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Ghada Al-Madbouh
is completing her PhD at the University of Maryland/College Park in the Department of Government and Politics with a dissertation titled: Aggression of Inclusion: the Effect of Decentralized Leadership and Informal Politics in the Palestinian Authority on Inter-factional Violence in a Colonial Context. She received her B.A. from Birzeit University, Ramallah, her M.A. from the University of Maryland/College Park. Her main field of study is comparative politics with a concentration on the relationship between social movements and the state apparatus (especially the repression-dissent nexus), the transition and/or robustness of authoritarian regimes, and the political thought of Islamist social movements. She conducted her fieldwork in the Occupied Territories in 2007. At the time she also held the position of Acting Director of the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) in Ramallah.
In her dissertation she attempts to move beyond the liberal understanding of inclusion that locates violence (or moderation) within social Islamist movements in the context of the Middle East, and to situate it within the context of state-movement interaction, colonization, and high foreign intervention. In doing so, she also sheds light on the ideas of the Islamist movement Hamas with regard to governance and internal violence and how they evolve and interact with the liberal project of politics.
During the EUME fellowship year, Al-Madbouh will build on her dissertation project focusing on the Religious-Secularism in Hamas' Discourse and Practice.
Dr. Haytham Bahoora
studied English literature at the University of Michigan, and did his graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley and New York University, where he earned a PhD in Comparative Literature in 2009. His dissertation project, Modernism Before Modernity: Literature and Urban Form in Iraq examines the relationship between discursive and material culture in the Arab world by linking the rise of aesthetic modernisms to a particular moment of uneven social and economic development in Iraq. Focusing on cultural production in 1950s Baghdad, his work considers how the confluence of modernist architecture, development discourse and expanding state power combined to produce a modern urban order characterized by the aesthetics of technology, and the ways that visual culture and various literary genres, from modernist poetry, to the realist short story, to modernist novels, responded to these new spaces of development.
He has taught Arabic literature at the Gallatin School and the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University, and Arabic language at Columbia University. He was a fellow at The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq in 2007, and has written for Al Ahram Weekly. He will join the faculty of the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2010.
During the academic year 2009/10 as a EUME-fellow in Berlin he will expand upon his dissertation project by examining the ways that radical aesthetic forms are linked to the expansion of liberal notions of citizenship in the Arab world.
Dr. Bashir Bashir
is a research fellow in the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and holds a Ph.D. and a M.A. degree in Political Theory from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He received his B.A. in Politics, Sociology and Anthropology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute Bashir co-chairs with Prof. Yossi Yonah and Dr. Guy Ben-Porat a research group on Public Policy and Multiculturalism in Israel and co-edits a book with Dr. Amos Goldberg on The Holocaust in Israel’s Public Discourse: Between the Perpetuation of Victimhood and the Promise of Civility. He has taught Political Theory at the LSE, Queen's University (Canada), and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His primary research interests are: democratic theories of inclusion, multiculturalism, conflict resolution and the politics of reconciliation, deliberative democracy, and Bi-nationalism in Palestine/Israel. Among Bashir's publications is: Will Kymlicka and Bashir Bashir (eds.), The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
His current research project that he will work on as a EUME-fellow in Berlin is titled The Politics of Reconciliation and Bi-national Democracy in Palestine/Israel.
