dhofar Rock Art and Inscriptions Project: A Digital Humanities Initiative in the Sultanate. Both field projects are under the auspices of the Diwan of the Royal Court.
Academic Year 2019-20
Eli Dollarhide is an archaeologist and anthropologist who specializes in the prehistory of the Gulf region and the broader Middle East. He received his PhD in Anthropology from NYU in 2019 and is currently Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World at NYU Abu Dhabi. His research investigates the role of small and rural settlements in the development of Bronze Age exchange networks and political systems.
Esmat Elhalaby is a historian of the Middle East and Research Fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi. Elhalaby's research focuses on the Middle East's global connections, particularly its links with South Asia. His current book project, Parting Gift of Empire: Palestine, India, and the Making of the Global South, is an intellectual history of partition from the standpoint of its victims.
Huma Gupta did her doctoral training at MIT in History, Theory & Criticism of Architecture + Art. She was also a fellow in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) and the Social Science Research Council. Her dissertation “The Architecture of Dispossession: Migrant Sarifa Settlements and State-Building in Iraq” examines state-building through the architectural production of the dispossessed. Specifically, it historicizes the dialectical relationship between Baghdad’s reed and mud settlements populated by rural migrants and the development of state institutions in the decades following Iraq’s independence in 1932. She argues that the intractable and intertwined problems of the migrant and the slum are productive problems that stimulate capital accumulation through 'solutions’ spanning architectural design, housing programs, urban planning, land grabbing, and large infrastructure projects. Yet, she shows how these ‘problems’ merely function as a foil for the Iraqi state whose very model of economic development and political order was premised on an iterative process of dispossession.
Marcel Kupershoek joined NYUAD in January 2015, as a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program.
His research subject is Nabati poetry, a traditional art in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, and Bedouin culture. Its roots go back to the pre-Islamic classical Arabic poetry of famous bards like Imru ‘l Qays. His fieldwork started in 1989 in central-Arabia, at the edge of the Empty Quarter, where he found illiterate poets who were great masters of this poetry’s more recent Nabati version, with vernacular elements.After completing his PhD at the University of Berne (Switzerland), Dr Jan Loop was awarded a Frances A. Yates long-term research fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London. In September 2012 he joined the School of History at the University of Kent where he had a chair in early modern history. As of August 2020 he is a Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Cultures at the University of Copenhagen.
Laila Prager is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Hamburg (Germany) and a member of AGYA (Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities). Formerly, she worked as a researcher and senior lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Münster and Leipzig (Germany). She has conducted ethnographic research among Bedouin societies in Syria and Jordan, with a special emphasis on the narrative representation and performance of the past. In addition, she has done extensive fieldwork among the Arab speaking Alawi/Alawite (Nusairy) society in South Eastern Turkey (Hatay/Çukurova) and among Alawi migrant communities in Germany, focusing on topics relating to kinship, cosmology, inter-religious conflicts, ritual healing, and migration. She has also conducted research among Kuwaiti-Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Germany.
Mohammed Rustom obtained his PhD (Islamic philosophy and Quranic studies) in the University of Toronto’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations in 2009, and is currently an associate professor of Islamic Studies at Carleton University. An internationally recognized expert on Islamic philosophy, Sufism, and Quranic hermeneutics, his works have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, German, Italian, Persian, Spanish, and Turkish.
Ayman Shihadeh is an intellectual historian specialized in philosophy and theology in the pre-modern Islamic world. After studying at the Universities of Oxford and London, he worked at the University of Edinburgh before moving in 2008 to SOAS University of London, where he is currently Reader in Arabic Intellectual History at the School of History, Religions, and Philosophy.
Anne-Lise’s research focuses on falconry’s cultural history in the context of national and international relationships, and examines what human engagements with birds of prey across time and culture, reveal about the understanding and the definition of ourselves, of our civilizations, and our aspirations across a range of ethnic, religious, historical, and geographical differences.
John’s research examines Christian and Muslim writing on ascetic practice within the early Islamic world. His work in this field began at Harvard University, where he defended his doctoral dissertation in April 2019. John’s studies have also led him to archival research at mosque libraries in Cairo, Fes, and Istanbul, as well as at Western European manuscript libraries.
Academic Year 2018-19
Giuliano Garavini teaches International History at Roma Tre University in Rome.
