Faculty

Janet Afary, Professor of Religious Studies and Feminist Studies
Affiliation: University of California, Santa Barbara

Janet Afary is a native of Iran and a historian of modern Iran. She holds the Mellichamp Chair in Global Religion and Modernity at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is a Professor of Religious Studies and Feminist Studies. Her books include: Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2009, winner of the British Society for Middle East Studies Annual Book Prize); The Iranian Constitutional Revolution: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism (Columbia University Press, 1996, winner of Dehkhoda Institute Book Award; and (with Kevin B. Anderson) Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (University of Chicago Press, 2005, winner of the Latifeh Yarshater Book Award for Iranian Women’s Studies).

Professor Afary taught History of Modern Iran at NYUAD in January 2015.

Dawn Chatty, Visiting Professor of Anthropology
Affiliation: Visiting

Dawn Chatty is Emeritus Professor in Anthropology and Forced Migration, former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre in the Department of International Development, and Emeritus Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford, UK. 

Zvi Ben-Dor, Professor of History
Affiliation: New York University New York

Areas of Research/Interest: Global History, Early Modern and Modern Chinese History, Asian and European Islam, Religion and World History, Middle Eastern History, History of Geography, Arab-Jewish and Mizrahi History.

Professor Ben-Dor taught Arab Crossroads in China at NYU Shanghai in January 2015.

Steve Caton, Professor of Contemporary Arab Studies in the Department of Anthropology Program
Affiliation: Harvard University

Steve Caton is an anthropologist of the Middle East specializing in Yemen. He has written three books, Peaks of Yemen I Summon (University of California Press, 1990), Lawrence of Arabia: a Film’s Anthropology (University of California, 1999), and Yemen Chronicle (Hill & Wang, 2005) along with numerous articles.

Professor Caton taught Anthropology and the Arab World at NYUAD in spring 2014.

Mark Cohen, Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus
Affiliation: Princeton University (Emeritus)

Mark R. Cohen is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, Emeritus, and Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus, at Princeton University. His research over the years has focused on the documents of the Cairo Geniza. His books include Jewish Self-Government in Medieval Egypt, 1980; Al-mujtama‘ al-yahudi fi Misr al-islamiyya fi al-‘usur al-wusta (Jewish Life in Medieval Egypt 641-1382); Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages; Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt; and The Voice of the Poor in the Middle Ages: An Anthology of Documents from the Cairo Geniza. He edited the medieval section of A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations from the Origins to the Present Day. Since its inception in 1986 he has been the director of the Princeton Geniza Project, an on-line database of transcriptions of documents from the Cairo Geniza. He is currently finishing a book tentatively titled Law and Society in Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah: Codification in the Post-Talmudic Islamic Economy.

Professor Cohen taught Jews in the Muslim World in the Middle Ages in fall 2014.

Deborah Kapchan, Professor
Affiliation: NYU New York

Deborah Kapchan is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. A Guggenheim fellow, she is the author of Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (1996), Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Music and Trance in the Global Marketplace (2007), as well as numerous articles on sound, narrative and poetics. Other works include Intangible Rights: Cultural Heritage in Transit (2014); Theorizing Sound Writing (2017); and Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Moroccan Contemporary Poetry (2019).

Professor Kapchan has taught Listening to Islam at NYUAD.

Elias Khoury, Global Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies
Affiliation: NYU New York

The Lebanese writer Elias Khoury began his career as a literary critic with his book, Searching for a Horizon: The Arabic Novel After the Defeat of 1967 (1974). Professor Khoury then published his first novel, On the Relations of the Circle, (1975), and became part of the Beirut vanguard in modern Arabic literature, which was seeking to create new dimensions in the movement of modernism which began in the late forties with a revolution in poetry. He served on the editorial board of Mawakif Quarterly, and as the managing editor of Shu'un Falastinia (Palestine Affairs) and of Al Karmel Quarterly.

Professor Khoury has published 12 novels which have been translated into numerous languages, four books of literary criticism, and many articles and reviews. He is a public intellectual who plays a major role in the Arabic cultural scene and in the defense of the liberty of expression and democracy, and he is a cultural activist who directed the theatre of Beirut and co-directed the Ayloul Festival of Modern Arts in Beirut.

Professor Khoury has taught Cities and Modern Arabic Literature at NYUAD.

Jonathan Shannon, Visiting Professor of Anthropology
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi

Jonathan Shannon's research, scholarship, and teaching focus primarily on the Arab world and the Mediterranean, with special attention to the cultural politics of musical performance, collective memory, and transnational migration in the Middle East and North Africa and across the Mediterranean. 

Ella Shohat, Professor of Cultural Studies
Affiliation: NYU New York

Her books include: Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Duke Univ. Press, 2006); Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Univ. of Texas Press, 1989; Updated Edition with a new postscript chapter, I.B. Tauris, 2010); Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (MIT & The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998); Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (co-edited, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997); Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora (co-edited, The Univ. of Michigan Press, 2013, Honorable Mention in the Non-Fiction Category of the 2014 Arab American Book Award, The Arab American Museum); and with Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism (winner of the Katherine Kovacs Singer Best Book Award, Routledge, 1994; 2nd Edition for the book’s 20th Anniversary, with a new Afterward chapter, Routledge, 2014); Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media (Rutgers Univ. Press, 2003); Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2007); and Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic (NYU press, 2012).

Helga Tawil Souri, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication
Affiliation: NYU New York

Helga works on issues to do with technology, media, culture, territory and politics in the Middle East, and especially Palestine-Israel. She has researched and written on Arab media; Palestinian cinema, television, videogames and popular culture; on telecommunications and internet infrastructure and development in the Palestinian Territories; as well as on cultural/territorial politics in Palestine-Israel including analyzing checkpoints as cultural and economic spaces, identification cards as material artifacts and territorially-bordering mechanisms. By and large, Helga's scholarship deals with how media/cultural technologies are shaped, used, negotiated, circulated and impeded in the contemporary geopolitical context of the Middle East.

Professor Tawil-Souri taught War and Media in the Middle East in fall 2014.

Edward Ziter, Associate Professor of Theater
Affiliation: NYU New York

Edward Ziter is a theater historian with specialization in nineteenth-century British theater and contemporary Arab theater. He is the author of the Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge UP, 2003), and is currently at work on a history of political theater in Syria. His work on Syria has been supported through a Fulbright grant and a fellowship from the Humanities Institute at NYU.

Professor Ziter occasionally teaches the class Theater in the Arab World at NYUAD.