Prior to his engagement with the OIB, he was chairman of interdisciplinary research institutions funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation) and by his home university. His research topics combine history, literature & textuality, applying text criticism, discourse analysis and intertextual analysis. His published work covers Arabic historiography, with particular attention given to narrativity; Islamic Tradition under the perspectives of authority of knowledge, transmission and moral politics; and the Bedouin patrimony in Arabic thought and discourse. He also writes on the history of Oriental Studies in Europe. His current research projects concern medieval political literature, and the intellectual and political role of the Ayyubid chancery exemplified by the critical edition of al-Qadi al-Fadil’s correspondence.

Nadia von Maltzahn is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project "Lebanon's Art World at Home and Abroad: Trajectories of artists and artworks in/from Lebanon since 1943 (LAWHA)", which has started in October 2020. She joined the OIB in 2013, first as a research associate (2013-2018) before being appointed deputy director (2018-2020, partly on parental leave). 

Nadia’s publications include The Art Salon in the Arab Region: Politics of Taste Making, co-edited with Monique Bellan (Beiruter Texte und Studien 132, 2018), The Syria-Iran Axis: Cultural Diplomacy and International Relations in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2013/2015), and other publications revolving around cultural practices in Lebanon and the Middle East. She holds a DPhil and an MSt in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St Antony's College, University of Oxford. She received her BA Honours in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from King’s College, Cambridge.

Nadia’s research interests include cultural policies, artistic practices and the circulation of knowledge. Her current research project, LAWHA, is about the forces that have shaped the emergence of a professional field of art in Lebanon within its local, regional and global context, against the background that Lebanon is regularly portrayed as a country with weak public institutions but vibrant cultural sector. It follows up from her previous research project at the OIB, which has dealt with cultural policies in Lebanon, looking in particular at cultural institutions and their role in the public sphere.

Monique Bellan works as a postdoctoral researcher in the LAWHA project. She previously worked as research associate at the Orient-Institut Beirut (2013-2019) where she examined aesthetic reflection and art critique in twentieth-century Lebanon and Egypt. She also worked at the collaborative research centre Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits at Freie Universität Berlin and the Performing Arts Section of the Academy of Arts in Berlin
She holds a PhD in Arabic Studies from Freie Universität Berlin, an MA in Islamic Studies, Sociology and Political Science from the University of Bonn, and an MA in Library and Information Science from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Within LAWHA she focuses in particular on exhibition practices, art critique and the database and digital platform (DDP).

From 2011-2013 he was the institute’s Deputy Director. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin (1993). Before joining the OIB in 2009, he served as a research associate at the Center for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin (1993-1995), the Orient-Institut of the German Oriental Association (1996-1999), the Free University of Berlin (2000-2001), the University of Notre Dame, Indiana (2001-2002), the University of Copenhagen (2005-2008), Saint-Joseph’s University, Beirut, and Notre Dame University (NDU), in Zouk Mosbeh, Lebanon (2008-2009).

His research areas include: religion and political order; interreligious dialogue and peace-building; communal identities, minorities, and conflict management in the Middle East; German-Middle Eastern relations; and the history of Oriental Studies. His main research project at the OIB, Clergy and Conflict Management, examines the impact of Christian and Muslim religious leaders on the escalation and de-escalation of political conflict before, during, and after the Lebanese civil war(s) of 1975-1990.

He holds a BE in Computer and Communication Engineering from Notre Dame University – Louaize as well as an executive MBA from the Lebanese Canadian University and a Master Management Administration des Entreprises from Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne in France.

Zakaria holds an MA in Philosophy and is preparing his PhD in Philosophy at the Lebanese University on the topic of "Religious Revival Movements in Christianity and Islam: the USA and Egypt as case studies". He is the author of al-dawla wa al-shari'a fi al-fikr al-arabi al-islami al-mu'asir (Beirut, 2013) and several articles on philosophy and religion, including one on Max Weber. Barraq's research interests revolve around Arab and Islamic political thought, both classical and contemporary, Islamic movements, and the relationship between the East and the West, in addition to his interest in Arabic philology.

Dina Banna works at the OIB since 1986. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Nutrition and Dietetics from the Faculty of Agriculture and Nutrition Sciences at the American University of Beirut (1986).

Additionally she joined many further vocational trainings in library science in Germany. Since 1986 she is also a member of the Lebanese Librarians Association.

Nasma Tayyara joined the library team as a library assistant in 1999. 

She studied Business Administration at the Lebanese University and gained some working experience at the Allied Business Bank in Beirut.

She holds a Bachelor degree in Information Science (2006) as well as in Political Science and Public Administration (2010) both from the Lebanese University. She worked, among others, as a cataloger at the Lebanese National Library Rehabilitation Project from 2009 until 2011 and at the Lebanese University (2008-2010).

Jennifer Viehl is a political scientist and a PhD candidate in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg working on a critical examination of the discourses on good governance in late medieval Arabic political advice literature. She holds an MA in Islamic Studies and Political Science from Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. She worked as a research assistant on a project on late medieval Islamic political thought funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung and hosted by the OIB between 2012 and 2015. Jennifer’s research is located at the intersection of the history of political ideas, political theory and Islamic studies and it centres around the history of Islamic political thought and methodological problems of political theory.

Dahlia Gubara is a postdoctoral fellow at the Orient-Institut Beirut conducting research on a project entitled “Virtuous Narratives and the Many Lives of Luqmān al-Ḥakīm." She studied Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and History at Columbia University, New York where her dissertation focused on al-Azhar and orders of knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her work bridges the fields of Islamic Studies and African and Middle Eastern History and is concerned primarily with the production, transmission and consumption of knowledge in, and about, the ‘Islamic discursive tradition.

Astrid Meier joined the OIB in October 2013 as deputy director. A historian by training, she holds a PhD from the University of Zurich, Switzerland (1994). She worked as a research assistant at the History Department of the same university (2006 – 2011) and lectured at the universities of Zurich, Basel, Bern and St. Gallen. From 2011 to 2013, she was Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies at Martin-Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg, to where she returned as Professor of Islamic Studies in April 2018.

Her research interests include the social and cultural history of the Middle East in the early-modern period; theory and practice of Islamic law; famines, hunger and food systems; and environmental history. Astrid Meier is a member of the scientific boards of the journals Comparativ (Leipzig) and Annales islamologiques (Cairo). In early 2018, she acted as a reviewer for Annales islamologiques.
 

She holds a BA degree in Oriental Studies (Erlangen, Germany) and an MA in Islamic Studies (SOAS, UK). She is a PhD candidate in Islamwissenschaft at the Martin-Luther University Halle, Germany, and her research project builds on a comprehensive study of Ibn al-Azraq’s political treatise "Badāʾiʿ al-Silk fī Ṭabāʾiʿ al-Mulk".

Apart from the history of Islamic political thought, Elena’s research interests include Islamic theology, philosophy, and law. She also conducts research on the history of Christian-Muslim relations in the Levant.

In 2012, Torsten submitted his Ph.D. thesis titled "Zwanzig Jahre Alltag. Lebens-, Welt- und Selbstbild im Journal des Aḥmad Ibn Ṭawq" (Twenty Years of Everyday Life. Biography, Worldview and Self-Image in the Journal of Aḥmad Ibn Ṭawq) on a text from late Mamluk Damascus, which he wrote at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies (BGSMCS, Free University Berlin) and the Anne Marie Schimmel Kolleg "History and Society during the Mamluk Era (1250-1517)". He received his Master degree in Islamic Studies, history and intercultural communications from the University of Jena.

She has taught Middle East Politics, International Relations, International Politics of Economic Relations and Comparative Politics at SOAS, Exeter and McGill. Her research interests include nationalism, citizenship and the governance of social services in the Arab region, especially in relation to the education sector. She has also worked on aspects of Islamist and post-Islamist discourses. She has just completed an evaluation of a nation-wide education support program in Egypt and has worked in development policy, research and project evaluation since 2004. During her fellowship at OIB, Hania will be writing-up her updated research on pro-‘Revolution’ electoral mobilization in Egypt since 2012, initiated during her fellowship with the EUME program of the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.

Publications

- Forthcoming 2015. Honorable Citizens, Selective Islamism and Neoliberal Dreams: Reading Textbook Nationalism from Mubarak to Sisi. Nations & Nationalism 21(4): tbd.

- 2015. A Collapse of Formal Schooling in Egypt: Interview with Hania Sobhy. Inequality, Education and Social Power: Transregional Perspectives FTS & MWS. 15 January. Available at: ies.hypotheses.org/815.

- 2014. Tell the teacher: I see you, I thank you. Mada Masr Online Newspaper. 1 July. Available at: www.madamasr.com/opinion/tell-teacher-i-see-you-i-thank-you.

- 2012. The De-Facto Privatization of Secondary Education in Egypt. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 42 (1): 47-67.

- 2009 [2011]. Amr Khaled and Young Muslim Elites: Islamism and the Consolidation of Mainstream Muslim Piety in Egypt. In Cairo Contested: Governance, Urban Space and Global Modernity, edited by Diane Singerman. Pp. 415- 454. Cairo: American University Press.

- 2007. Reading Reform into the Past: Power and the Islamist Articulations of Muslim History. Quest Spring. Available at: www.qub.ac.uk/sites/QUEST/FileStore/Issue4PerspectiviesonPowerPapers/Filetoupload,71746,en.pdf.

Stefan Seeger graduated in library science from the HTWK Leipzig in 2005 with a thesis on public libraries of Egypt. He worked from 2005 till 2009 as Librarian at the Library of the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, a London branch of the Aga Khan University, and thereafter been employed from 2009 till 2014 at Georgetown University in Qatar as Librarian for Arabic Collections and Services.

Hans-Peter Pökel is since 2019 Head Librarian at the OIB. He joined the OIB already in 2014 as research associate. He studied Semitic philology, Religious Studies and Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Marburg/Germany. He received his PhD from Jena/Germany with a thesis on al-Jahiz and was research associate at the Seminar for Semitic and Arabic Studies in Berlin until 2014. He also studied Library and Information Science and received his M.A. LIS from Berlin/Germany with a thesis on National Libraries in the Arab World. 

Till Grallert joined the OIB in 2014. His research and teaching focuses on the social and spatial history of late Ottoman cities, the socio-linguistics of early Arabic newspapers and digital humanities (DH) outside the global north. He completed his PhD at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies in 2014 with a thesis entitled “To Whom Belong the Streets? Property, Propriety, and Appropriation: The Production of Public Space in Late Ottoman Damascus, 1875 – 1914.” Till’s current research project aims at establishing a genealogy of urban food riots as a “repertoire of contention” (Tilly) and as genuine political negotiations of the social contract between the rulers and the ruled in the Eastern Mediterranean between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. He is a co-organiser of the “Digital Humanities Institute – Beirut,” the developer and a core contributor to “Project Jarāʾid,” an online chronology of Arabic periodicals before 1900, and he contributed to a recent collection on “Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies” (ed. Elias Muhanna, 2016). Within the framework of his research project “Open Arabic Periodical Editions” (OpenArabicPE), Till works on open, collaborative and scholarly digital editions of early Arabic periodicals such as Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī's journal al-Muqtabas and ʿAbd al-Qādir Iskandarānī's al-Ḥaqāʾiq.

Bio:

Zeina G. Halabi is Assistant Professor of Arabic literature and Culture, French and Francophone Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching interests include Arabic music and film. In her current book project, Writing Melancholy: The Death of the Author in Modern Arabic Literature, Halabi engages the elegiac writings of modern and contemporary Arab novelists and poets since 1967. An article on the poetics of mourning the postwar Lebanese intellectual appeared in Journal of Arabic Literature. Other articles in progress address topics ranging from the contemporary literary depiction of 19th century Arab intellectuals to political satire and the revisiting of notions of displacement and exile in literature and film.

Publication:

“The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: The Suicide of the Intellectual in Rabih Jaber’s Ralph Rizkallah Through the Looking Glass.” Journal of Arabic Literature 44 (2013) 53-82.

Book Project:

During her affiliation with the Orient Institut-Beirut, Halabi will complete her current book project, Writing Melancholy: The Death of the Intellectual in Modern Levantine Literature. Lying at the intersection of literary criticism and intellectual history, Halabi’s project probes the (self-) representation of Levantine intellectuals in elegiac writings since the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Halabi examines the ways in which contemporary poets and novelists who identify with different literary and historical generations have mourned and commemorated the death of their peers. She shows how the psychological and political imprints of loss and defeat that have emerged in elegiac texts in the wake of the 1967 war, contribute to an elegiac discourse that is inherently melancholic. Halabi engages the elegiac writings of canonical novelists including Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Abdel Rahman Munif and poets including Mahmoud Darwish and Mohamed al-Maghout in the backdrop of a collective experience of loss and defeat. As she examines the poetics of mourning the contemporary Arab intellectual, Halabi engages the works of novelists Elias Khoury, Rabih Jaber, Rawi Hage among others.

Veronica Ferreri is a PhD candidate in Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her research investigates Syrians’ lived experiences and social imaginaries of forced displacement in Lebanon.

She holds a Master’s degree in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies from the Venice’s University Ca’ Foscari and an MA in Migration and Diaspora Studies from SOAS. During her postgraduate studies, Veronica conducted research with the Somali refugee community in Damascus and amongst the Syrian diaspora in London.

