studied English language and literature at Cairo University and started his postgraduate studies in literary theory in 2002. He received his Ph.D. from Cairo University in 2008 with a dissertation on The Cognitive Mapping of Modernity and Postmodernity, exploring the convergence of Jewish and Islamic critiques of modernity and postmodernity with a particular emphasis on the contributions of the Polish-born British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (the author of Modernity and the Holocaust) and the Arab Egyptian intellectual Abdelwahab Elmessiri (the editor of the Arabic Encyclopedia of the Jews, Judaism and Zionism). Ali's research interests fall within the scope of literary theory and critical theories of modernity. He has published several articles and reviews in Arabic, including “The Metaphorical Approach to Modernity in the Writings of Abdelwahab Elmessiri and Zygmunt Bauman,” in: Abdelwahab Elmessiri in the Eyes of his Friends and Critics. Dar Al Fikr: Damascus (2007), “Elmessiri and Western Modernity,” in: Al Jazirah Cultural Magazine. 9/4/2007 G. Issue No 194, and “Yahuda Bauer: Rethinking the Holocaust, A Review” in: Weghat Nazar. Cairo: Sep. ( 2007).  ). His current research project deals with “The Spectre of Eric Voegelin in Zygmunt Bauman's and Abdelwahab Elmessiri's Critique of Modernity”.

is a poet, novelist, and translator. He studied English literature at Baghdad University before moving to the United States after the 1991 Gulf War. He did his graduate studies at Georgetown and Harvard, where he earned a PhD in Arabic Literature in 2006. His dissertation was on the 10th century Arab poet Ibn al-Hajjaj. He received a Mellon grant to support his research in 2003. His poems and articles (in Arabic and English) have appeared in various journals and publications in the Arab world, including as-Safir, an-Nahar, al-Adab, Masharef, as well as The Nation, Middle East Report, al-Ahram Weekly, Banipal, World Literature Today, and The Journal of Palestine Studies. He has published a collection of poems in Arabic (A Prism; Wet with Wars, Cairo 2003), which was published in English as The Baghdad Blues in April 2007 by Harbor Mountain Press, and a novel I’jaam (Beirut, 2003) which was published in English in 2007 by City Lights Books. Translations in Italian (Fertinelli), German (Lenos), Portuguese (Globo), and Norwegian are forthcoming. His poetry was anthologized in Iraqi Poetry Today and Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Arab-American Poetry. He has also contributed numerous translations of Arabic poetry into English. His co-translation of Mahmud Darwish’s poetry was nominated for the PEN Prize for translation in 2004. Antoon co-produced and co-directed a documentary About Baghdad (2004, which assessed the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam occupied Iraq. He is a contributing editor to Banipal and a member of the editorial committee of Middle East Report. He taught at Dartmouth College (2003-2005) and is currently Assistant Professor at New York University’s Gallatin School and a fellow at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.

While in Berlin he will be working on a book about “The Poetics of the Obscene in Pre-Modern Arabic Poetry.”

studied political science at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. She received her M.A. degree in Middle Eastern Studies at SOAS, University of London in 1998. Her research focused on intellectual movements in the Middle East with a special emphasis on Islamism and secularism in Turkey. In 2007 she completed her Ph.D. at CNWS (School of Asian, African and Amerindian Studies) in Leiden University with a dissertation titled Myths and Memories of Secularism in Turkey (1946-1966). She worked as part-time lecturer at Leiden University and Utrecht University from 2004-2006. Her publications include: “A Reaction to Authoritarian Modernization in Turkey: The Menemen Incident and the Creation and Contestation of a Myth, 1930–31,” in T. Atabaki, ed., The State and the Subaltern: Modernization, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 143-58; “Secularism in Turkey as a Nationalist Search for Vernacular Islam: The Ban on the Call to Prayer in Arabic (1932-1950),” REMMM, La Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée,123 (2008): 161-77. Her current research focuses on contemporary secularism in Turkey and the transformation of state rituals related to major national monuments.

studied history at Middle East Technical University (METU) and the University of Texas-Austin before completing his Ph.D. in history at Sabancı University (Istanbul). Dursun wrote his dissertation on the history of Ottoman forestry. His current research is on the environmental (ecological) history of the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, and the Middle East with a particular emphasis on the use and governance of natural resources. His publications include the transcription and facsimile edition of The Ottoman Treasury Registers of the Year 1680, 2 vols, Royal Asiatic Society Books. Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt Series (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, forthcoming), the "Limits to Forest Administration in the Ottoman Empire: 1870-1914,"in Law and Transformation in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, ed. Huri Islamoglu and Jane Burbank (forthcoming) and "A Call for an Environmental History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey: Reflections on the Fourth ESEH Conference (Review Article),” in: New Perspectives on Turkey 37 (Fall 2007): 211-222. During his stay in Berlin, Selçuk Dursun will be pursuing his project "Producing the Ottoman Empire, Greening the Turkish Nation: Demographic Displacements and Cosmopolitan Visions in Resource Management."

is an Assistant Professor at the History Department, Boğaziçi University, where he teaches Balkan history and the history of the non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire. He holds a Ph.D. (2005) from the Turkish Studies Program of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Leiden, where he submitted his thesis titled The Greeks of Izmir: An Ottoman Non-Muslim Community between Autonomy and Patriotism. He is a member of a research group on historiography and the theory of history, which since 1999 has been publishing the review Historein. He is also a fellow in a project for the publication of a four-volume Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770-1945): Texts and Commentaries by CEU Press, Budapest whose first two volumes, vol. I.: Late Enlightenment and vol. II.: National Romanticism, edited by Balázs Trencsényi & Michal Kopeček, appeared in 2006 and 2007. Kechriotis has published articles on Ottoman Izmir and the political and cultural aspects of the Greek-Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire.