He has mainly written about European integration, decolonization and the Global South, the history of energy and natural resources. He has taught and received fellowships in various institutions including the European University Institute (EUI), the Graduate Institute in Geneva, the University of Bologna and the University of Padua, and has been a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities at NYUAD where he left his collection of OPEC archives.Yannis Hadjinicolaou studied Art History, South East Asian Art History, and History in Berlin and Amsterdam.
At NYUAD he is pursuing a pictorial history of falconry, which has largely been neglected by art historians and cultural historians alike. The combination of political power and falconry as a metaphor that is being reflected in a number of images in the Early Modern period is the frame of the investigation. The crucial role of the Mediterranean world in transferring knowledge, images, practices, and the instruments of falconry from the Arab Peninsula and Asia to medieval and early modern Europe will be highlighted. At the same time, it will be shown that certain pictorial traditions and media starting from Europe and the US reach the Arab Peninsula today.Marcel Kupershoek joined NYUAD in January 2015, as a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program.
His research subject is Nabati poetry, a traditional art in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, and Bedouin culture. Its roots go back to the pre-Islamic classical Arabic poetry of famous bards like Imru ‘l Qays. His fieldwork started in 1989 in central-Arabia, at the edge of the Empty Quarter, where he found illiterate poets who were great masters of this poetry’s more recent Nabati version, with vernacular elements.After completing his PhD at the University of Berne (Switzerland), Dr Jan Loop was awarded a Frances A. Yates long-term research fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London. In September 2012 he joined the School of History at the University of Kent where he had a chair in early modern history. As of August 2020 he is a Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Cultures at the University of Copenhagen.
Henriette Müller joined NYUAD in October 2015 as a Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program. Müller is a political scientist whose research focuses on comparative politics, comparative government and governance studies with a particular focus on political leadership.
Laila Prager is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Hamburg (Germany) and a member of AGYA (Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities). Formerly, she worked as a researcher and senior lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Münster and Leipzig (Germany). She has conducted ethnographic research among Bedouin societies in Syria and Jordan, with a special emphasis on the narrative representation and performance of the past. In addition, she has done extensive fieldwork among the Arab speaking Alawi/Alawite (Nusairy) society in South Eastern Turkey (Hatay/Çukurova) and among Alawi migrant communities in Germany, focusing on topics relating to kinship, cosmology, inter-religious conflicts, ritual healing, and migration. She has also conducted research among Kuwaiti-Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Germany.
Mohammed Rustom obtained his PhD (Islamic philosophy and Quranic studies) in the University of Toronto’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations in 2009, and is currently an associate professor of Islamic Studies at Carleton University. An internationally recognized expert on Islamic philosophy, Sufism, and Quranic hermeneutics, his works have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, German, Italian, Persian, Spanish, and Turkish.
Anne-Lise’s research focuses on falconry’s cultural history in the context of national and international relationships, and examines what human engagements with birds of prey across time and culture, reveal about the understanding and the definition of ourselves, of our civilizations, and our aspirations across a range of ethnic, religious, historical, and geographical differences.
Academic Year 2017-18
Prior to joining NYUAD, Omnia Amin had been a Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Zayed University (ZU) in Dubai, UAE from 2005 to 2017. She has taught courses including English and Comparative Literature and Culture and Heritage, in addition to interdisciplinary courses focusing on the Middle East region in general and on the Gulf region in particular. She coordinated and taught Senior Seminar courses and Capstone projects in which students undertake research on modern and contemporary global issues including topics such as the Arab Spring, Feminism in the Middle East and Honor Crimes in Arabic Literature. She served on a number of committees including the Curriculum Review and Faculty Promotion Committees, in addition to serving as a peer reviewer for the journal Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Gulf Perspectives, published by Zayed University Press.
Yannis Hadjinicolaou studied Art History, South East Asian Art History, and History in Berlin and Amsterdam.
At NYUAD he is pursuing a pictorial history of falconry, which has largely been neglected by art historians and cultural historians alike. The combination of political power and falconry as a metaphor that is being reflected in a number of images in the Early Modern period is the frame of the investigation. The crucial role of the Mediterranean world in transferring knowledge, images, practices, and the instruments of falconry from the Arab Peninsula and Asia to medieval and early modern Europe will be highlighted. At the same time, it will be shown that certain pictorial traditions and media starting from Europe and the US reach the Arab Peninsula today.Marcel Kupershoek joined NYUAD in January 2015, as a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program.