Alyn Hine is currently working on a project called 'Expressions of Cultural Identity among Antiochian Orthodox Christians in Lebanon,' which attempts to analyse a narrative of identity for the Antiochian Orthodox through their literature. Although the project concentrates on modern literature, it also attempts to locate ideas of origin through pre-modern literature. Having written his PhD thesis (SOAS) on the presence of Russian literature in the works of Mikhail Naimy, Alyn is also interested in the interaction of Russian and Arabic literature in the modern era and how this literary dialogue helped to construct intellectual and artistic ideas in both areas.

Lana Mzhavia is a doctoral student at the University of Freiburg (Germany) and works on a thesis titled "Alternative Worlds: A Study of the Contemporary Poetry of Arab Women". She holds a master’s degree in Semitic Studies from the Tbilisi State University (Georgia), where she also studied Arabic Language and Literature and Georgian Philology. Her research interests include, but are not limited to, the works of contemporary female Arab writers with a special focus on experimental poetry.

Samer Ghamroun is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the “Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique” (ISP) at the École Normale Supérieure in Cachan, France. His research focuses on the politicization of sharia courts and law in Lebanon, between women’s mobilization and the civil courts’ competition, within the field of legal sociology. More generally, Ghamroun works on judicial policies and judges’ mobilizations in Egypt and Tunisia. He is also a member of an international research program in legal anthropology (PROMETEE), studying law and property issues in various Muslim contexts. Ghamroun has taught legal and political sociology at several universities in Paris, and is a founding member of the Legal Agenda Center in Beirut where he regularly publishes articles and contributes to discussions about Law and Society in Arab contexts. Among others, he recently published:

Samer Ghamroun, 2013, "Le droit de la communauté sunnite libanaise saisi par les femmes", in Florence Rochefort et Maria Eleonora Sanna (dir.), Normes religieuses et Genre: Mutations, Résistances et Reconfiguration XIXème-XXIème siècle, Paris: Armand Colin.

Samer Ghamroun, 2012, “Liban: mobiliser la norme islamique, préserver le système pluricommunautaire”, in Baudouin Dupret (dir.), La charia aujourd'hui: Usages de la référence au droit islamique, Paris: La Découverte.

Zina Sawaf is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. She is a recipient of the Shelby and Kathryn Davis scholarship. Based on long-term ethnographic work in Saudi Arabia, her doctoral project lies at the intersection of the anthropology of politics and kinship. Her dissertation aims to investigate the refashioning of kinship in Riyadh through the everyday affects and experiences of women that stem from divorce in addition to the documentary practices and technologies of the state. She holds an MSc in social anthropology from the London School of Economics and an MSc in foreign service from Georgetown University.

Rita Sakr ( orient-institut.academia.edu/RitaSakr ) completed a PhD at the University of Nottingham in 2009 and then a post-doctoral British Academy/AHRC/ESRC research scholarship at the University of Kent before taking up a visiting lectureship at University College Dublin followed by a 2-year Research Associate position on the Research Councils UK "Partnership for Conflict, Crime, and Security Research" programme (Kent). Besides 3 volumes of co-edited essays, she is the author of "Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study" (Continuum, 2012; re-issued in paperback, Bloomsbury, 2013) and "'Anticipating' the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies" (Palgrave, 2013). She is co-producer and co-director of the documentary film on memory and peace-building in contemporary Beirut "White Flags". Her current project at the OIB is titled "Nineteenth-Century Beirut as a 'City of the World'". Grounded in archival research, this interdisciplinary project will bring together urban studies, cultural geography, history, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean studies.

Diana is a Ph.D. candidate in History and Civilization at the Sorbonne University (Paris 4). She has an M.A in History from the Sorbonne University and an M.A in Political Science from Saint Denis University (Paris 8).

Her dissertation focuses on the role of music in "Lebanese" society during the period of al-Nahda (Arab Renaissance) from the nineteenth century to the Second World War. The study considers Lebanese musical production from different angles. From a social perspective, it traces the musical life in the Ottoman and Mandatory Beirut based on an analysis of the press at the turn of the twentieth century. From a socio-political angle, it analyzes the role of music in the ideological construction of a "national narrative", asserting a certain Lebanese specificity within the Levant. Finally, it analyses the songs’ texts and their messages from a literary perspective, in order to understand and trace subjective, social and political desires, claims, taste and changes in this period.

Lamia Moghnieh is a PhD candidate in Social Work and Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also holds a Master’s in Social Science from the University of Chicago, and a Master’s in Psychology from the American University of Beirut. Her dissertation research follows the humanitarian therapies of violence in Lebanon, introduced during the July war in the form of war trauma interventions, and their proliferation in “postwar Lebanon” to psychologically treat violence against refugees, prisoners and women. Moghnieh studies the ways in which the psychologization of violence relocate it around new forms of injuries, bodies and sites of healing, and explores its implications on the politics of violence and suffering in Lebanon.

Francisco Mazzola is a doctoral candidate in the Department of War Studies at King's College London (KCL), University of London. He holds a Master's degree in Political Science and Contemporary Middle East Studies from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

In his research Francisco investigates the effects that clientelism has on the ways that citizenship and statehood are conceptualized in post-war Lebanon. He is particularly interested in exploring the relations of state and non-state actors in the provision of public services, such as security and social welfare, and the consequences that these relations have on state-society bonds and statehood in Lebanon.

Mohamad Zaydan is a doctoral student in philosophy at the Lebanese University, Tripoli. He holds a master's degree in Christian-Muslim Studies from the University of Balamand. He works on a thesis titled "فلسفة الحكم والمواطنة والدولة المدنيّة في فكري الشيخ محمد الغزالي والإمام محمد مهدي شمس الدين" ("The concepts of governance, citizenship and civil state in the works of Shaykh Muḥammad al-Ghazālī and Imām Muḥammad Mahdī Shams al-Dīn: a critical analytical study").

Julia is doctoral candidate in the Department of City & Regional Planning at the University of California Berkeley. Her dissertation takes an urban ethnographic perspective to the political economy of the Middle East, tracing circulations of investment and violence in Beirut and mapping the region's broader sectarian and social class tensions. She has a master's degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she won the outstanding thesis award for her project "Peace Through the Metaphor of War" on the informal settlements (favelas) of Rio de Janeiro. She previously worked for the World Bank's urban development unit in Brazil and on Wall Street as an emerging market trader. She is also a regular contributor to Your Middle East (http://www.yourmiddleeast.com/).

Sina Birkholz, Dipl.Pol., is a Research Associate at the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 700 “Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood” at Freie Universität (FU) Berlin, and an affiliated PhD student at the Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies (BTS).

She studied Political Science and International Relations at Augsburg University, Germany and the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Her former research topics include the role of youth and women in the Egyptian Uprising, narrative identity and issues of class in Egypt, and societal legitimations of police violence. Sina has a strong interest in methodological questions of Social Sciences and in interdisciplinary research.

Her current research in Lebanon focuses on the reform and reconstruction of political and security institutions in comparative perspective and is part of the SFB 700 project "The Politics of State- and Security-Building in Areas of Limited Statehood". For her project page see www.sfb-governance.de/en/teilprojekte/projektbereich_c/c6/team/birkholz/index.html.

Elizabeth obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her doctoral fieldwork was conducted in Lebanon; it examined the entrepreneurial strategies of members of the wine industry as they converged in the Kefraya region of the West Bekaa–where she resided for well over a year. Her thesis, entitled, “Trade-marking Tradition: An Ethnographic Account of The Lebanese Wine Industry” (2014), combined archival and ethnographic research and covered issues concerned with food and wine related practices, the land-labour nexus, and rural livelihoods.

Elizabeth’s project draws upon the conclusions from her PhD thesis to design the outline for a book about rural economies in Lebanon. She is also conducting further ethnographic research which explores potential transformations in labour relations following the start of the Syrian conflict.

Her publications which have focused on themes of wine and food, labour and entrepreneurial strategies, memory and the senses include: “Eating and Drinking Kefraya; The Karam in the Vineyards” in “How We Eat, Why We Eat” edited by Emma-Jayne Abbots PhD and Anna Lavis PhD. London: Ashgate Publishers (2013) and “Pursuits of Quality in the Vineyards: French oenologists at Work in Lebanon” in “Anthropology of Wine: Ethnography from the Vineyard to the Glass”. Rachel E. Black, Ph.D. and Robert C. Ulin Ph.D. eds. London: Berg Publishers (2013).

At the OIB, he is working for the Thyssen-funded project "Politische Paradigmenbildung in islamischer Tradition" for which he's building an e-reserve database for project materials as well as the online publication of the project's "Source Companion". Apart from an interest in Arabic gnomologia, he has a strong background in digital humanities.

Dina Mansour-Ille holds a PhD in “Politics, Human Rights and Sustainability” with a specialization in political economy and human rights from the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. Before joining the OIB, she worked as a Post-doctoral Research Assistant at the European University Institute in Florence and was teaching in both Germany and Italy. She also holds an M.A. in International Human Rights Law from the American University in Cairo and regularly teaches courses on human rights, gender and identity politics, and migration and refugee studies. She is an editor for the Journal “Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism” published by Wiley-Blackwell and based at the London School of Economics. She edited and co-authored a two-volume book entitled “Multiculturalism, Conflict and Belonging” (Interdisciplinary Press, Oxford, 2014). Her most recent article “Women’s Rights in Islamic Shari’a: Between Interpretation, Culture and Politics” appeared in the “Muslim World Journal for Human Rights”. Her upcoming publication “Rational Atrocities and the Formation of the State: A Game-Theoretic Approach to the Case of ISIS” will be published in “Economics of Peace and Security".

Her current research project at the OIB is titled "From Orientalism to Fundamentalism: Identity between Religion and Politics in the Post-Arab Spring" and aims at studying the post-“Arab Spring” perceptions and reflections of the concept of ‘identity’ by exploring the peripheries that defy the centric religious perception of the Arab identity. Her project will focus on Egypt and Lebanon as comparative cases of study and research.

Karen Moukheiber received her PhD in Middle Eastern and Arab History from the American University of Beirut in 2015. Her main interests are Abbasid female slavery, gender, sexuality and cultural studies. Her PhD thesis titled “Slave Women and Free Men: Gender, Sexuality and Culture in Early Abbasid Times” investigated the masculine conceptual framework defining the sexual and cultural roles of slave women in a selection of Abbasid legal, literary and historical foundational texts. Her forthcoming publications are “The Abbasid Slave Courtesan: A Cultural Mediator for an Ethical Appreciation of Pleasure” in the Proceedings of the 2013 International Medieval Congress edited by Piroska Nagy and Naama Cohen-Hanegbi, published by Brepols; “Hisba: an Ordering Principle for an Islamic Way of Life” in Kamal Salibi’s Memorial Volume edited by Suleiman Mourad, published by the AUB Press.

Her current project at the OIB titled "Music and Gender in Kitab al-Aghani: Reflections on Women’s Cultural Roles in Classical Islam" analyzes biographical narratives of slave and free women (and men) musicians and singers from Ali b. al-Husyan al-Isfahani’s “Kitab al-Aghani”. It focuses on how slavery and gender transformed the engagement of slave and free women with music in the formative period of Islamic history and how these changes were reflected in the narrative strategies of al-Isfahani’s discourse on women and music.

Wulf Frauen is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Vienna (Austria). He is currently conducting research for a project entitled "Vergangenheit als ‘Eternal Present’ – Eine lebensgeschichtliche Studie zu palästinensischen Flüchtlingen im Libanon". He studied Arabic and Cultural Anthropology (both as a major subject) at the Georg-August-University Göttingen (Germany) where he gained his M.A. degree in 2012. During his studies he spent an extended period of time at the Ankara University in Turkey (2011) as well as in Damascus (Syria) where he attended language courses as well as an internship at the Goethe Institute (2010). In addition, he participated in a field trip to Egypt (2007) and worked for the German Foreign Ministry (Auswärtiges Amt) as a trainee in 2008.

His PhD-project focuses on the Palestinian minority in Lebanon. The rupture of 1948 (“Nakba”) and the memory of the lost land Palestine are central to both the Palestinian society of today and Palestinian social history and collective identity. This is especially the case for the Palestinians in Lebanon where they and their descendants have never been naturalized (with a few exceptions), thus keeping a distinct status of "Palestinian refugee"s. The project investigates and analyses narratives and discursive patterns of different generations of male Palestinians directly in Beirut and its surroundings which later will be compared with each other. The research will be based on an extensive literature research as well as on qualitative methods such as participant observation and life history interviews which is why the project is called “Vergangenheit als ‘Eternal Present’? – Eine lebensgeschichtliche Studie zu palästinensischen Flüchtlingen im Libanon”.

Samar Kanafani is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK. She holds an MA in Anthropology from the American University of Beirut, where she has also done research and taught part-time. Since the early 2000s, her social research has also extends into a visual arts practice, including video and installation. She is currently writing her PhD dissertation under the working title, “Once upon a place: An ethnography of urban regeneration and the aesthetics of decaying space in Beirut.” This research is about the conditions of possibility that produce decaying and decrepit houses in Beirut, as well as the terms and experiences of dwelling therein. On the one hand, it explores what relationship tenants and landowners of such houses have to the structures of the neoliberal urban regime, which has prevailed in Beirut since the mid-90s. On the other hand, it looks at what particular forms of knowledge, affective ties and sensibilities emerge from dwelling in these decayed spaces.

She is a PhD candidate in Islamic Studies at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies (BGSMCS), Freie Universität Berlin. Her thesis focusses on charitable traditions in Saudi Arabia and asks how welfare associations approach the growing phenomenon of poverty and social inequality in the kingdom. Her field research includes several journeys to Jeddah and Riyadh in 2012 and 2013. From 2005-2011 she studied Islamic Studies and History at Freie Universität Berlin, the Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford, Pembroke College, and King Abd al-Aziz University in Jeddah. She graduated in 2011 with an M.A. (Magister Artium) in Islamic Studies and History.