Dr. Munir Fakher Eldin
received his doctorate from New York University in a joint program in Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies and History (September, 2008). His dissertation, entitled “Communities of Owners: Land Law, Governance, and Politics in Palestine, 1858-1948,” examines the history of the territorial conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians from the perspective of the late Ottoman- and British-introduced land regimes. Using a wide range of archival documents and other sources in Arabic, English, Hebrew, and Ottoman Turkish pertaining to government and landholding in the Beisan Valley (north of Mandate Palestine), the study demonstrates the role of the state in shaping the colonial geography of the country. During his stay in Berlin, Dr. Fakher Eldin will work on a manuscript that will incorporate his dissertation project and expand its scope to include the impact of colonial rule on the project of Arab modernity in Palestine. The work has been presented in papers given at the Middle East Studies Association’s (MESA) annual meeting, the International Center of Advanced Studies’ (ICAS) seminar at NYU, and at the Palestinian Diaspora & Refugee Center – Shaml, Ramallah. Dr. Fakher Eldin has also used oral history to document stories about change and resistance in the everyday life of the Syrian population in the occupied Golan Heights—his home region. Both during his annual summer visits there and while abroad, he continues to be active in the community’s cultural and political affairs.
Dr. Nader Hammami
received his Ph.D. from the Université de Tunis in 2009 with a dissertation on Representations of the Companions of Muhammad in the Hadith Collections under the supervision of Professor Wahid Saafi. He graduated in Arabic art and civilisation from the Université de la Manouba with a thesis on The Grave Sin in Islamic Theology in 2002, supervised by Professor Abdelmajid Charfi. Since 2002 Nader Hammami is a member of the Tunisian research groups on The Quranic Codex and its Readings (headed by Professor Charfi) and Readings of Religious Discourses (headed by Professor Saafi). He taught at the University of Sfax and has been a 2007 Fellow of the EUME Summer Academy on Literary and Historical Approaches to the Qur'an and the Bibel. Among his publications are Tabari and his Sunni Opponents (in Arabic 2005), Islam al-fuqaha ("Islam of the Jurists"; in Arabic; Dar at-Tali'a, Beirut 2006) and Sources of Ibn Khaldun's Theory of Sunni Mysticism (in Arabic, Institute Superieur des Langues de Tunis 2007). His research interests are in Quranic Studies, classical and medieval Islamic imagination.
While a fellow of EUME in Berlin he will work on a research project entitled the Occasions of Revelation and the Problem of Authenticity.
Dr. Yasmeen Hanoosh
is a literary translator and Assistant Professor of Arabic language and modern literature. She will join the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Portland State University, in 2010. She lived in Iraq until 1995, after which she moved to the United States, where she completed a BA (2001) in Philosophy and World Religions and an MA (2003) in Arabic Language and Literature, both from the University of Michigan. She also holds a PhD (2008) from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the same university, where she submitted her dissertation titled The Politics of Minority: Chaldeans between Iraq and America.
In 2005, Dr. Hanoosh was a fellow at The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARII). She has taught at al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco (2003, 2005), The American University in Beirut, Lebanon (2004), The University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA (2003) and Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA (2007-2008). Her translations have appeared in various literary journals and publications, including Banipal and The Iowa Review. Her translation of the Iraqi novel Scattered Crumbs (al-Ramli) won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Prize in 2002, and has been since excerpted in a number of publications and anthologized in Literature from the Axis of Evil: Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Other Enemy Nations (2006).
During her stay in Berlin, Dr. Hanoosh will be working on a book, based on her dissertation, about the interactions between the local ethno-religious minorities in the Middle East and the European archeological and Christian missions in the region.
Dr. Nazan Maksudyan
studied political science at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. She received her M.A. degree from the same department in 2003. Her research focused on the research and publications of scholars associated with the Turkish Review of Anthropology from 1925 to 1939 and analyzed a form of early Turkish nationalism that was shaped by a racist discourse supported by and purveyed through the disciplinary authority of anthropology. In January 2008 she completed her PhD at History in Sabanci University with a dissertation entitled Hearing the Voiceless – Seeing the Invisible: Orphans and Destitute Children as Actors of Social, Economic, and Political History in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire. She worked as part-time lecturer at Boğaziçi University and Sabanci University in 2008 and 2009. Her publications include: “Foster-Daughter or Servant, Charity or Abuse: Beslemes in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 21 (2008): 488-512; “'This time women as well got involved in politics!': Nineteenth Century Ottoman Women's Organizations and Political Agency,” in Sima Aprahamian, Victoria Rowe eds., Ottoman Women's Movements and Print Cultures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); Türklüğü Ölçmek: Bilimkurgusal Antropoloji ve Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Irkçı Çehresi, 1925-1939 [Measuring Turkishness: Science-Fictive Anthropology and Racist Face of Turkish Nationalism, 1925-1939], İstanbul: Metis, 2005; 2nd ed. 2007; “The Turkish Review of Anthropology and the Racist Face of Turkish Nationalism,” Cultural Dynamics, 17 (2005): 291-322.