His research subject is Nabati poetry, a traditional art in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, and Bedouin culture. Its roots go back to the pre-Islamic classical Arabic poetry of famous bards like Imru ‘l Qays. His fieldwork started in 1989 in central-Arabia, at the edge of the Empty Quarter, where he found illiterate poets who were great masters of this poetry’s more recent Nabati version, with vernacular elements.Christian Mauder is an intellectual, cultural, and social historian of the Islamicate world with a focus on the late middle and modern periods.
In 2017, Christian defended his dissertation “In the Sultan’s Salon. Learning, Religion and Rulership at the Mamluk Court of Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516)” at the University of Göttingen. His dissertation, supported by the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung), constitutes the first in-depth analysis of the Egyptian court of the Mamluks as a center of intellectual, religious, and political culture. In addition, he has published several studies on aspects of Mamluk history, including his monograph Gelehrte Krieger. Die Mamluken als Träger arabischsprachiger Bildung nach al-Ṣafadī, al-Maqrīzī und weiteren Quellen (Olms, 2012).Hadia Mubarak is an assistant professor of Religious Studies at Guilford College. Previously, Mubarak served as a lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2015-2017. She also served as a visiting lecturer at Davidson College during the 2015-2016 academic year. Mubarak completed her PhD in Islamic Studies from Georgetown University, where she specialized in modern and classical Qurʾanic exegesis, Islamic feminism, and gender reform in the modern Muslim world.
Henriette Müller joined NYUAD in October 2015 as a Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program. Müller is a political scientist whose research focuses on comparative politics, comparative government and governance studies with a particular focus on political leadership.
Laila Prager is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Hamburg (Germany) and a member of AGYA (Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities). Formerly, she worked as a researcher and senior lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Münster and Leipzig (Germany). She has conducted ethnographic research among Bedouin societies in Syria and Jordan, with a special emphasis on the narrative representation and performance of the past. In addition, she has done extensive fieldwork among the Arab speaking Alawi/Alawite (Nusairy) society in South Eastern Turkey (Hatay/Çukurova) and among Alawi migrant communities in Germany, focusing on topics relating to kinship, cosmology, inter-religious conflicts, ritual healing, and migration. She has also conducted research among Kuwaiti-Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Germany.
Mohammed Rustom obtained his PhD (Islamic philosophy and Quranic studies) in the University of Toronto’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations in 2009, and is currently an associate professor of Islamic Studies at Carleton University. An internationally recognized expert on Islamic philosophy, Sufism, and Quranic hermeneutics, his works have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, German, Italian, Persian, Spanish, and Turkish.
Walid A. Saleh is Professor of Islamic Studies and Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at University of Toronto. He is a specialist on the Qur’an, Tafsir (Qur’anic exegetical literature) and medieval Islamic literature. Saleh is the author of two books, The Formation of the Classical Tafsir Tradition: The Qur’an Commentary of al-Tha`labi (Brill, 2004), and In Defense of the Bible: A Critical Edition and an Introduction to al-Biqa`i’s Bible Treatise (Brill, 2008). Saleh has published articles on al-Wahidi, Ibn Taymiyya, al-Zamakhshari, al-Baydawi, and al-Maturidi. He has also published articles on apocalyptic literature and mirabilia literature in early Ottoman period.
Shuang Wen is a historian of the modern Middle East and East Asia. Using Arabic and Chinese language primary sources from multi-sited research in China, Egypt, Syria, Taiwan, the UK, and the US, her forthcoming first book investigates the transformative processes of Arab-Chinese global interactions in the age of late imperial capitalism from the mid-19th century to the end of World War II.
William Gerard Zimmerle is both the Director of the Dhofar Ethnography Preservation Project: Documenting the Cuboid Incense Burner in the Sultanate of Oman, and the Dhofar Rock Art and Inscriptions Project: A Digital Humanities Initiative in the Sultanate. Both field projects are under the auspices of the Diwan of the Royal Court.
Academic Year 2016-17
Dr. Anderson’s research has included work on state formation in the Middle East and North Africa; on regime change and democratization in developing countries; and on social science, academic research and public policy both in the United States and around the world. She is author of The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980 (1986), co-editor of The Origins of Arab Nationalism (1991), editor of Transitions to Democracy (1999) and author of Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-first Century (2003), as well as numerous scholarly articles.