Before joining the OIB in October 2015, Jonathan Kriener was a PhD fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, a visiting fellow at Marburg’s Center for Near and Middle East Studies and a research fellow at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research at the OIB and at Universität Bochum. Jonathan graduated with a PhD in Oriental Studies from Universität Bochum in 2010. He taught courses about the twentieth-century histories of Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinians as well as recent Arab educational thought and reform at Universität Bochum and Universität Tübingen. His publications compare history, civics and religious instruction at Lebanese, Palestinian and Israeli schools and in higher education in Egypt and Lebanon. His current project is about academic history writing in Lebanon and combines his interest in academically-produced expressions of collective memory with that for institutional practices in the social sciences and humanities.

Antonio De Martin is a PhD candidate in Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, Canterbury. His research investigates the sources of political parties' resilience in Lebanon by looking at political parties' transnational relations,

access to state power, intra-sectarian political competition and the provision of social services to the population.

Antonio holds an MSc in Middle East Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) and a Master's degree in Diplomacy and International Relations from the University of Bologna. His research interests encompass the study of political parties and social movements in the Middle East, the international relations and the multi-level identities that characterize it. Prior to starting his PhD, Antonio worked as a political analyst with various research centres, where his articles focused on political, social and international developments in the Middle East, and for several Middle East-based political and human rights research organizations.

A graduate in Philosophy (Paris-1 Sorbonne and Nanterre) and in Chinese language and civilization (INALCO, Paris), Laure Guirguis holds a PhD in Political Studies from the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris). 

In my first book, based on my PhD Dissertation and entitled "Les Coptes d'Égypte: Violences communautaires et transformations politiques 2005-2012", I combine political, anthropological and social historical approaches to analyze how social and individual practices reproduce a political order based on the multilayered subjugation of the Christian minority, drawing on the theories of (de)secularization to understand the contemporary politicization of religious leadership and to explain how the state became the main agent obstructing the process of secularization among the Coptic community. It includes a study on the attitudes of the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood towards Copts, as well as on the evolution of this organization.

Before joining the OIB, I have been pursuing my research for two years at the University of Montreal as a Banting postdoctoral Fellow. At that time, I wrote my second book, which was published by Laval University Presses in 2014 under the title "Égypte: révolution et contre-révolution". 

I now engage in a long-term research on Arab leftist trends in the 1960-1970 in a cross-regional perspective. Indeed, the study of leftwing radicalism from 1960-1970 requires a transnational approach, which allows us to decipher the dialectical processes of social, discursive, and symbolical practices whose interconnections are constitutive of structuring continuities. Focusing on Lebanon, Yemen, and Egypt, I do not engage in a comparative study; rather, I consider them as circulation nodes bundling and easing the diffusion and the transformation of activists’ practices, be they political, discursive or symbolical. I pay particular attention to the impact of Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, and Algerian revolutionary models and strategies on Arab left-wing syntax, tactics, and revolutionary thought. This project also brings into conversation gray literature, literary publications, and cinema, which have proved to be an important forum for political struggle and expression---even in support of the regime, as it was the case in the Nasserian state---thereby combining methodological tools which stem from different disciplinary fields. 

Michela De Giacometti is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) of Paris. After beginning her research in Lebanon on the emergent youth narratives of the Lebanese civil war and the shaping of social memories, she redirected her work to family-making in the region. For her thesis, which stands at the intersection of the anthropology of kinship and law, she explores the nexus between politics, religion and intimacy in light of the experiences of Lebanese couples who have contracted a civil marriage and the attempts of civil society organizations to reshape the personal status laws within the Lebanese multi-confessional system. She holds a Master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnolinguistics from the University of Venice, as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Conservation of Cultural Heritage, for which she worked on the politics of reconstruction and the role of cemeteries as contested spaces of memory in a post-disaster northern-Italy context.

Farah Cherif Zahar is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) of Paris and graduated from the Institut d'Études Politiques (Sciences Po Paris). She holds an "agrégation" in Philosophy, a "licence" in Arabic and three master degrees: in Philosophy from the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV); in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris; and in Islamic Studies from the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE- Paris). Since 2011 she works on her doctoral thesis entitled “The Eighth Book of Aristotle’s Physics and its commentaries: Simplicius and Ibn Bāǧǧa”. She taught at the University Paris-Sorbonne before being awarded a one year-fellowship from the Fondation Thiers (Centre de Pensée humaniste). In January 2016, she joined the OIB as a doctoral fellow where she will complete her dissertation on the Arabic reception of the eighth Book of Aristotle’s Physics.

Charlotte Bank is an art historian and independent curator, living and working between Berlin and Geneva. She is currently preparing her PhD thesis titled “The emerging contemporary art scene in Syria: Between the tradition of social critique and a contemporary artistic movement in the Arab World” at the University of Geneva. From February 2013 – February 2016 she was a member of the Swiss National Fund research project “Other Modernities: Patrimony and Practices of Visual Expression Outside the West”.

Her PhD project explores the contemporary art scene in Syria during the decade 2000–2010 in its social and political contexts. Based on material collected from interviews with artists, gallerists and other cultural producers during extended research periods in Syria in 2007 – 2010, the project seeks to analyse the working situations of young visual artists in Syria up to the year 2010, how they sought to negotiate a space for individual artistic projects and the articulation of social and political critique in the context of fluctuating rules of censorship, the difficult and largely lacking exhibition opportunities inside Syria and the fast developing art scene of the Middle East, and how they inscribe themselves into the tradition of critical and socially committed as practiced in Syria since the early generations of painters.

Adrien Zakar is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Columbia University in the City of New York. His doctoral project examines the Great Syrian Revolt with a focus on science, technology, and visuality. It investigates how political and cultural imaginations of the late Ottoman era shaped discourses on science, data collection, and visual practice among both local and foreign actors in the post-Ottoman Levant. Last year, he published "The End of Ottoman Positivism: The Gökalp-al-Husari Debate of 1916" in IJMES 47(3). Adrien holds a License in International Relation from the Graduate Institute of International Studies and a M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University.

He earned his PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Modena and Milan – Bicocca in 2006, with a thesis on the Jordanian university system and its students, studied ethnographically between 2003 and 2005. Later on he went to Cairo, Egypt, where for three years (2007-10) was associated researcher at the CEDEJ, working on different projects dealing with university education and its privatization, worries of citizenship, youth, religious minorities, and migration. In 2010, he was a researcher in the Social Science Research Council project on “Arab Universities: Autonomy and Governance”. Since 2011 he is senior research fellow at the Research Cluster “Society and Culture in Motion” at the MLU Halle-Wittenberg. Between 2013 and 2016 he was the principal investigator in a BMBF sponsored project, managed through the Orient-Institut Beirut, on doctoral studies at Egyptian universities.

He teaches at the University of Modena since 2008 and at the MLU Halle since 2012 different courses on the Anthropology of the Middle East, on Social and Political Anthropology, and on Ethnology of the Mediterranean. He is the author of Youth and Education in the Middle East: Shaping Identity and Politics in Jordan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016). He co-edited a special issue on Subjectivity and Islam: Anthropological Perspectives (La Ricerca Folklorica, 2014), and is the editor of a volume on ethnographies of private universities (to be published by Brill in 2016). His articles appeared in Anthropology of the Middle East, REMMM, CRES, Confluences Méditerranée, other than in different edited volumes.

He is currently working at the publication of the results of his latest research project, on knowledge production at the doctoral level at Egyptian public universities.

Mr. Mzaaber is a Computer Science graduate with a solid experience in software development, he's taking care of the OIB end-users related inquiries, website administration and the "Digital Humanities" subject at the institute.

Andrea Jud managed the Cairo Office of the OIB from October 2016 to June 2020. She is a PhD candidate in Media and Communication Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and holds an MA in Political Science and Islamic Studies from Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. In her PhD project she asks about the public construction of collective identities at the intersection of old and new media.

https://www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/en/kommwiss/arbeitsstellen/internationale_kommunikation/Doktoranden/Andrea-Jud/index.html

Dr. Marieke Krijnen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Orient Institut. She holds a PhD from Ghent University, Belgium and an MA from the American University of Beirut. Her dissertation, titled “The Urban Transformation of Beirut: An Investigation into the Movement of Capital”, connected detailed studies of processes of urban change to Lebanon’s political economy of public debt, the circulation of capital through the country’s massive diaspora, and the 2008 financial crisis in Europe and the Gulf, linking gentrification theory to economic and financial geography.

Her project at the OIB will focus on the increasing connections between real estate and finance in Lebanon and develop a research agenda on the financialization of real estate in the Middle East more generally, with a special focus on the Levant-region and the Gulf. Her publications can be found on orient-institut.academia.edu/MariekeKrijnen

Fouad is a Research Associate at the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. His research interests include Islamic pieties, sectarianism, Shii politics, jihadism, insurgency and rebel governance. His research focuses on Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, with a particular interest in post/ conflict issues and translocal entanglements.

Fouad previously worked at the University of Erfurt and the Free University of Berlin in Germany and the Orient Institute in Beirut, Lebanon. He has consulted governments and think tanks on regional politics and authored numerous policy papers on the Syrian war, insurgency and the rebel governance, justice and police sectors, and violent extremism (P/CVE). He was also involved in developing and implementing conflict stabilisation and transformation programmes.

Fouad holds a PhD from Durham University, United Kingdom.

Her doctoral thesis was entitled: “From a ‘Philosophy of the Limit’ to a ‘Poetics of the Horizon’: A Comparative Critical Approach to Language, Subjectivity and Alterity in Poststructuralist Thought and Arabic Critical Discourse.” She also holds a master’s degree from SOAS in Arabic Literature (with distinction) and a BA in Government (summa cum laude) from Smith College.

Prior to joining the Orient-Institut, Dr. Epstein was a Fulbright Research Fellow at the Center for Maghribi Studies in Tunis (CEMAT), and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the American University in Beirut’s Center for Arts and Humanities (CAH). During her Mellon fellowship, she designed and taught interdisciplinary courses in philosophy, Islamic studies, and literature at the American University in Beirut (AUB). She is currently affiliated with AUB’s Philosophy Department as a visiting faculty member.

Dr. Epstein’s current research at the Orient-Institut, which entails the transformation of her doctoral thesis into revised book form, is provisionally entitled: “Voyage Toward an Impossible Exteriority: Crossings of European Philosophy and Arabic Poetic Theory.” Engaging trends in continental philosophy and Arabic theory, as well as their intersections, this project considers the work of moving between the “inside” and “outside” of “philosophy,” while interrogating eurocentric conceptions of those limits. It thus opens a critical conversation in which a new ethical/political opening toward the other is at stake. The goal is to begin articulating a new type of critical intervention that could arise from between critical tropologies of thought, through their mutual (linguistic/historical) displacements.

Her doctoral research focuses on the evolution of the Syrian intellectual field since 2011. She is now doing her field research at the Orient Institut Beirut.

A graduate in European Affairs from Sciences Po Paris, and in International Relations form Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Adélie was a Jenkins Memorial Scholar at Oxford University where she achieved an MPhil thesis on the political activism of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Jacques Rancière, she explored how a politically qualified subject is articulated in light of experiences of exile, throughout a study of the discourse of Syrian refugee communities in Lebanon between 2011 and 2014. Part of her research findings have been published in French (Berthelot, 2014). Her research also led her to discuss the principle of distinction between civilians and combatants in international humanitarian law (Saint Antony’s International Review, 2015). Her interests include international relations theories, politics of the Middle East, poststructuralism, sociology, and refugees and forced migrations studies.

She specializes in modern art and visual culture of the Middle East, along with artistic practices in the history of the Islamic world. Her research project examines the modern dynamics of Islamic artistic heritage in the Arab world and Iran. In 2011 she co-curated an exhibition of posters from the 1979 Iranian Revolution and Iran-Iraq War at the University of Chicago. Following the 2009 presidential protests in Iran she completed her master’s thesis at Indiana University on the arts of the uprising, later published in an article, “Thirty Years Later: Iranian Visual Culture from the 1979 Revolution to the 2009 Green Movement.” Her forthcoming article on the 2011 Pearl Roundabout protests in Bahrain will explore the transformative effects of iconoclasm in spurring new creative forms of popular dissent.

He holds an M.A. in Arabic Studies from Bamberg University and a B.A. in Islamic Studies. Recently he published “L’alternance codique dans le rap algérien et tunisien” in L'Année du Maghreb 14|2016. His doctoral project investigates rap music and hip hop culture in Lebanon and Algeria. By focusing on language choice, processes of cultural “glocalization” and (supra-regional) networks, it discusses the existence of an "Arabic Hip Hop Nation".

Her doctoral project examines how contemporary popular music in the MENA is produced today by focusing on the production of commercial pop music ("Arab Pop"). Ethnographic in approach, the project builds on fieldwork conducted in different production centers of the transnational Arab music industry, such as Beirut, Cairo, and Dubai. By considering questions of place, cultural identity, and cultural industries, the project examines the politics of music making in the region with an emphasis on the ways space, locality, and cultural production intersect. Ines has a background in the field of community media and holds a M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Leipzig University.