Her current research-project that she will work on as a EUME fellow in Berlin focuses on the introduction of vocational education and training to orphaned, destitute, and poor children in the urban provincial centers. It is aiming to offer a more nuanced understanding of the specificities of Ottoman educational reform in the provinces, the attempts to rejuvenate Ottoman urban economy, and the newly contemplated concerns for order and security in the cities.
Dr. Sonali Pahwa
received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Columbia University in 2007. She was then appointed a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the program Cultures in Transnational Perspective at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she taught in the departments of Theatre and Anthropology. In 2003 and 2004 she worked as a staff writer for the Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly's cultural pages. Currently she is writing a book manuscript titled Theatres of Translation: Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Neoliberal Egypt, which examines youth theatre, drama workshops for self-help, and changing notions of performance during the era of transition from postsocialist to neoliberal cultural production. A second project on new women’s media in the Arab world, such as satellite television talk shows and Internet radio, investigates the gendering of space and construction of domesticity in trans-Arab public spheres.
Dr. Nadya Sbaiti
is currently Assistant Professor of History at both Smith College and Mt Holyoke College in Massachusetts, USA, where she teaches courses on the social and cultural histories of the modern Middle East. She earned her doctorate from Georgetown University in 2008. Sbaiti’s publications include an article entitled, ‘If the Devil Spoke French’: Strategies of Language and Learning in French Mandate Beirut, on the cultural and political significance of language of instruction in schools, as well as articles that guide researchers through Lebanon’s archival terrain. She has given talks and is pursuing additional research on such topics as spatial manifestations of colonial and national projects; colonial methods of social control; the production of history as discursive and material practice; tourism and heritage; and contemporary popular culture (music, film, game shows, and reality television). In addition, Dr. Sbaiti has served as co-editor of the peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary publication, the Arab Studies Journal, since 2005.
She is currently writing her book manuscript, based on her dissertation, that examines the central role of education to the unfurling and complex intersections of multiple national narratives with ramifications for the production of history in Lebanon under the French mandate.
Dr. Kirsten Scheid
is an anthropologist and art historian specializing in modern and contemporary visual arts in Lebanon. She studied art history at Columbia University (1992) and cultural anthropology at Princeton University (2005). She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the American University of Beirut and her research interests include the history of painting in Lebanon and the Arab world, colonialism and aesthetics, cross-cultural investments in fine art, and the use of art for negotiating ambiguous social identities such as gender and class. She is currently producing a manuscript, On Civilized Art in Primitive Places: Modern Art and the Formation of Lebanese Society. Her articles include, The Agency of Art and Studying Arab Modernity (MIT-Electronical Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (7, Spring 2007), Missing Nike: On Oversights, Doubled Sights, and Universal Art Understood through Lebanon (Museum Anthropology, 32 / 2 Fall 2009), and The Necessity of the Nude: Being Painter, Man, and Intellectual in 1920s Beirut (International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, December 2009). Kirsten has also curated several exhibitions including on-line shows for Arteeast.org and at Nadi al-saha, a cultural facilities center she co-founded. In 1992-3 Scheid conducted independent field research on the contemporary Palestinian painting movement in the West Bank.
Scheid's newest research has taken two parallel paths: funding of contemporary Arab art and audience cultivation, on the one side, and elite youth subjectivity formation, on the other.
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