Past Fellows

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Ella Shohat joined NYUAD in February 2016, as a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program. Currently, Ella is a Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

She completed her PhD thesis at the Humboldt University on “The Commission Presidents and European Integration: Political Leadership Performance in Supranational Governance” in Political Science at the Humboldt University Berlin (HU) and the Global Governance department at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB).

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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.

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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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Dale joined NYUAD in September 2014, as a Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program. 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.

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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.

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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.

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Houda Lazrak joined NYUAD in September 2015, as a Research Assistant in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program.

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Matthew MacLean joined NYUAD in September 2014 as a Research Assistant in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program. He spent his fourth year in the Joint Program in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYUAD.

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Hollian Wint joined NYUAD in January 2016, as a Research Assistant in the Humanities Research Fellowship Program.

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