Her dissertation examines Islamic imperial ideology-formation through a case study of al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf al-Thaqafi (d.714), the formidable Umayyad governor of Iraq. While in the study of the early Islamic empire the focus has been on Islamic conquests, she focuses on the ‘soft power’ at play and looks at the role of culture and language in the construction of imperial power. She coordinates a literary approach to later Muslim historical with the study of contemporary material culture and non-Muslim texts. Her research falls into the field of early Islamic history; yet she is approaching it from a broader perspective than usual, hoping to improve on the (to-date) tentative attempts at bringing early Islam out of isolation onto the world stage of late antiquity. Pamela holds a Master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Leiden University in the Netherlands and a Magister degree in Arabic and Dutch philology from Charles University in Prague.

Peter Blank is a PhD candidate at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany, where he works as a research assistant and lecturer at the Department of Oriental Studies. He holds an MA in Political Science and Islamic Studies from Friedrich-Schiller-Universität and he has also studied at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Rennes, France. Peter re-joined the OIB for the second part of his fellowship, after completing fieldwork while based at the OIB in 2016/2017.  He was a visiting researcher at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut in 2018 and the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, Sweden, in 2016. He has worked with several political and academic organisations in Germany, Egypt and Lebanon. His research interests include war-to-peace transitions, political parties and power-sharing in divided societies, rebel governance and social change in civil wars.

She received her PhD in Arabic Studies in 2011 from the University of Leipzig. "At the doors of paradise: discourses of female self-sacrifice, martyrdom and resistance in Palestine" (Ergon Verlag).

She graduated from the University of Bayreuth and the School of Oriental and African Studies (London). She taught at the Universities of Leipzig, Cologne and Goettingen as assistant professor. She has also worked as Middle East Expert for the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation in Bonn. She carried out extensive field research throughout the Middle East.

www.uni-goettingen.de/en/dr-phil-liza-maria-franke/550683.html

Marie Karner is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Geography at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany). Within her dissertation, she studies the cohesion and internal dynamics of diasporic communities. These communities distinguish themselves through communicative, emotional, economic and symbolic ties among their globally dispersed members. They have gained strength under the influence of new media, the rapid development of transportation technology and the pressure of neoliberal transition. Maronite Lebanese communities who identify with villages in the Wādī Qādīšā serve as case studies for the project. Within the concept of a multi-sited-methodological approach, descendants from Hadath el Jobbeh, Diman, Bcharre, Hadchit, Blouza, Kfarsghab, Ehden, Aitou and Miziara were qualitatively interviewed in Lebanon, Sydney (Australia), Halifax (Canada), Easton (USA) and Dubai (UAE). Based on praxeological concepts she examines the stabilizing elements of diasporic communities like daily routines, maintained traditions, organizations and their shared knowledge. Marie holds a diploma in Geography accomplished with a thesis on the “Transformation of the historic center of Byblos/Jbeil (Lebanon)”.

Adey Almohsen is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota. Although specialising on the history of the modern Middle East and Mediterranean, his broad interests include Marxism - its history and thought, global and intellectual histories of the sixties, critical theory, poststructuralism and postcolonialism, theories of nation and culture, among others.

Focusing on Palestinians and the fraught development of their identity, Almohsen chronicles Palestinian history through its cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic expressions in Amman and Beirut over the years 1967-75. He registers the unremarkable manifestations of Palestinian identity in everyday life and observes the products of independent Palestinian thinkers and artists in order to furnish a "counterpoint" to hegemonic national discourses and reifying historical narrations. Conclusively, the research agenda will reveal the diversity and creativity of a people whose conflict and its historicisation – by supporters as well as detractors – have contributed to their provincialising.

His research interests cover the Middle East's intellectual and cultural histories, Modern Muslim discourses on bioethics, and digital humanities. His PhD dissertation examines Mamluk-Mongol diplomacy during their long warfare starting from the mid-thirteenth century. Previous works on the subject regarded the correspondence between the Mamluk and Mongols courts as vehicles for expressing kingship ideologies. Alternatively, with focusing on the Mamluk side, this dissertation will examine these letters beyond their direct functions as means of communication between two courts, and link them along with the “forged correspondences” (or the various versions of the correspondences which frequently appeared in the narrative sources) to more internal issues of Mamluk literary production, social organization, and performance of identities.

His dissertation aims to understand law enforcement responses to a variety of security challenges, particularly protests, in the context of international security cooperation, moves towards security sector reform and police modernization, and a globalized market of security technologies. The thesis takes into account historical continuities and discontinuities of crowd policing. Particularly, the project focuses on the role of security technologies and their impact on security strategies. Tim’s thesis features a multi-method, multi-site approach, that integrates historical, transnational and local perspectives. Based on insights from Science and Technology studies and other, ‚new materialist‘ literature in security and international relations, Tim’s work seeks to go beyond traditional state-centrist accounts of security.

Fatima Shaheen joined the library team in June 2017. As librarian she is responsible for cataloguing and user services.

Fatima Shaheen joined the library team as assistant librarian for cataloguing and user services in June 2017. She studied Library and Information Science at Lebanese University and has an MA in Information Management from Lebanese University. She is a member of the Lebanese Library Association since 2009.

He studied History and Political Science at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and is currently preparing his master in Global Diplomacy at SOAS, University of London. He is a PhD student in History at the University of Aberdeen researching the role of the Spanish embassy in Beirut in the shaping of Spanish Foreign Policy during the Lebanese civil war.

Borja’s stay at the OIB is intended to pursue preliminary field work in preparation of the study to be started at the University of Aberdeen and on diplomatic relations between Spain and the Arab states after the Second World War.

www.uni-goettingen.de/en/550653.html

She studied Social and Cultural Anthropology, Sociology and Economics at the University of Bayreuth and at the University of Goettingen. Her doctoral thesis examines the interrelationship between contemporary forms of Muslim religiosity and the construction of gender - especially the constructions of masculinities - among Sunni Lebanese in Beirut.

www.uni-goettingen.de/en/551130.html

Birgit Schäbler was the director of the Orient-Institut Beirut between October 2017 and September 2022. She holds the (only) Chair of History of West Asia (Near and Middle East) in Germany, at the University of Erfurt, from which she is on leave. After studying History of the Middle East, Islamic Studies and Political Science at the universities Würzburg, Erlangen and Berkeley, USA, she held positions and fellowships at Erlangen University, Duke University, Harvard University and Georgia’s Public Liberal Arts University. She founded the first German transregional research platform in 2008 at the University of Erfurt.

Her research interests have been combining history of the Middle East, Islamic Studies, Anthropology and Politics, focusing on the modern history of the Levant (Bilād al-Shām) from the 19th and 20th centuries to the present. Her recent book analyzes and documents 19th century reform movements in Islam in their entanglement with Europe. She has also published on questions of the history of the Middle East as an Area History and its relations to Global History, as well as the history of Orientalism and Oriental Studies in Germany and beyond.
 
Her books and edited and co-edited volumes include: Moderne Muslime. Ernest Renan und die Geschichte der ersten “Islamdebatte” 1883 (English translation forthcoming); Globalization and the Muslim World: Culture, Religion, and Modernity; Area Studies und die Welt: Weltregionen und neue Globalgeschichte; The Syrian Land: Processes of Integration and Fragmentation in Bilad al-Sham from the 18th to the 20th century; Aufstände im Drusenbergland: Ethnizität und Integration einer ländlichen Gesellschaft Syriens vom Osmanischen Reich bis zur staatlichen Unabhängigkeit, 1850-1949 (also in Arabic).

Mathieu Eychenne holds a PhD in History from the Aix-Marseille University, France (2007). He previously worked as a research associate at the French Institute of the Near East (Ifpo) in Damascus (2008 – 2011) and Beirut (2011-13). He taught the history of the Medieval Middle East and North Africa at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (2014/15) and was awarded a Junior Fellowship at the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg at the University of Bonn in Germany in 2016/17. Since 2018 he is assistant professor (maître de conférences) at Paris Diderot University.
 
His research interests include the social and economic history of medieval and early modern Bilād al-Shām, with a focus on Damascus and its province. His current research project at the OIB encompasses the interactions of Damascus with its rural hinterland, focusing on land property and pious endowments (waqf), rural economy (agricultural production and prices) and environmental issues (climate).
 

Muzna al-Masri is an independent consultant and researcher in the fields of conflict analysis and conflict sensitive aid. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MA in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding from the Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, Virginia. During her time as a postdoctoral fellow and based on her PhD thesis, she worked on a book manuscript that ethnographically explores the relationships between political elites and their constituencies, looking specifically at the emergence and production of the model of an “entrepreneurial elite” in post-war Lebanon. Before joining the OIB, she was a postdoctoral fellow with the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and affiliated with the Centre for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB), and she has taught at AUB and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research interests include political anthropology, elite politics and formation, everyday political practice, conflict and violence, the anthropology of aid and development, research methods and the anthropology of sports.

Stefan Maneval holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from Freie Universität Berlin. His PhD thesis on public and private spaces in the Saudi city of Jeddah in the twentieth century won the 2016 dissertation prize of the German Association of Middle Eastern Studies (DAVO). It will be published in book form by UCL Press in 2019. From October 2017 to March 2018 Stefan was a postdoctoral fellow at the OIB. He is currently based in Halle (Saale), working on his research project entitled “Negotiating Differences,” for which he received a grant from the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). His publications include articles on contemporary Saudi society and politics, cultural heritage and the art scene in Saudi Arabia, social theory and material culture as well as a co-edited book on the diversity of Muslim everyday life (Muslim Matter, Berlin 2016).

Michele Scala is a PhD candidate at Aix-Marseille Université and an independent consultant specialising in “labour migration.” During his fellowship at the OIB, he organised the “At the margins of wage labour?” seminar series revolving around the labour conditions of Lebanese and migrant workers excluded from any form of legal and social protection. In his thesis, he analyses contemporary forms of labour relations, focusing on the role of patron-client ties in labour contexts in which there is little, or no, labour protection.

His latest publication is “De l’injustice à l’action? La mobilisation des travailleurs de Spinneys au Liban”, in A. Allal et al., Quand l’industrie proteste. Fondement moraux des insoumissions ouvrières, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018. Together with Amin Allal (CNRS) and Élisabeth Longuenesse (CNRS), he currently coordinates a special issue on “Situations de travail et mobilisations ouvrières en Méditerranée” for the Confluences Méditerranée review to be published in 2019.
 

Hana Sleiman is an archivist and a PhD student in History at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research is concerned with the intellectual history of the modern Middle East, focusing on two generations of scholars and educational reformers in Beirut and Damascus, and the contest over higher education curricular reform in the early twentieth century. After receiving her MA in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University in 2013, she worked as a Special Collections Librarian at the Archives of the American University of Beirut, where she co-led the Palestinian Oral History Archive.

Her archival work focuses on devising open tools and methodologies for ephemera and oral history archives. She is currently collaborating on building the open source MASRAD:platform for Oral History. In the past, she has consulted with the Archive of the Missing and Disappeared in Lebanon, the Syrian Oral History Archive and the Institute for Palestine Studies Library. In 2016 she co-curated Sea of Stories: Voyages of the Palestinian Archives, exhibited in Qalandiya International.
 

Mina Ibrahim is a third-year PhD student at Justus-Liebig Universität and The International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in Gießen, Germany. His doctoral dissertation, “Parables of Khidma: The Everydayness of Christians in Egypt,” ethnographically complicates the difficulties and the possibilities of living as a “good” Christian in Egypt. He researches academic and non-academic works about the lives of the Copts seeking “negated” and “rejected” spaces and contexts, attempting to question the absence of, and to find a place for, the “atheist” and “sinful” among the many other similar figures whose “weak/absent” faith excludes them from claiming a position within the largest Christian minority in the Middle East. In addition to working on his project, Mina contributes to the Eshhad online database that analyses the everydayness of sectarianism in Egypt and beyond (www.eshhad.org). Moreover, he has recently begun to contribute to the MENA Prison Forum project (www.menaprisonforum.org/) that is moderated by the non-profit organisation Umam Documentation and Research in Beirut, in cooperation with The Arab Fund for Arts & Culture (AFAC) and the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa).

Affiliated Researcher, since January 2018

Harald Viersen is a doctoral candidate in Arabic at the Philipps University of Marburg. After a brief stint at the North-Netherlands Conservatory he went on to study philosophy and law at the University of Amsterdam, as well as receiving an Mphil in philosophy from the University of Cambridge. In 2014, he lived in Cairo where he continued his studies in Arabic, which he had dabbled in while studying in Amsterdam. During this period, he developed an interest in contemporary Arab thought, which led him to pursue his current doctoral project at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies in Marburg. For this project he was awarded a 3-year scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes in 2016.

The project in question assesses contemporary Arab thought, focusing on the central and ongoing discussion of authenticity, or aṣāla. Its central thesis is that a study of Arab discussions of authenticity should start from the recognition that authenticity as a political and moral ideal is inherent to the ideological, political, and social development of late modernity. By showing the main current in Arab thought to be an instantiation of this global discourse on authenticity and by describing its rich genealogy and the many ways in which conceptions of authenticity have been developed in the last 250-odd years, the aim is (1) to provide a new perspective on Arab thought that breaks with the dominant nativist understanding of authenticity discourse in the Arab world and opens up new ways of reading and differentiating between the works of Arab intellectuals; (2) to broaden the scope of the study of authenticity, which has remained focused on the European context; and (3) to provide common ground for philosophical discussions and exchange between cultures by showing their traditions of thought to be closely intertwined and faced with similar sets of problems.

