Academic Year 2010/2011

Toufoul Abou-Hodeib

qualified as an architect from the American University of Beirut (B.Arch, 1998) before pursuing her graduate studies in cultural and social History at the University of Amsterdam (M.A., 2002) and at the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 2010). During her graduate studies, she taught at the American University of Beirut and at the University of Chicago. Supported by a Mellon fellowship, Toufoul Abou-Hodeib’s research for her dissertation, “Authentic Modern: Domesticity and the Emergence of a Middle Class Culture in Late Ottoman Beirut” investigates the home's role in mediating the experience of modernity and in formulating cultural "authenticity" for an emerging middle class in Beirut. Paying particular attention to the materiality of the home, the approach focuses on turn-of-the-century transformation of categories such as "public," "class," and "taste" and their formation across three key domains of inquiry: urban politics, intellectual discourse, and domestic consumption. She also has a forthcoming article on taste and class in late Ottoman Beirut in the International Journal of Middle East Studies During her stay as an EUME-fellow in Berlin, Toufoul Abou-Hodeib will be developing her dissertation and reworking it into a book manuscript.

Maggie Awadalla

studied English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo and did her graduate work at the University of Kent, where she earned her PhD from the Centre of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies in 2006. Her dissertation, “National Discourse and Egyptian Women’s Writing: Generational Differences in the Works of Latifa Zayyat and Ahdaf Soueif” focuses on the participation of women writers in Egypt in creating a national discourse and their efforts at claiming a space within the public domain.
She has taught Arabic language and literature at Imperial College London and the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London (SOAS). She also taught Modern and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent.
During the academic year 2010/11 as a EUME-fellow she will expand upon her dissertation project by tracing the effects of the socio-political and cultural change that lead to the development of compensatory discourses and radicalization in Egypt and the means by which an alternative secular and indigenous legacy can help find a common ground through literary forms of expression.

Gülhan Balsoy

received her PhD in history from Binghamton University in 2009 and an M.A. from Istanbul Technical University. Between 2007 and 2010 she gave courses on Ottoman and Turkish history as well as History of Science at Işık University. Her dissertation, “Gender and the Politics of Female Body: Midwifery, Abortion, and Pregnancy in Ottoman Society (1838-1890s)” examines the politicization of reproduction in the mid- to late nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. Her major publications include: “Gendering the Ottoman Labor History: The Cibali Régie Factory in the Early Twentieth Century” in “International Review of Social History”, and “Advices to Pregnant Women: Changing Conceptions of Pregnancy and Birth in the Ottoman Empire in the late Nineteenth Century” in “Medicine Within and Between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, 18th-19th Centuries” (forthcoming). Her teaching and research interests cover the history of the late Ottoman Empire, history of women and gender, social history of medicine, history of science and technology, and labor history.
During her stay in Berlin she will be working on a book based on her dissertation about the gendered aspects of the population policies and politics of female body in the late Ottoman Empire. She will also conduct her research on a new project that examines the medical institutions for women in the Ottoman society.

Mohammed A. Bamyeh*

is currently a professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. He has held the Hubert H. Humphrey chair in International Studies at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the SSRC-MacArthur Fellowship in International Peace and Security. He has previously taught at Georgetown University, New York University, SUNY-Buffalo, and the University of Massachusetts.
He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990. His subsequent areas of interest have included Islamic studies, sociology of religion, political and cultural globalization, civil society and social movements, and comparative social and political theory. His books include Anarchy as Order: The History and future of Civic Humanity (Rowan & Littlefield 2009); Of Death and Dominion: The Existential Foundations of Governance (Northwestern UP 2007); The Ends of Globalization (Minnesota UP 2000); The Social Origins of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse (Minnesota UP 1999, winner of the Albert Hourani Honorable Mention from the Middle East Studies Association); and the trend report Transnationalism, published as a special issue of the International Sociological Association’s journal Current Sociology (1993). He has also edited Palestine America (published as a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 2003, and runner-up for the best special issue award from Council of Editors of Learned Journals); co-edited (with Brett Neilson) Drugs in Motion: Mind and Body Altering Substances in the World’s Cultural Economy (published as a special issue of Cultural Critique, 2009); and has just finished editing the forthcoming volume Intellectuals and Civil Society in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris 2011).
Mohammed Bamyeh is the founding editor of the journal Passages: Journal of Transnational and Transcultural Studies, the former book series editor of “World Heritage Studies on Multiculturalism and Transnationalism,” and the current co-editor of the new book series “Tracking Globalization” (Indiana UP).