is Assistant Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. He received his Ph.D. in African history from York University (2007). His dissertation project, The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, Abolition of Slavery and Transformations in the North African Regency of Tunis, 1759-1846, explores the interplay between the caravan slave trade, abolitionism, and economic and political processes in 18^th- and mid-19^th-century Tunisia, and the western Mediterranean more generally. Montana has been Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Trent University (Canada). His research interests range from the social and economic history of slavery in Northwest Africa and the Islamic world in the 18th and 19th centuries to development cooperation between the European Union and African, Caribbean, and Pacific States in the post cold war era. He has published several articles based on this research including “Ahmad Ibn al-Qadi al-Timbuktawi on the Bori Ceremonies of Sudan-Tunis,” in Paul E. Lovejoy (ed.), Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam (2003), and has edited a volume with Paul E. Lovejoy and Behnaz Mirzai Asl: Islam, Slavery and Diaspora, Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, [in Press: forthcoming July-August 2008]. Montana lectures on African history, slavery, and its abolition on the African continent, the African Diaspora, as well as the history of Islam in Africa.

was educated in India, and then spent 15 years in Cairo, Egypt, fully memorizing the Qur’an, learning professional recitation, and obtaining a B.A. Degree at the American University in Cairo (AUC) in Arabic Language & Literature and Computer Science. For his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge he has studied Fatimid exegesis of the Qur’an. His focus has been the works of Fatimid Grand Missionaries (da‘i-s), especially those of al-Qadi al-Nu‘man (d. 973), the Chief Justice of the Fatimid dynasty (909-1171), such as The Pillars of Islam and The Chosen One in Jurisprudence. His research interests include the Qur’anic exegesis of Fatimid and post-Fatimid Ismaili communities, pragmatic and semantic analysis of Qur’anic quotations, electronic tafsir databases, and the usage and application of the Qur’an by Islamic sects in modern times. He will pursue this latter interest during his participation in the Europe in the Middle East – the Middle East in Europe program. Qutbuddin has taught Arabic and Introduction to Islam at AUC and University of Cambridge, UK. Papers he has presented at conferences include “A Methodology for the Analysis of Qur’anic Quotations in Arabic Texts,” “Implicit Tafsir and the Exoteric Aspect of Ismaili Exegesis,” and “Applying the Qur’an Today: Perspectives of the Major Islamic Sects.” His publications include “Al-Husayn b. ‘Ali,” in: Biographical Dictionary of Islamic Civilization and Cultures, ed. Mustafa Shah (I. B. Taurus, forthcoming 2009), and a review of The Advent of the Fatimids by Paul Walker and Wilferd Madelung, in: MESA Bulletin 39, no. 2 (2005): 208-09.

is Associate professor of Religion at the University of Toronto. He studied Arabic language and literature at the American University of Beirut and received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Yale University. He specializes in the Qur'an and the history of its interpretation (tafsir). His first book, The Formation of the Classical Tafsir Tradition: The Qur’an Commentary of al-Tha’labi (D. 427/1035), was published by Brill in 2004. His second book, In Defense of the Bible: A Critical Edition and an Introduction to al-Biqa’i's Bible Treatise, came out in 2008 and was also published by Brill. Saleh’s new project is a study of the history of the Bible in the Islamic religious imagination. Saleh is interested in charting the development of Islamic religious intellectual history by using tafsir and the study of the Qur'an as the guide to such a history. Another area Saleh is interested in is the apocalyptic literature written in Mamluk and early Ottoman Arab lands.

was the 2007-2008 Qatar Post-doctoral fellow at CCAS, Georgetown University. She is Co-Editor of the Arab Studies Journal. She received her doctoral degree in September 2007 from the Departments of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. She is presently working on her manuscript based on her dissertation, Meatless Days: Consumption and Capitalism in Wartime Palestine 1939-1948. Situated at the intersections of studies of consumption, political economy, and colonialism, her research traces the formation of a Palestinian Arab middle class before the defining rupture of 1948. Seikaly’s interests range from social and cultural history of daily practices to the trajectories of colonial and post-colonial development. She has lectured and is writing on topics including, “The New Arab Home: Consumer, Housewife, and Citizen in Forties Palestine,” “A Public Good? Palestinian Businessmen and the British Colonial State,” “Nakba and Historiography: The Centrality of Catastrophe in Palestinian History,” and “Food for All Under Control: Nutrition and Colonial Development in 1940s Palestine.” Seikaly has taught courses on the history of the modern Middle East and has developed graduate seminars that wed the material and cultural approaches to Middle East history.

studied Translation Studies at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and Media Studies at Oslo University in Norway. She holds a PhD degree in Translation Studies and currently teaches courses on translation theory, translation history and translation criticism at Boğaziçi University. She is the author of Kapılar (2005 - a book exploring different approaches to translation history, published in Turkish) and The Politics and Poetics of Translation in Turkey, 1923-1960 (Rodopi, 2008). Gürçağlar has published articles on Turkish translation history and method in descriptive translation studies. She is also a professional conference interpreter and a translator of poetry, social sciences and environmental subjects. Her new project is titled “Mapping the Field of Popular Literature in Turkey: Textual Production Outside the Canon.”