Joan Chaker is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Harvard University. She received a BA in Economics and an MA in History from the American University of Beirut as well as an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics. Her previous research focused on the Ottoman tobacco market. She is currently working on a study of the social transformation of the countryside as it joined the global market over the long nineteenth century, told as a collective biography of the mule drivers of Ottoman Lebanon. More generally her research interests range over Ottoman history, global history, the history of capitalism and the constitutional law of money. In a previous incarnation, she worked as a money-markets trader in Amsterdam and London.

Sarah C. Johnson is an art historian and a PhD candidate at Freie Universität Berlin, where she is completing a dissertation on the Iraqi modern artist Hafidh Druby (1914 – 1991). Previously she was a curator of Islamic Collections at the British Museum in London. She completed her MA in Islamic Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford in 2014, and her undergraduate degree in Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in 2010.

Post-conflict in Literature, Art, and Emergent Archives. She discusses the role of investigative aesthetics in situations of (post-)conflict and transition and examines the mnemonic/archival potential and counter-semantics of literature and art as dissonant narratives for addressing critical historiographies, accountability, responsibility, and truth. The research project “Literature and Art in Court: Investigative Aesthetics and Dissonant Narratives in the Global South” reassesses the relationship between investigative aesthetics, their forums and the court that has shaped the historical narratives about violent pasts, while it critically inquires into transitional justice, which rests on the premise that it is necessary to attend to the past in order to progress into a future, in which the past has been understood, documented and judged. It gives space to the collective dimension of truth telling and truth constructions, material witnessing and with them to the critical function of archives to guarantee the right to memory and the access to judicial records. At the OIB she follows these questions with regard to Lebanon.

dissonantnarratives.ch

www.rose.uzh.ch/de/seminar/personen/g%C3%B3mez-popescu.html

Her PhD Project „Absent Images. Filmic, Curatorial and Institutional Engagement with the Unavailability of Audiovisual Heritage in the Middle East“ deals with the unavailability of audiovisual heritage in Palestine and Lebanon (lost, scattered, destroyed, unrealized films), and investigates filmic, curatorial and institutional strategies which intervene in this absence.

She studied Theatre, Film and Media Studies and Philosophy at the University of Vienna, and graduated in 2015 with a thesis on the transformations of Masao Adachi’s militant cinema-aesthetics being reflected by Eric Baudelaire’s essayistic documentary film THE ANABASIS... (F 2011). In 2013-2017 she was working at Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society, Vienna and at the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna. Besides, she is active as a film curator and co-founder of the curating collective Diskollektiv.

dissonantnarratives.ch/iris-fraueneder/

www.khist.uzh.ch/de/kol/gomez/Team/fraueneder.html

Her experience as a researcher in Beirut started in 2010-2011, when she was conducting her MA thesis fieldwork on the demarcation lines during and after the Lebanese Civil War. She participated to a research fieldwork in Lebanon in 2012, focusing on the War of the Hotels in Beirut, and again in 2016, in the region of Aley.

She is currently working on the Shi‘i religious rituals in Lebanon and the related geopolitical implications. Her study focuses on the structure of the ʿĀshūrā’ rites in three central neighbourhoods of Beirut (Bashura, Musaytbe, and Zoqaq al-Blat), and investigates how the everyday ritual practices are connected with specific urban atmospheres and emotional geopolitics.

Simona Loi is a member of the Italian Geographical Society: societageografica.net/wp/en/

Olga Nefedova is an art historian and former director of the Orientalist Museum in Doha, Qatar. She has worked for many years with private and government collections and museums in the Far East, South Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf countries. Her projects include the following international exhibitions and publications: “The Art and Life of Jean-Baptiste Vanmour (1671 – 1737),” “A Journey into the World of the Ottomans” (2010), “Bartholomäus Schachman (1559 – 1614): The Art of Travel” (2012) and “Heritage of Art Diplomacy: Memoirs of an Ambassador” (2013). Olga is one of the organisers of the “Orientality” series of international biannual conferences (launched at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, 2013). Presently she is an Associate Professor at the National Research University HSE, Moscow.

Her current research project “Art and Artists Crossing Borders: The Early History of Art Education for Arab Students in the Soviet Union between 1959 and 1979” focuses on the early history of art education of students from Arab countries in the USSR. Parts of this research have been presented at international conferences and public seminars such as The Arts in Society (American University, Paris, 2017); World Congress of Middle Eastern Studies (University of Seville, 2018); and Cultural Diplomacy of Socialism in the 20th Century: Institutions, Actors, Discourses (Deutsches Historisches Institut, Moscow, 2019).

Joseph Ben Prestel is a research associate and lecturer in Modern History at Freie Universität Berlin. During the 2018/19 academic year, he is a Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University. He received his PhD in Modern History from Freie Universität Berlin in 2015. Prestel is the author of Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860 – 1910 (OUP, 2017). From October 2017 to March 2018, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the OIB, where he worked on his current project Revolutionary Arabesque: Palestinian Groups and the West German Radical Left, 1956 – 1982.

Amin Alsaden is an independent scholar who focuses on the global exchanges of ideas and expertise across cultural boundaries. He is currently researching a pivotal juncture in post-World War II Baghdad, when the city became a locus of unprecedented encounters, contributing to the profound transformation of art and architecture globally while generating unique local movements. Alsaden holds a PhD and MA from Harvard University, a MArch from Princeton University, and a BArch from the American University of Sharjah. He defended his PhD while being a Visiting Doctoral Fellow at the OIB.

In his research, he studies global security and peace discourses and their manifestations in local practices of intervention and state-building, as well as politics of security in Europe and Eastern Mediterranean. He has studied at the Masaryk University (2006 – 2012), University of Bologna (2009) and Bourguiba Institute of Modern Languages (2012). During his PhD studies he conducted research visits to the Free University of Berlin (2014) and American University of Beirut (2014 – 2015). He has published on theory of contemporary critical security studies, political sociology of peacekeeping and security governance and Islamist political movements.

Research project:

Hybrid Revolutionary Actors in World Politics: ISIS and international order

The notion that ISIS should be conceptualized as a hybrid actor that defies clear-cut categories of terrorist/ insurgent group has been promoted by a number of different authors. This project builds on such understanding but pushes the scholarly investigations of the group and its impact on the international politics and security in several novel directions. First, it seeks to examine the imaginations underpinning the project of the self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate. It will thus offer a comprehensive investigation of the political and ontological vision of the world order and political sovereignty envisioned by the group. Second, the project relates these visions to other movements which share some features of the political and spatio-temporal registers with ISIS. The point is thus not to provide a historical overview of ISIS origins but rather to locate it within movements discontent with the current political and international order and its conceptualization and practice of sovereignty and international hierarchy. Third, while the project focuses on ISIS, it also attends to the responses of the international community. The project aims to account for how has been the political-ontological challenge of ISIS as a radical resistance to the present international order and its different political imagination received and fought on the international scene. It therefore seeks to map the effects, which the perceived challenges posed by such novel revisionist actor, have had on the international politics.

In 2003 she obtained MA degree from history with the thesis entitled “ Samanids”. She addressed in her thesis political history of Samanids. In 2009, she got her PhD degree in history from Ankara University with the thesis on Mosul and its surrounding during Zangids. In her research, she identified the names of villages and towns of Mosul which are metioned in the geographic works, travelogues and political history books and studied the economic situation and social life in the Mosul region at that time. She has joined Arabic Language class in Mahad al-Ajanib in Damascus ( 2005-2006 ), Amman ( 3 months in 2012 ) and Cairo (3 months in 2018). Also she did a research about waqfs during Bahri Mamluks in al-Jamiyya al-Mısrıyya li’d-dirasât at-Tarihiyya in Cairo.

Research project:

The analysis of the waqfiya belonging to Mamluk Soltan Shahban's mother.

The waqfiyya documants consisted of 50 pages ( waraq ). Each pages comprises of fifteen lines on average. It was written with the nasih style. A few pages of it have been damaged. This project builds on its rewriting with Arabic printed letters, translation to Turkish language and its analysis. While it is being analyzed, the understanding of foundation in İslam will be addressed briefly. Secondly, the foundations of other female members of Mamluk state will be mentioned in general terms. Thirdly, the information about the other waqfs of the sultan’s mother will be given.

Foroogh Farhang is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Northwestern University. She received her MA in Gender Studies from Central European University Budapest in 2014. Her Master’s thesis focused on the visual representations of Shi’a saintly martyrs and the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war in mural paintings in Tehran in post-revolutionary Iran. In her current dissertation project, she explores the political, economic and ethical dimensions of the quest of Syrians for a proper burial in Lebanon in the years following the 2011 mass migration of Syrians to that country. She looks at the ways in which the scarcity of burial spaces in Lebanon, in conjunction with increasing restrictions on crossing the Lebanon-Syria border, has mobilised legal and illegal networks of Syrians’ travelling dead within the borders of Lebanon and en route from Lebanon to Syria.

Sean Lee is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. His dissertation focuses on sectarian and ethnic minority communities in the Levant during times of civil war. Through interviews, focus groups and archival sources, he traces the decision-making processes of Armenian and Druze communities during the Lebanese civil war (1975 – 1990) and Kurdish and Druze communities in the current conflict in Syria (2011 to the present). He received MA degrees from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and from the Université de la Sorbonne-Nouvelle. He has carried out field research in Lebanon, Turkey, Tunisia, Germany and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Sam Dinger is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at New York University. He received his MA in Sociology from NYU in 2017 and spent the 2017/2018 academic year as a Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) Fellow at the American University in Cairo (AUC). His MA research focused on international and local NGOs in Lebanon and their divergent ways of reasoning about the materialities and temporalities of crisis. He is currently working on an ethnographic study of the municipality of Taalabaya in the central Beqaa valley where he is examining the practices and ethics of brokerage and exchange between Syrian and Lebanese residents with a particular focus on young Syrian men.

Chafika Ouail is a revisionist philosopher and a scholar in Islamic spirituality and theology; she is also a poet. She holds a PhD in Arabic Language and Literature from the American University in Beirut. Her work is concerned with revisiting the concepts and narrative of the Arabic and Islamic tradition by employing a multidisciplinary approach. During a postdoctoral fellowship at the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, she studied the crowd in the Islamic tradition. At the OIB she studies the concept of neighbourliness as a spiritual paradigm. To this end, she tracks from a philosophical perspective the shift of this concept from the pre-Islamic era to the Sufi vision.

Chafika served as assistant editor of Al-Abḥāth and has been chosen to lead the editorial board of the forthcoming issue of Maghārib. She has published on a wide range of topics, including the making of the historical Sufi dictionary; the dilemma of Sufism between translating the experience and translating the language; an onto-semantic reading as a new approach to interpret the Sufi texts; ethics in the Qur’an between philosophy and spirituality; and the making of the crowd (jumhūr) in the Islamic tradition.
 

Ahmad Sukkar joined the OIB after a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the American University of Beirut. He is a former visiting lecturer at the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge and a former research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. He completed his PhD with a thesis in architecture and a Master’s degree in Humanities and Cultural Studies at the London Consortium (University of London in collaboration with the Architectural Association). He received an MA in Architecture and Urbanism from the Architectural Association. Ahmad holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Architectural Design and a BA in Architecture from the University of Damascus. He has worked at leading architectural offices in the UK and the Middle East, including Zaha Hadid Architects. His work which has received several international awards and prizes examines the interaction between architecture and culture in connection with design, heritage and identity in the Middle East, with a focus on urban conflict, reconstruction and development in Syria.

Fuad Musallam is a political anthropologist who specialises in the study of activism, labour and subjectivity, particularly as they relate to the making of community and the political imagination. For his PhD at the London School of Economics (completed in 2017), he conducted fieldwork in Lebanon between 2013 and 2014. In particular, he investigated what drove young people to struggle for change and how, in the face of failure to effect it, activists have come to reorient themselves, understanding the possibility of worthwhile action in the future.

His current project tracks community building among migrant workers in Lebanon, particularly through their voluntary associations. During his time at the OIB, he has begun new fieldwork with migrant workers in Beirut to explore possible forms of participatory research practice.
 

Before joining the OIB, Mohammad Magout was a senior researcher at The Multiple Secularities—Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies at Universität Leipzig, Germany. He completed his doctoral studies at the same university in 2016 with a dissertation entitled “Between Religion and Culture: Academic Discourse and Religious Subjectivity at Two Nizari Ismaili Institutions for Islamic Studies in London,” for which he was awarded the Katharina Windscheid Prize of the Research Academy Leipzig (2017). Mohammad holds an MA in Muslim Cultures (2010) from the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, Aga Khan University, London, where he wrote his thesis about heavy metal music in Syria, and a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Damascus (2006). His most recent publication entitled “Transnationalising Multiple Secularities: A Comparative Study of the Global Ismaili Community” will appear in Historical Social Research, Special Issue on “Muslim Secularities” (2019).

Fatih Ermiş joined the OIB in 2018. He received a doctorate from the University of Erfurt with a thesis entitled “Ottoman Economic Thinking before the 19th Century.” He holds an MA in economic history from Marmara University and a BA in economics from Boğaziçi University, both in Istanbul. Before joining the OIB, he worked as a research assistant for the Chair of History of West Asia at the University of Erfurt and, most recently, as a post-doctoral associate at the Centre for Islamic Theology, University of Tübingen. His main research interest is pre-modern Islamic intellectual history, with a particular focus on intellectual endeavours in Ottoman lands. His work is also concerned with economic, social, religious and literary writing as well as with Sufi thought. His research at the OIB focuses on a famous book of ethics, Aḫlāḳ-ı ‘Alāʾī, written in Damascus by the Ottoman scholar Ḳınālīzāde ʿAlī Çelebī (1510 – 1572).