*Affiliated Fellow of EUME

Fadi A. Bardawil

studied Sociology at the American University of Beirut and did his doctoral work in Anthropology at Columbia University. His dissertation titled "When All that is Revolution Melts into Air: The Disenchantment of Leftist Levantine Intellectuals," examines the collapse of Marxist thought and practice in the Levant through focusing on the intellectual and political trajectories of a generation (born around 1940) of prominent public intellectuals. Through engaging memoirs, newspaper archives, party documents, theoretical texts as well as interviews, this work explores ideological transformations in the region, the vexed relation of intellectuals to political militancy as well as the shifting articulations of Western metropolitan fields of cultural production to Arab peripheral ones.
He has taught introductory social sciences courses at the American University of Beirut and Contemporary Western Civilization at Columbia University. He was an associate researcher at the Institut Français du Proche Orient in Amman and Beirut (2005-7) and one of the two conveners of the Middle East and North Africa Workshop at Columbia (2009-10).
In Berlin he will revise and develop his dissertation project through an examination of the international circulation of theoretical discourses, their political effects, and the ethical dilemmas they pose in the wake of Marxism's ebbing away as a transnational idiom of critique and a promise of emancipation.

Lejla Demiri

holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge (2008), where she also worked as a Junior Research Fellow (Trinity Hall) between 2007-2010. She is currently working on her book project, based on her PhD thesis, “A Medieval Muslim Commentary on the Bible: Najm al-Dīn al-Tūfī’s (d. 716/1316) Response to the Christians”.
She previously studied Christian Theology in Rome and obtained her Licentiate degree (2004) and Post-graduate Diploma (2003) from the Pontifical Gregorian University. She was also a visiting student at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas/Angelicum (2002-2003). Prior to that, she received her MA (2000) and BA (1998) degrees in Islamic Theology from Marmara University in Istanbul. Her research examines Muslim-Christian theological interactions in the pre-modern period. She has also taught at the University of Cambridge and the Cambridge Muslim College. Since 2002 she has been actively involved in the field of interfaith dialogue.
Her research project for the EUME fellowship in Berlin is entitled:
“A Muslim Approach to Religious Diversity and Salvation in the late 17^th and Early 18^thCenturies: ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (1641-1731) on Christianity and Christian Theology”

Hanan Hammad

is currently an assistant professor of history at Texas Christian University, USA. She earned her Ph.D in Middle East History with a supporting field in Persian studies at the University of Texas at Austin in 2009. Her publications include the articles “Between Egyptian ‘National purity’ and ‘Local Flexibility’ Prostitution in al-Mahalla al-Kubra in the first half of the 20^th century” and “From Fascination to Condemnation: Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution in the Egyptian Press”. She is currently writing a book manuscript tentatively entitled Mechanizing People, Localizing Modernity: Industrialization and Social Transformation in Modern Egypt. Based on archival sources which have not previously been consulted and oral history collected in the town of al-Mahalla al-Kubra, Mechanizing People examines how modern industry influenced the socio-economic and demographic growth of Egyptian society, affected the daily routine of ordinary people and changed their sense of time, concept of money, and consumption habits. Prof. Hammad also has a passion for Persian history and culture, which has resulted in several scholarly presentations and an Arabic translation of Moniro Ravanipour’s novel Ahl-e Gharq. She also holds a B.A. in Communication and Journalism from Cairo University, and, before coming to the world of academia, she worked as a journalist in Egyptian, Kuwaiti and American newspapers.

Tamer el Leithy

was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt. After studying economics (BA., American University in Cairo), and a brief stint as an economist in the oil industry, he turned to studying medieval history at AUC, Cambridge University (MPhil.) and Princeton University (PhD). He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2003-06); currently, he teaches medieval social and cultural history at New York University (2007-).
El-Leithy just completed a book manuscript, based on his dissertation, which examines a pivotal wave of Coptic Christian conversion to Islam in the 14th century, most likely when Egypt became majority Muslim. Based on unpublished Coptic manuscripts and documents, the study traces the ways in which conversion—and the attendant suspicion, and eventual assimilation, of converts—had profound effects not only on Coptic Christianity, but also on Islam. It also discusses the relationship between religious change and long-term processes of acculturation and ethnic conversion.
During the EUME fellowship year (2010-11), he will begin his research on a hitherto unknown collection of documents that he recently discovered in Cairo. He plans to use these documents to reconstruct two Christian neighborhoods in late-medieval Cairo, and to examine their resident Coptic families and their strategies of social reproduction. This study of the relationship between family, property, and legal practice is especially significant given that these Christian litigants conducted all of their communal and familial strategies of reproduction—from marriage/divorce to inheritance and endowment [waqf] practices—in Muslim courts (i.e. through Islamic law).