Caner Dagli is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at The College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. His first book The Ringstones of Wisdom (2004) was a full translation and annotated commentary on Ibn ʿArabī’s Sufi-Philosophical treatise, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, published by Great Books of the Islamic World. He is a general editor of The Study Quran (2015), and recently published a new book, Ibn al-ʿArabī and Islamic Intellectual Culture: From Mysticism to Philosophy in Routledge’s Sufi Series.
Giuliano Garavini teaches International History at Roma Tre University in Rome.
He has mainly written about European integration, decolonization and the Global South, the history of energy and natural resources. He has taught and received fellowships in various institutions including the European University Institute (EUI), the Graduate Institute in Geneva, the University of Bologna and the University of Padua, and has been a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities at NYUAD where he left his collection of OPEC archives.Marcel Kupershoek joined NYUAD in January 2015, as a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program.
His research subject is Nabati poetry, a traditional art in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, and Bedouin culture. Its roots go back to the pre-Islamic classical Arabic poetry of famous bards like Imru ‘l Qays. His fieldwork started in 1989 in central-Arabia, at the edge of the Empty Quarter, where he found illiterate poets who were great masters of this poetry’s more recent Nabati version, with vernacular elements.After completing his PhD at the University of Berne (Switzerland), Dr Jan Loop was awarded a Frances A. Yates long-term research fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London. In September 2012 he joined the School of History at the University of Kent where he had a chair in early modern history. As of August 2020 he is a Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Cultures at the University of Copenhagen.
Anne-Marie McManus is assistant professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Culture at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches in the departments of Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (JINELC) and Comparative Literature. Her research engages debates in comparative and world literatures, Arabic and Middle Eastern studies, translation theory, and anthropology, with a particular interest in the multilingual and circulational literary ties that have internally traversed North Africa and the Middle East since decolonization.
Henriette Müller joined NYUAD in October 2015 as a Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program. Müller is a political scientist whose research focuses on comparative politics, comparative government and governance studies with a particular focus on political leadership.
Laila Prager is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Hamburg (Germany) and a member of AGYA (Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities). Formerly, she worked as a researcher and senior lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Münster and Leipzig (Germany). She has conducted ethnographic research among Bedouin societies in Syria and Jordan, with a special emphasis on the narrative representation and performance of the past. In addition, she has done extensive fieldwork among the Arab speaking Alawi/Alawite (Nusairy) society in South Eastern Turkey (Hatay/Çukurova) and among Alawi migrant communities in Germany, focusing on topics relating to kinship, cosmology, inter-religious conflicts, ritual healing, and migration. She has also conducted research among Kuwaiti-Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Germany.
Luke Yarbrough, since 2013 an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Saint Louis University, earned his PhD in 2012 in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. In the fall of that year, he was a fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Academic Year 2015-16
Andrew Bush is an anthropologist specializing in Islamic Studies. He has conducted ethnographic research with Iraqi Kurds for more than ten years in the United States and the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Research interests in ethics, literature, and gender and sexuality have led him to examine kinship, Sufi poetry, Islamist movements, and Islamic law in Kurdistan. He is drafting a book manuscript that examines the ethical lives of Muslims in Kurdistan who turn away from pietistic aspirations while at the same time citing Sufi poetry and sustaining intimate relations with more pious Muslims. Tentatively titled Islam and Intimacy in Kurdistan, the manuscript renders ethical life in ethnographic prose that is interspersed with poetry.
Yousef Casewit teaches Arabic Intellectual Heritage and Culture at the American University of Sharjah (UAE).
His research centers on the medieval intellectual history of North Africa and Muslim Spain. Yousef is currently working on a study of the life, teachings, and legacy of the Sevillan Qur'an commentator and mystic Ibn Barrajan (d. 536/1141), tentatively entitled "The Paradise of Certainty: Ibn Barrajan and the Rise of Andalusi Mysticism."
Dr. Allen Fromherz is Associate Professor of Mediterranean, Middle East, and Gulf History at Georgia State University in Atlanta. His first two books, The Almohads: the Rise of an Islamic Empire (IB Tauris) and Ibn Khaldun, Life and Times (Edinburgh) examine the rise of Empire in lineage-based societies in North Africa. Qatar, A Modern History (Georgetown, 2013) focuses on the importance of memory and history in Qatari and Gulf society from the 19th century to the present.
Giuliano Garavini teaches International History at Roma Tre University in Rome.