Molly Theodora Oringer is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at UCLA. Her dissertation addresses the legacy of Lebanon’s Jewish community and its spaces after the Lebanese Civil War (1975 – 90) and the mobilisation of concepts of Lebanese conviviality, everyday interactions with “otherness” and the development of a collective Lebanese national narrative as these concepts are embodied in the context of post-civil war spaces. In particular, she strives to understand better how so-called minority spaces—in this case, former Jewish spaces such as synagogues, neighbourhoods and cemeteries—are rehabilitated, ignored or repurposed and also how the relation between these arenas and concepts of belonging are understood by the Lebanese public. She draws on theoretical approaches from anthropology, history and spatial analyses address the relationship between minority communities, national narratives, place and citizenship. Most urgently, this involves considering how the ostensibly multifaceted, multi-sectarian nature of Lebanon, once considered the impetus for the so-called Balkanisation of the region, is utilised in its revival for the purposes of strategic marketing and, in turn, how such narratives are incorporated into the built environment, resulting in spaces in which the Lebanese public grapples with concepts of national belonging and intercommunal relations.

Christopher D. Bahl is an assistant professor at Durham University, UK. He was a research associate at the OIB from 2018 to 2020 after completing his PhD in History at SOAS University of London. His doctoral thesis Histories of Circulation—Sharing Arabic Manuscripts across the Western Indian Ocean, 1400 – 1700 studied the transregional circulation of Arabic manuscripts to argue that mobile scholars as well as shared cultural practices and corpora of Islamicate texts led to the cultural integration of the Western Indian Ocean in the early modern period. Christopher received an MA in Historical Research Methods from SOAS in 2014 after completing an MA in Islamic Studies and South Asian History at the University of Heidelberg in 2013. In 2010/11 he studied Arabic at the University of Damascus and Urdu at the Central University, Hyderabad, India. He is interested in the social and cultural histories of the wider Indian Ocean region in the early modern period, manuscript cultures and their circulation, and scholarly cultures and practices of history writing. His new postdoctoral project focuses on mobile protagonists in the Indian Ocean region in the early modern period and their practices of knowledge formation and community building in the context of shrine cities.

Visiting doctoral fellow, January - February 2019

Owain Lawson is a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University, focusing on the twentieth-century Middle East. He holds an MA and MPhil from Columbia, an MA from the American University in Cairo, and a BA from Concordia University (Montréal). He is senior editor of Arab Studies Journal and website editor for the Lebanese Studies Association. His dissertation examines the history of the development of the Litani river between 1931 and 1975. By putting the Litani project at the center of its historical narrative, the dissertation reexamines the history of modern Lebanon, postcolonial development, and interrelations among technology, society, and environment.

Jaana Davidjants is a PhD student in the department of cultural theory at Tallinn University in Estonia. She completed her MA degree in political science at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her MA research dealt with online political participation with the focus on prosumer petition websites such as Change.org and the problems growing out of it being a for-profit platform. Jaana’s current work concerns social media activism - she is studying the possibilities offered by and the limits of self-representation on social media by people who are trapped in conflict zones. In more detail, Jaana is studying how did the self-representation of people on Twitter during the last days of the siege of Aleppo translated into media discourses in the UK and US, and can these discourses be considered empowering for the people who provided the tweets. Videos and text-based messages which have been shared in real time by the victims of the conflict were unprecedented only a few years ago, but they are becoming increasingly common in today’s digitally connected world. They are part of what the media scholar Mette Mortensen calls the ‘mediatisation of conflict death’, leaving the safe spectator in the role of a digital witness of distant suffering. For the methodology, Jaana is deploying multimodal analysis that looks into the patterns of combinations of the visual and the textual. She further relies on critical discourse analysis to study how linguistic choices influence the mediation of agency in news reports.

Philip Widmann is a filmmaker based in Berlin. In Beirut, he researches on the production and disappearance of the first sound film made in Lebanon, and the biography of its producer, a woman who is said to have been of German origin. Documents and oral histories on this pioneer project of a national cinema delineate conflicting attempts of imagining the nation and national identity on the way to an independent Lebanon.

Widmann has been showing his film and video works in film festivals, art spaces, educational and cultural institutions internationally. He has selected film programmes for Arkipel International Experimental and Documentary Film Festival Jakarta, Image Forum Japan, the Kassel Documentary and Video Festival and several other festivals and exhibitions. Recently, he co-edited Film in the Present Tense - why can’t we stop talking about analogue film? (Archive Books 2018). Since 2016, Widmann is a PhD candidate at the Braunschweig University of Art, working on a dissertation on notions of landscape as a device of representational and political critique in the films of Masao Adachi, Gerhard Friedl and Straub/Huillet.

Dr. Mara Albrecht was deputy director at the Orient-Institute Beirut (OIB) between April 2019 and March 2020. Before joining the OIB, she worked as research associate (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the Chair of History of West Asia at the University of Erfurt, Germany. She received her doctorate from the University of Erfurt in 2014. Her thesis “War of symbols. Political parties and political culture in Lebanon (1975-2013)” (in German) is concerned with political narratives as well as symbolic forms and practices relevant for the creation of political culture in contemporary Lebanon. She holds a MA in history and political science from University of Hamburg, Germany.

Currently, she works on her habilitation project with the working title “Spatio-temporal practices of violence during the riots in Belfast and Jerusalem and their assessment by the British Empire”. This project is concerned with the interconnectedness of urban space, urban rhythms and practices of violence as well as practices of policing employed by the representatives of the British Empire in Belfast during the late 19th and early 20th century and in Jerusalem during the mandate era. It also argues that a transfer of knowledge about urban violence took place from Ireland to Palestine in the context of relocating officers, troops, and administrative personnel.

Her research interests include urban violence, spatial history, contested histories and memories, political cultures in the Middle East, the modern history of Lebanon, transregional/translocal/entangled history,the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, symbolic representations and cultures of violence, nationalisms in the Middle East and the history of the Middle East mandates.

Since 2011, she is academic coordinator of “Middle Eastern Sociology and History” (MESH), a German-Lebanese MA program conducted by University of Erfurt/Germany, Université Saint-Joseph/Lebanon and Université Saint-Esprit des Kaslik/Lebanon.

Pelle Valentin Olsen joined the University of Chicago as a PhD student in 2014. He holds degrees in Modern Middle Eastern History from the University of Oxford (MPhil) and the University of Copenhagen (BA).

Pelle works on 20th century Iraqi history and literature. His dissertation examines the history of leisure, education, gender, and sexuality in Hashemite Iraq (1921-1958). His dissertation argues that leisure both defined and expressed key aspects of Iraqi modernity. By critically evaluating the social life of “leisure” the dissertation problematizes how Iraq, until recently, has been studied through limited lenses such as dictatorship, sectarianism, and foreign occupation, state governance, British colonial rule, nationalism, and authoritarianism. Offering a more inclusive analysis, his dissertation shows how leisure played a growing and important role in Iraqi society, shaping both collective and individual identities and the built environment of the urban spaces that Iraqi leisure subjects inhabited.

 In addition to several book reviews, Pelle has published in the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and regularly presents at conferences in Europe and North America. His research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, The Danish Institute in Damascus, The Danish Institute in Rome, and The German Orient Institut in Beirut, among others. In 2018, Pelle was awarded a two-year Hanna Holborn Gray Mellon Advanced Fellowship.

Rana Hassan is an urban researcher currently pursuing her PhD in Sustainability and Urban Regeneration in the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Her thesis studies the current situation of urban grassroots initiatives in Lebanon and their potential to foster a transformation in the role played by civil society in the production of urban space. Her research interests include the informal development of urban suburbs and Palestinian Camps in Lebanon; the community participation in urban processes; and the grassroots urban activism. She holds an MSc in Urban Planning and Policy from the American University of Beirut, with a thesis entitled: Bypassing Exclusionary Laws: The Case of the Informal Development of Nahr El Bared Camp’s Extension.

John Hanna graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at Graz University of Technology in 2014. During his study years, he volunteered and worked with housing and shelter organizations in Zambia, Egypt and Brazil. In the past few years, he worked closely with contemporary art institutions in Graz and in Cairo. Hanna is a third year PhD candidate at the Chair History of Architecture and Urban Planning at Delft University of Technology, with a research project on the spatiality of urban conflicts, laying a focus on conditions of armed violence.

Derya Özkul is a research officer at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. She is working for the project entitled Refugees are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights, led by Prof Cathryn Costello. This project examines refugee status determination and protection mechanisms in four different countries, including Lebanon, Kenya and South Africa. The project aims to explore the workings of various protection mechanisms, in particular, alternatives to individual refugee status determination, as well as status determination by UNHCR, and the questions surrounding its accountability in that context.

Derya Özkul completed her doctorate at the University of Sydney and previously worked for a number of Australian Research Council-funded projects including Syrian and Iraqi Resettlement Outcomes in Australia and Social Transformation and International Migration in the 21st Century which investigated the processes of migration in the context of the broader processes of social transformation. Before her PhD, Derya worked as a researcher at the Migration Research Centre at Koc University in Istanbul. She holds an MSc degree in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and a BA degree in Political Science from Bogazici University in Turkey. As a DAAD alumnus, she held fellowships at Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and Bielefeld University in Germany. She has published on precarious work, refugee resettlement, immigration and diversity policies in Turkey, Germany and Australia. Her work includes Social Transformation and Migration (Palgrave, 2015) and a forthcoming book on Alevis in Turkey and abroad.

Dr Felicia Meynersen studied Archaeology, Byzantine Studies and Prehistory at the Universities of Mainz and Berlin. An archaeologist by training, she holds a PhD from the University of Mainz. Felicia was assistant professor at the University of Saarbrucken (2006-2012), worked as a research fellow in the “Syrian Heritage Archive Project” (SHAP) at the German Archaeological Institute (2013-2015, DAI Berlin) and in the Special Research Program in the Humanities “Cultural and Linguistic Contacts” (University of Mainz); she coordinated the multinational EU-project “Preservation of Cultural Heritage Training Program” at the Orient Department of the German Archaeological Institute (2003-2005) and was scientific coordinator of the first joint project of the Archaeological Heritage Network “Zero Hour – A Future for the Time after the Crisis” (German Archaeological Institute Berlin, 2016-2018).
 
Her research and teaching focuses are phenomena of contact and change in the MENA region, the history of emotions, animal images as well as critical heritage and museum studies.
 
Felicia’s current research project “Museums in Dialogue with the Future” focuses on the political-historical negotiation of archaeologies in Lebanon through time. The focus is on museums themselves as ‘key cultural loci of our times’ (Macdonald). The central thesis is that archaeological museums and collections do not only preserve but also actively produce history. Examining archaeology in Lebanon from the 19th century to the present day, the research project considers how such representations of history are constructed, by whom and why.
        
During her stay in Beirut, Felicia presented this project at the National Museum Beirut on 3 October 2019 in the form of an academic guided tour in response to a request by the German Embassy in Beirut. The results from October, especially with regard to museums in their function as archives, were delivered by Felicia on 16 December 2019 at the international Palmyra Conference of the Université de Lausanne („Politics of Archives“). 
 

She holds a dual-subject Bachelor`s degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies and Islamic Theology and a Master's degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Münster in Germany.

Anna Reumert is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.
Informed by ongoing ethnographic work with Sudanese migrant workers in Lebanon, her dissertation explores discourses of anti-blackness between Lebanon and Sudan. Documenting the central role Sudanese migration has played in political and cultural formation in the Arab Mediterranean from the time of Ottoman slavery through colonialism till contemporary migrant labor economies, the dissertation project asks: How does blackness travel in the Levant? How does migration construct and disrupt categories of identification, difference and affiliation? The project explores how the movement of Sudanese workers tells a larger story about the shifting frontiers of affiliation, belonging and Othering in the Middle East.
 

Abdallah Soufan joined the OIB as a research associate in September 2019. He received his PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Georgetown University with a dissertation entitled “Tradition and Its Boundaries: A Diachronic Study of the Concept of Bidʿah in Early Islam.” He holds a BS in Mathematics, and a BA and an MA in Arabic from the American University of Beirut, where he had worked for several years as an Instructor of Arabic and Islamic Thought. His research investigates dichotomies in classical Islamic thought, including the dichotomies of sunnah-bidʿah, veridicality-tropicality, reason-tradition, word-meaning, and exoteric-esoteric. His current project focuses on the dichotomy between the literal and the metaphorical (veridicality-tropicality = ḥaqīqah-mağāz), so essential to Islamic thought. His main argument is that this dichotomy is not self-evident. It was constructed as a theoretical framework that would facilitate an ongoing process of disenchantment in Islam. His publications include a critical edition and a translation of Epistle 48 of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (jointly with Abbas Hamdani; OUP, 2019).

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Sarah El Bulbeisi joined the OIB in November 2019 after completing her PhD at the Institute for Near and Middle East Studies at the LMU Munich, Germany. Before joining the OIB, she coordinated the DAAD project “Violence, Forced Migration and Exile: Trauma in the Arab World and in Germany”, a Higher Education Dialogue between Palestinian and Lebanese universities as well as with the LMU Munich. Prior to that, she worked as a lecturer and research associate at the Institute for Near and Middle East Studies at the LMU Munich. Her PhD thesis “Taboo, Trauma and Identity: Subject Constructions of Palestinians in Germany and Switzerland, 1960 to 2015” draws on conversations, life stories and participant observation and explores the tension between the (family) histories of first and second generation Palestinians, which are characterized by the experience of expulsion and dispossession, and the reshaping of this experience in the Western European representation of the so called Middle East conflict. Sarah El Bulbeisi’s postdoc research at the OIB revolves around the interrelations between systemic violence and family & intimate relations in Lebanon.