Nadia Nader

is a legal historian who finished her Ph.D. in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara in October 2010. Her dissertation, “The Memory of the Mihna in a Haunted Time: Dogmatic Theology, Neo-Mu’tazilism and Islamic Legal Reform “, is a historical assessment of what the Mihna meant and means to Muslims. By focusing on the legacy of the Mihna in modern times, her dissertation demonstrates how dogmatic theology impacted the development of Islamic legal institutions and doctrines, and how this development affected Muslims’ normative system of belief, and their understanding of the ethical foundation of Islamic law.
Nadia Nader received her BA in English literature and civilization from Alexandria University in Egypt, after which she moved to the United States. She received two Master's Degrees in Religious Studies and History, both from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is primarily interested in questions of historical memory, and how they fundamentally affect our modern understanding of people’s communal past, the formation of the law, as well as issues of identity and faith. She is also interested in historiography, Islamic legal history, legal theory, Islamic law, Islamic family law, Islam in the West and Human Rights. Her specialization in the medieval and the legal history of Islam, and her interest in contemporary Islam and Islam and ethics make her an active participant in the enduring debate on Muslim reform, and women’s and human rights in the greater Muslim world.
During the EUME fellowship year in Berlin, Nadia Nader intends to work on a book, based on her dissertation. Her project looks at Muslim memory and the development of Islamic legal discourse. Her book is tentatively titled “Haunted Times”.

Agnès Penot-Lejeune*

is completing her PhD in History of art at the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne under the supervision of Dominique Poulot. Her dissertation is entitled: The internationalization of the French art market during the nineteenth century through the example of the art Gallery Goupil & Cie. In a comparative study utilizing history, economics, and sociology, this dissertation focuses on one of the worldwide most successful French art galleries and print dealers of the period.
She has been a 2008-2009 fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and worked closely with the Project for the Study of Collecting and Provenance in order to create a database recording the Goupil & Cie’s stock books.
During her stay in Berlin she will explore the subject of France occupying a privileged space in the artistic relationships between Europe and the Middle East. She will study the pictorial diffusion of the Nineteenth century messages regarding the “Eastern world,” i.e iconographic choices and marketing strategies made by Goupil & Cie, as well as the legacy of the Middle East in the Nineteenth century art market. In addition to studying the evolution of the American and European tastes for images of the Orient as recorded in Goupil & Cie`s ledgers, she will study the taste of and the role played by Middle-Eastern collectors in the international art market.

*Affiliated Fellow of EUME. Fellowship of the Centre Inter-disciplinaire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur l’Allemagne

Guriqbal S. Sahota

holds degrees from the University of California (BA, History) and from the University of Chicago (MA, PhD, South Asian Languages and Civilizations). His dissertation, currently being revised for publication as “The Late Colonial Sublime”, explores the social energies and aesthetic ideologies that generated a neo-epic form in Hindi and Urdu literature over the last decades of British colonial rule. He translates literary works from Urdu and writes reviews on contemporary culture, especially theory, fiction, and translation.
His current project draws together a constellation of cultural forms generated by the rejection of modernity in postcolonial locations over the twentieth century. The project concentrates specifically on the way in which different belief forms begin to mediate social and political contradictions in this period. While in Berlin, he will look at two points of this constellation in particular: 1) Muhammad Iqbal's doubts about the West within the context of his engagement with Goethe, his reading of German romantics, and parallel forms of “late” romanticism in Germany at the time, i.e., Nietzsche, Klages, and the Munich Cosmic Circle (Muenchener Kosmiker Kreis); the aim is to better understand whether - or how - romantic critiques of Enlightenment informed Iqbal's elaboration of Islamic politics in the subcontinent; 2) the minoritarian religious politics of Sikhs in postcolonial India; here the question will be: What shape did political ideology take in the movement for Khalistan vis à vis the majoritarian Hindu liberal secular order.
G.S. Sahota will begin teaching in the Literature Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2011.

Zeynep Türkyılmaz

received her PhD from the Department of History at the University of California at Los Angeles in August 2009 and her M.A. 2001 at Boğaziçi University. Her dissertation, “Anxieties of Conversion: Missionaries, State and Heterodox Communities in the Late Ottoman Empire,” is based on intensive research conducted in Ottoman, British and several American missionary archives and also utilizes ethnographic sources. Drawing upon on her research, she examines how the anxiety over the loyalty of religiously marginal communities of the empire and the intervention of missionaries into those communities transformed the categories of identity and techniques of statecraft and thus played a key role in defining the contours of both Ottoman modernity and that of Ottoman successor in Southeastern Europe, Anatolia, and the Arab Middle East. In 2009-2010 academic year, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow at UNC-Chapel Hill. As a EUME fellow, she will expand her research and focus on revising her dissertation into a book manuscript.