He has mainly written about European integration, decolonization and the Global South, the history of energy and natural resources. He has taught and received fellowships in various institutions including the European University Institute (EUI), the Graduate Institute in Geneva, the University of Bologna and the University of Padua, and has been a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities at NYUAD where he left his collection of OPEC archives.Jeychandran is a scholar of visual cultures and performances of South Asia and West Africa. She has also worked as an independent curator on several ethnographic and contemporary art exhibitions. She was awarded a PhD in Culture and Performance from University of California, Los Angeles in June 2014. Her dissertation research was funded by the Fowler Museum at UCLA and Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Mellon Fellowship and other institutions such as the UCLA International Institute and the Smithsonian Institution.
Marcel Kupershoek joined NYUAD in January 2015, as a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program.
His research subject is Nabati poetry, a traditional art in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, and Bedouin culture. Its roots go back to the pre-Islamic classical Arabic poetry of famous bards like Imru ‘l Qays. His fieldwork started in 1989 in central-Arabia, at the edge of the Empty Quarter, where he found illiterate poets who were great masters of this poetry’s more recent Nabati version, with vernacular elements.Houda Lazrak was a Research Assistant in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program in academic year 2015-16.
Henriette Müller joined NYUAD in October 2015 as a Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program. Müller is a political scientist whose research focuses on comparative politics, comparative government and governance studies with a particular focus on political leadership.
Ella Shohat was a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program in academic year 2015-16. Currently, Ella is a Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University.
Hollian Wint was a Research Assistant in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program in academic year 2015-16.
Academic Year 2014-15
Marilyn Booth's areas of interest span gender studies, Arabic literature, auto/biography studies, translation studies and the practice of literary translation, vernacular culture and dialect literatures, and cultural history especially in the context of imperialised societies. She is writing a book on early Egyptian/Arab feminism and on women’s contributions to the nahda in the final twenty years of the nineteenth century. The book focuses on the writer Zaynab Fawwaz (c1850-1914), who immigrated from Ottoman Lebanon to Egypt and wrote articles in the press, two novels, and a play.
Andrew Bush is an anthropologist specializing in Islamic Studies. He has conducted ethnographic research with Iraqi Kurds for more than ten years in the United States and the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Research interests in ethics, literature, and gender and sexuality have led him to examine kinship, Sufi poetry, Islamist movements, and Islamic law in Kurdistan. He is drafting a book manuscript that examines the ethical lives of Muslims in Kurdistan who turn away from pietistic aspirations while at the same time citing Sufi poetry and sustaining intimate relations with more pious Muslims. Tentatively titled Islam and Intimacy in Kurdistan, the manuscript renders ethical life in ethnographic prose that is interspersed with poetry.
Marcel Kupershoek joined NYUAD in January 2015, as a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program.
His research subject is Nabati poetry, a traditional art in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, and Bedouin culture. Its roots go back to the pre-Islamic classical Arabic poetry of famous bards like Imru ‘l Qays. His fieldwork started in 1989 in central-Arabia, at the edge of the Empty Quarter, where he found illiterate poets who were great masters of this poetry’s more recent Nabati version, with vernacular elements.Matthew MacLean was a Research Assistant in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program in academic year 2014-15. He spent his fourth year in the Joint Program in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYUAD.
Dale was a Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program in academic year 2014-15. His scholarly interests center on the history of the Middle East during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Broadly, he is interested in how changes in the environment resulting from both human and non-human action relate to social and political change.
Academic Year 2013-14
Giuliano Garavini teaches International History at Roma Tre University in Rome.
He has mainly written about European integration, decolonization and the Global South, the history of energy and natural resources. He has taught and received fellowships in various institutions including the European University Institute (EUI), the Graduate Institute in Geneva, the University of Bologna and the University of Padua, and has been a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities at NYUAD where he left his collection of OPEC archives.Anna is a doctoral candidate in Ethnomusicology in the FAS Department of Music at New York University New York. Subsequent to her tenure with the NYU Abu Dhabi Research Institute, Anna received an NYU Humanities Initiative Graduate Fellowship to complete her dissertation writing in residence at NYU New York during the 2014-15 academic year.
Reynolds Richter is a PhD candidate in History at New York University, specializing in modern African history and colonial legal history. His work contributes to ongoing debates about land, ethnicity, and citizenship in Africa by showing how possibilities for unifying Kenya’s plural legal system — comprised of “customary,” Islamic, and English law jurisdictions — opened and closed during the era of decolonization and independence.
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