 

China Sajadian is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. With support from the Orient-Institut, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, her dissertation examines agricultural labor in the Bekaa Valley from an ethnographic and historical perspective. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork with Syrian farmworkers, her research analyzes how workers’ loss of cross-border mobility throughout the Syrian war has reconfigured agrarian social relations. She holds a BA in Government from Smith College and an MA in Anthropology from Columbia University. 

Hazim Alabdullah is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Erfurt.  He received a BA in English Language and Literature (University of Aleppo) and MA degree in Literary Studies (University of Erfurt). Between 2015-2018, he worked as research assistant at Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institut) within the DFG project “Typographia Medicea”. 2019, Hazim Alabdullah was a visiting doctoral fellow at the OIB. 

Stefan Tarnowski is a PhD Candidate at Columbia University’s Anthropology Department, Institute of Comparative Literature and Society and Institute for Comparative Media. His research focuses on Syria since the 2011 revolution, and in particular on the relations between technology, political economy and social imaginaries. He has a degree in Middle East Studies from Oxford University. His ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian media activists and civil society organisations was also funded by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation 2018-19, and his most recent publication is a translation of and introduction to Dork Zabunyan's The Insistence of Struggle (IF Publications, 2019

Monika Halkort is post-doctoral researcher whose work transcends the fields of media and cultural studies, political ecology, feminist STS and post-humanist thought. During her fellowship at the OIB she will explore the intersectional dynamics of racialization, de-humanisation and enclosure in environmental sensing and earth observation, focusing on the historically specific context of the Mediterranean sea. The main objective of this study is to unpack the new regimes of bio-legitimacy emerging from the ever denser convergence of social, biological and machine intelligences in environmental data and to assess how they recalibrate ‘zones of non-being’ that Franz Fanon identified as key locus of oppression, alienation and ontological displacement characteristic of modern coloniality.

Abdalhadi Alijla is a Palestinian-Swedish  social and political scientist. He was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Orient Institute in Beirut (OIB) in 2020.  He is the Co-Leader of Global Migration and Human Rights at Global Young Academy. He is a co-founder of Palestine Young Academy in 2020. He is an Associate Researcher, and the Regional Manager of Varieties of Democracy Institute (Gothenburg University) for Gulf countries. Since April 2018, he is an associate fellow at the Post-Conflict Research Center in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Abdalhadi has a PhD in political studies from the State university of Milan and M.A. degree in Public Policy and Governance from Zeppelin University- Friedrichshafen, Germany.  He has been granted several awards and scholarships, including DAAD (2009), RLC Junior Scientist (2010), UNIMI (2012), ICCROM (2010), Saud AL-Babtin(2002) among others. 

In 2016, he was a fellow of Royal Society of Art and Science, UK.  He worked for many NGOS and INGOS in the Middle East and Europe such as Transparency International, GiZ, EU Maddad Fund for Syria Crisis, and UNV among others.  He is  a member of the scientific and consultative committee of Center for Arab Unity Studies in Beirut. His writings appear on OpenDemocracy, Mondoweiss, Huffpost, Qantara, Your Middle East, Jaddaliya and other media outlets.  His main research interests are divided societies, Rebel Governance, Democracy, Social Capital, Middle East Studies,  and Comparative Politics.   Abdalhadi is the author of the forthcoming book “ Trust in Divided Societies” by  Bloomsburry Academics and I.B.Tauris UK.

Mohammad Reza Moridi is assistant professor at Tehran University of Art. He is a visiting Hans-Robert Roemer Fellow at OIB since Feb 2020.
His main discipline is sociology of art and he researches complex relationships between art and society in Middle East region. During his stay at OIB, he will explore Modern Islamic art and focus on the cultural discourses on modern and contemporary Islamic art. In this research, he pursues the following questions: How was modern Islamic art constructed by cultural and political discourses? How have Iranian and Arab artists tried to shape modern Islamic contemporary art?
He is the author of Cultural Discourses and Artistic Styles in Iranian Contemporary Art (2018; Published by Tehran University of Art & Aban publisher, Tehran, Iran), and he also has published articles on Iranian contemporary art and regional studies of Islamic art such as “A comparative study on Iranian and Turkish art in the modern social transformation context (2018)”, “Local -Global Discourse In The Islamic Art: Discourse Analyses Of Art In The Geopolitics Of The Islamic World (2013)” and “Discourse Analysis Of The Middle East Art (2010)”

Dr. Lotte Laube was a visiting doctoral fellow between March and December 2010. 

Lino studied Political Science, Islamic Studies and Medieval and Modern History at Göttingen University and Arabic at Damascus University 2004. He is a Research Associate at Göttingen University since 2017. 

Lino's research interests include: Political Islam, Digital Salafism; History of Political and Religious Thought

Friederike Eggert was an affiliated researcher between 2012 and 2014

Pierre joined the Orient Institut in 2020 as a Research Associate. A Ph.D candidate (defense in waiting) in Political Science at Paris 1 Sorbonne University, his doctoral research focuses on the process of a the Lebanese state survival throughout the Lebanese war (1975-1990). It led him to study the Lebanese state in its material and human forms, with a specific attention to several public institutions' and their civil servants' histories. This research resulted also in a broad revisit of the Lebanese war based on comparative and historical sociology. Aside of his Ph.D, Pierre co-wrote a book with Prof. Antoine Vauchez in 2017, to be published in a revised english edition in 2021 (Cornell) on the phenomenon of top french civil servants becoming lawyers, a contribution to the study of the blurrying lines between public and private social spheres in contemporary France. He has been also a full time Junior Lecturer in Political Science at Sciences Po Aix (2016-2018).

Pierre's main research project at the OIB, "Fictio Statis. Unreliable numbers, Private Statistics and Economists’ careers in Lebanon (1950-1990)" aims at unfolding the question of numbers in Lebanon, from the mandate to the contemporary period. Along different periods, this project embraces the study of main figures' providers whether public or private, national or international, but also militant, tackling their interplay, cross-dependencies and conflicts, and questionning the effect of this specific market/field on the type of professional careers od Lebanese/Arab statisticians and economists.

He will also carry on working on other various projects about music in Lebanon and the Arab world, for which he has been recently invited at the Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France) as Core Program Fellow in 2020, for a joint project on audio cassettes and heritage. At the Orient Institut, Pierre will especially work on a new project grounded into digital humanities, dataviz and cartography entitled "Mapping Music in The Arab World". 
  

Enrico Boccaccini is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Orient Institute Beirut (OIB). He received his PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Göttingen with a dissertation on transcultural comparisons of Mirrors for Princes from Europe and the Middle East. He holds an MA degree in Persian Studies from the University of Leiden and a BA degree in Arabic and Persian Studies at the University of Cambridge. His current research focuses on the representation of women in pre-modern advice literature for rulers. His publications include articles on recurring themes in Mirrors for Princes (in Knowledge and Education in Classical Islam, ed. S. Günther, Brill: Leiden, 2020) and on a commentary on Ibn al-Farid's Khamriyya (in Khamriyya as a World Poetic Genre: Comparative Perspectives on Wine Poetry in Near and Middle Eastern Literatures, ed. K. Dmitriev, Ergon Verlag: Würzburg, forthcoming).

Rima has over ten years’ of experience in the field of strategic communications across borders, ranging from advocacy, lobbying, and human rights; to corporate communications, public relations, marketing and advertising in the corporate sphere; to the public sector and UN working on political and humanitarian campaigns in times of crisis in the Middle East. Rima was the first Lebanese to win G. Tueini human rights research fellowship at the Kennedy School at Harvard, in the name of a martyr journalist assassinated for defending freedom of the press in the region.
 
Rima holds a PhD from the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of London, and specializes in crisis communications, focusing on news framing in times of crisis in the Middle East. Her interdisciplinary research interests (history, media and politics) include:  
   -    Islam, Terrorism, and News Framing in Times of Crisis 
   -    Conflicts, Refugees, and Representations of the ‘Other’ 
   -    Religion, Human Rights, & Framing of Minorities 

Rima holds postgraduate degrees in business, journalism, and political science (international affairs) from American University of Beirut, Lebanese American University, and Harvard. She is a freelance journalist with publications in leading English and Arabic newspapers. 
 

Alfred el-Khoury is a PhD candidate in the Department of Arabic Studies at the University of Bamberg. He did his previous studies at the Lebanese University (BA, 2013) and the American University of Beirut (MA, 2015). 
El-Khoury’s doctoral project is motivated by the following question: What can the investigation of metaphor in corpora of old Arabic poetry teach us about specific turning points in the development of this poetry? In tackling this question the project takes the war-metaphor as case study and focuses mainly on two moments in the history of Arabic poetry: the “muḥdath” moment that started to take shape at the turn of the third/ninth century, and the “pre-muḥdath” moment, used here to refer to the poetical tradition that the muḥdath poets drew upon, appropriated as theirs, and in a way contested. In this framework, metaphor is used for two purposes: first as a conceptual notion that helps us reexamine Arabic critical notions such as istiʿāra, majāz, maʿnā, and badīʿ; and second as a critical tool to study texts and shed light on the interpretation practices, editorial endeavours, and literary agendas of the Arabic poetry commentators between the third/ninth and fifth/eleventh centuries. 
 

Chloe Kattar is a final year PhD student near completion at the University of Cambridge working on the revival of intellectual conservatism in Wartime Lebanon (1975-1982).

Rosy Azar Beyhom is developing her second phase of her post-doctoral project. In the last year, she investigated the musical network that can be found in al-Wāfī bi-l-Wafayāt by Ibn Aybak aṣ-Ṣafadī. While considering migration as a powerful tool to move sciences in the old world, music that moves – when played and sang –, and that is moved (carried, copied, and translated), holds an important part in the transformation of sciences. Rosy earned her PhD from the University of Münster - Westfälische Wilhelms Universität (WWU) with a Magna Cum Laude in Musicology and Arabic studies. She is a co-founder and permanent co-editor of the Nemo-online peer-reviewed musicological journal (https://zenodo.org/communities/nemo-online/?page=1&size=20).

Contact : rosybeyhom@dont-want-spam.outlook.com  ;  https://orcid.org/0009-0000-0729-4732 

Agnes Rameder has studied Art-History (BA/MA) in Vienna and Leipzig. Her MA thesis was entitled “Azadeh Akhlaghi’s Photographic Series By An Eye-witness in the Context of Staged Photography in Tehran/Iran” (2016, Univer-sity of Vienna). She is currently a PhD-candidate at the University of Zurich where she works on a thesis on “Lebanese and Iranian Martyrs in Contempo-rary Photo-Related Art-Practices.” She has undertaken a number of research trips to Iran and is currently based in Beirut, where she is an affiliated re-searcher at the Orient Institute and the Departement of Fine Arts and Art His-tory at the American University Beirut. She has also curated a number of ex-hibitions, among them “Capturing Iran’s Past” (2019-20) in Berlin’s Per-gamonmuseum.

Thomas Würtz ist dem Orient-Institut im Mai 2021 beigetreten und ab Oktober 2022 kommissarischer Direktor des Instituts.
Nach dem Studium der Islamwissenschaft, Politik und Philosophie in Bamberg und Kairo hat er seine Doktorarbeit zur islamischen Theologiegeschichte an der Universität Zürich verfasst. Sie ist unter dem Titel "Islamische Theologie im 14. Jahrhundert. Auferstehungslehre, Handlungstheorie und Schöpfungsvorstellungen im Werk von Sa´d ad-Din at-Taftâzânî" erschienen. Danach war er Wissenschaftlicher Assistent an den Universitäten Bern und Aarhus. Dabei hat er mehrere Forschungsreisen in Ägypten und Pakistan absolviert. Im Jahr 2015 lehrte er als Gastdozent an der Freien Universität Berlin. Einige Jahre hat er als Wissenschaftlicher Referent an der Katholischen Akademie in Berlin in den Bereichen Islam und Nahost sowie im christlich-muslimischen Dialog gearbeitet. Seine Forschungsinteressen liegen vor allem auf den Gebieten Koran und Koranexegese wie auch Koranübersetzungen und Theologiegeschichte sowie auf der muslimischen Sicht der Kreuzzüge.

Thomas Würtz joined the Orient-Institut in May 2021 and became the institute's interim director in October 2022.
After studying Islamic Studies, Politics and Philosophy in Bamberg and Cairo, he wrote his doctoral thesis on the history of Islamic theology at the University of Zurich. The thesis is published under the title "Islamic Theology in the 14th Century. Doctrine of Resurrection, Theory of Action and Conceptions of Creation in the Work of Sa'd ad-Din at-Taftâzânî". He was then a research assistant at the universities of Bern and Aarhus. In the process, he completed several research trips in Egypt and Pakistan. In 2015, he taught as a guest lecturer at the Free University of Berlin. For several years, he worked as an academic advisor at the Catholic Academy in Berlin in the fields of Islam and the Middle East as well as Christian-Muslim dialogue. His research interests lie primarily in the areas of the Koran and Koranic exegesis as well as Koranic translations and the history of theology, and in the Muslim view of the Crusades.

Ala Al-Hamarneh holds a PhD degree in Social and Economic Geography from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev (1994). He joined the project ‘Relations in the Ideoscape: Middle Eastern Students in the Eastern Bloc’ in 2019 as Research Coordinator and is responsible for the yearly report of the overall project “Knowledge without Borders” to the BMBF. His research focuses on the Soviet/Russian Alumni Associations in the Arab world and the Jordanian students in the former USSR.
During his 20 years of affiliation with the University of Mainz as assistant professor he taught courses in human geography with regional focus on the Arab World, Germany, Emilia Romagna/Italy and the USA-Northeastern metropoles. He was senior researcher at the Center for Research on the Arab World (CERAW). He was a visiting professor for sociology at the University of Sharjah/UAE teaching classes on “Modern Arab Society” and “Emirati Society”. Ala has published on migration, tourism, globalization of higher education, neoliberal urban development and Arab culture production. His last publications include the co-edited volumes “Neoliberale Urbanisierung” (2019, transcript) and “International Tourism Development and the Gulf Cooperation Council States” (2017, Routledge).
 

Sam Wilder received his PhD from Cambridge University in 2019, with a dissertation that studied Arabic love poetry from the Umayyad period in its historical and political context. From 2015-2018 he was a contributing researcher to the research project Aristotle's Poetics in the West (of India) at the Freie Universität, Berlin, followed by a post-doc position at the same university. His research concerns Arabic classical literature and the history of its social construction and reception, with a current focus on poetry, science and the occult in the 11th-13th centuries CE. He has also translated several books from German and Arabic; his most recent translation, Where the Bird Disappeared by Ghassan Zaqtan, received the 2019 Palestine Book Award.

Karim El Taki is a PhD candidate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His doctoral research studies the ideology of sovereignty—or sovereigntism—in contemporary Egypt and Qatar. Prior to joining the OIB, Karim was a Visiting Doctoral Student at Georgetown University Qatar and a Visiting Scholar at the George Washington University. Karim holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences and Middle Eastern Studies and a research master’s degree in International Relations from Sciences Po Paris.

Markus Schmitz is Visiting Professor and DAAD-Consultant at the Doctoral School of Literature, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Lebanese University, Beirut.
Trained in Middle Eastern Studies, English Literary and Cultural Studies, and Comparative Literature his decisively interdisciplinary work is located at the intersections of Transnational Middle Eastern Studies and Relational Diasporic Arab Studies. Among his research interests are Anglophone Arab Representations, Forced Migration and Border Regimes, Relational Diasporic Formations, Theories and Practices of Cross-Cultural Comparison, Cultural Resistance, and Decolonial Arts.
His current project is a book-length study with the working title “Escape to Europe: Comparative Refugee Imaginaries.”

Abdallah El Ayach is a researcher of Modern Philosophy and Critical Theory. He holds a Master’s degree from the department of Anthropology at the American University of Beirut. His Master’s thesis, entitled Structures of Trust, is about contemporary political normative relations in Beirut. He has also worked at developing Naqḍ, a database for Arab critical thought. His current research is on Arabic translations of German Idealism viewed within the wider context of the problematic of the “impossible Arab modern philosopher”. Within the scope of translation, Abdallah has also written an article on the problem of “Translating the Subject into Arabic”. 

Zachary Davis Cuyler is a PhD candidate at New York University. His dissertation examines how transnational infrastructures of oil shaped the political economy, built environment, and national scale of Lebanon from the 1920s through the 1970s. His work has appeared in Historical Materialism, the Arab Studies Journal, Middle East Report, and Labor History.

Jakub Jajcay is a PhD. student in History at the American University of Beirut. He studies the Lebanese city of Saida in the period before the Lebanese Civil War, with a focus on the social conditions and organizations that later facilitated political violence. He also conducts historical research for a number of NGOs in Lebanon that work to prevent violence by raising awareness among young Lebanese on the history of the Civil War.

He got his BA in Arabic and Politics from SOAS and his Master's from the University of Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic.

Ennio Napolitano is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Orient Institute Beirut (OIB). He received his PhD in Islamic Art and Archaeology from the University of Bamberg with a dissertation on Arabic inscriptions and pseudo-inscriptions in Italian Art funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. He holds an MA degree in Islamic Studies and a BA degree in Transcultural studies, both from the University of Naples "L'Orientale".
His current research focuses on the cross-cultural dynamics of Arabic scripts in border areas, especially in their disguised form. His publications include articles on recurring themes concerning the interpretation of Arabic inscriptions and the transmission of debased Arabic and pseudo-Arabic inscriptions in the European medieval cultural contexts, in painting, sculpture, and ceramics.

Christian Thuselt joined the OIB in October 2021 as a research associate and is responsible for the in-house production of the “Beiruter Texte und Studien” (BTS). He holds a MA from Tübingen University and received his PhD in Social Sciences from Roskilde University with a study on Lebanese political parties as expressions of a global modernity. From 2009 till 2021 he worked at Erlangen University, most recently as an assistant professor. His research at the OIB focusses on Iraqi statehood as part of a discourse on legitimacy. 

Ahmed M. F. Abd-Elsalam joined the OIB in October 2021 as a research associate. He received his PhD in Islamic Studies from the Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg with the dissertation „Das Verhältnis des beduinischen zum islamischen Recht in sozialem und historischem Kontext“ (The relationship between Bedouin and Islamic law in a social and historical context). At the OIB, he studies social and theological issues of Abrahamic interdependence concerning marriage and divorce as human production of theological and religious knowledge. His research focuses on social and legal transformations in Muslim societies, past and present.

Abd-Elsalam works at the OIB on social and theological issues of Abrahamic interdependence concerning marriage and divorce as human production of theological and religious knowledge. His project "Abrahamitic Interdependence: The Relations of Jewish to Islamic concerning Marriage and Divorce" deals with legal issues of marriage and divorce in Theory and Praxis in the Example of the Jewish communities in Egypt and Iraq in the first half of the last century and its relation to other trans-regional and trans-religious communities.

The project is well-networked with other research institutions in Egypt, Morocco, and Germany.

Previously, Abd-Elsalam worked as a docent and researcher of Islamic Theology at the Centre for Islamic Theology at the University of Münster (2012 – 2021) and as a visiting professor for Religious Comparative Studies at the Humboldt University Berlin (2019 – 2020). He also taught at Al-Azhar University (2011 – 2012) and the University of Innsbruck (2018 – 2022).

Research

• Legal realities and transformations in Muslim societies: legal and religious norms between theory, practice, and history.

• Islamic Norms and Islamic History (Pre- and Early Islamic History, Middle Ages and Present)

• Currently transformation processes in Islamic thought: secularization, Islamization and globalization of norms and values.

Academic Education

Career

Memberships and activities in committees

Awards

Projects

Download CV as PDF

Hussein Ibrahim is a Doctoral Candidate in Philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His dissertation project concerns practical philosophy and epistemology in Islamic East with a special focus on Miskawayh (d. 421/1030), Ibn Sīnā (d. 427/1037), and Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274). 

Hussein is an OIB Doctoral Fellow. He holds an M.A. in Islamic Studies from McGill University and an M.A. in Philosophy from the American University of Beirut (AUB).
 

My research intersects feminist theory, media and critical race theory, with an emphasis on human rights, colonial genealogies of justice and recognition, affect theory, memory studies and digital activism. Prior to joining the Orient institute, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. I have taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London School of Economics, the University of Buckingham and the University of Manchester, where I also received my PhD in 2018. I was a visiting fellow in the Media and Communication Centre at the London School of Economics (2018-2020).  I am a co-convenor of the British International Studies Association (BISA) working group on Emotions in Politics and International Relations (EPIR). My work has appeared in Jadaliyya, Open democracy, Feminist Media Studies and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. I have been awarded the 2021 Catharine Stimpson Prize for my forthcoming article in Signs, ‘Digital feminism beyond nativism and empire: affective territories of recognition and competing claims to suffering in Iranian women’s activism’. During my time at OIB, I am working on my manuscript which builds on my PhD and explores the affective politics of crisis through the lens of critical race and feminist theory. I hold an MA in Gender Studies from SOAS, London, and an MSc and BSc in Journalism, Media and Communications from the University of Tehran, Iran where I worked as a journalist and reporter for nine years. I can be found @TafakoriSara. Email address: S.Tafakori@LSE.ac.uk

Joud Alkorani is an anthropologist with a background in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Islam Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Between January and June 2022, Joud will be based in Beirut as a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the OIB.
 
Broadly speaking, Joud's research explores how changing political, economic, and sociohistorical conditions transform Muslims’ beliefs and practices. In particular, she is interested in the forms Muslim piety takes after the Islamic Revival and the Arab Spring. 
 
Joud's first project was an ethnography of Muslim becoming, believing, and belonging in Dubai. Through fieldwork and interviews with middle-class, migrant Muslim women, Joud examined how Muslims grapple with Islamic ethical practices, theological commitments, and eschatological horizons in their everyday lives. She focused on how these women's endeavors are marked by the contingencies of their living and laboring in Dubai as noncitizens and shaped by state efforts to depoliticize Islam. 
 
During her time at the OIB, Joud will extend the insights of her prior research beyond its ethnographic context to tell a larger story about God-human relations in an increasingly neoliberal, post-Islamic Revival, post-Arab Spring Middle East. 
 

About me

Flavia Malusardi is a PhD candidate in History of Art as part of the LAWHA project, with an international position between Università Cà Foscari (Venice) and OIB Orient-Institut Beirut. Her project investigates the role of gallerist Janine Rubeiz and her informal space Dar el Fan (1967-1976) within the Lebanese cultural panorama. She holds a Master’s degree in History of Art and Architecture of the Islamic Middle East from SOAS School of Oriental and African Studies (London) and a MFA in Visual Cultures and Curatorial Practice from Brera Fine Arts Academy (Milan). Her work focuses on the contemporary arts and visual culture of the Middle East and North Africa, with an interest in archival and collecting practices within post-colonial contexts. She lived in Cairo and Dubai, where she worked with international galleries and curators. She is the editor of Vista Sud a bi-monthly column featured in Osservatorio Futura, a platform and Turin-based gallery devoted to contemporary arts. 
 

Project description

Flavia Malusardi is conducting a PhD in History of the Arts at Cà Foscari University of Venice within the ERC-funded project LAWHA – Lebanon’s Art World at Home and Abroad, hosted by the Orient-Institut Beirut, part of the Max Weber Foundation. LAWHA examines the forces that have shaped the emergence of a professional field of art in Lebanon within its local, regional and global context. The project proposes a shift of perspective in approaching Lebanon’s art world by focusing on the multi-dimensionality of artists’ individual trajectories. The PhD is bound to a specific topic, that of Women Artists in Lebanon’s Art World. 

Within this frame, Flavia’s research project focuses on the cultural centre Dar el Fan w-el Adab (House of Arts and Literature) active in Beirut from 1967 to 1975. Dar el Fan was founded by cultural advocate Janine Rubeiz (1926-1993), who was as well a political activist and a supporter of women empowerment. The research attempts at reading the cultural program of the space and its reception against the scenario of deep historical and political transformations happening in the region as well as globally. Particular attention is given to the artists who collaborated with the centre and exhibited at its premises, in order to understand its importance and impact on their trajectories and careers. 

Despite being largely overlooked, Dar el Fan was extremely rich and diverse in its cultural offer and it came to constitute one of the main catalysts in the artistic and intellectual scene of Beirut, key in understanding the developments that have shaped the art scene and its audience in Lebanon. The study aims at producing a critical analysis of the centre, looking at its function and role not only as a cultural actor in Lebanon but also within a broader context. On the one side, this intends to contribute in the knowledge of the pre-Civil War art context, which remains largely unexplored in particular in terms of institutions and cultural spaces, their roles and politics. On the other, it plans to trace international linkages and connections that contextualise Lebanon’s cultural scene beyond the Arab world, highlighting a wider network on the global scale that resist the misleading idea of a monolithic and closed Arab world.  
 

Mohaddeseh Ziyachi obtained her BA in social sciences at Allameh Tabataba'i University in Iran and completed her master's degree in sociology at the same university. Her master's dissertation was concerned with the problem of gender and the city, focusing on the concept of "the women-friendly city". Being interested in gender issues as well as interdisciplinary studies, she did her PhD in the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen's University of Belfast, UK. In her PhD thesis, she investigated "the problem of motherhood in Iran" from a cognitive, evolutionary, and anthropological perspective.
During her fellowship at OIB, Mohaddeseh focuses on the history of motherhood in Iran and demonstrates that cognitive anthropological and cultural model studies need to be reconsidered in terms of their little attention to historical analysis of the cultural models' continuities and discontinuities.
 

Rosie Maxton is a doctoral student at Oxford University. She holds an MA in Arabic and Medieval History from St. Andrews University, and an MPhil in Middle Eastern Studies from Cambridge University. 
Her current research explores conversion to the Catholic faith among Eastern Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire, focusing on the town of Mardin (present-day southeast Turkey) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through examining the corpus of Arabic and Syriac manuscripts produced and procured by Mardin’s Christian communities during this period, her research seeks to analyse the ways in which conversion to Catholicism was expressed, and thereby to further our understanding of the intricacies of Catholic expansion in the early modern world. 
During her fellowship at the OIB, she will investigate the connection between Eastern Catholic communities in Lebanon and Mardin in the eighteenth century, primarily through the medium of scribal culture. 
 

Cynthia Kreichati is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University; Trained as a pharmacist in Lebanon, Cynthia also holds a Masters in Sociology from the American University in Beirut and has worked in various health related fields. Her work explores the relationships between politics, archives and the environment. She is now completing her doctoral dissertation project — an ethnography of the Litani river and its people — which investigates how the Litani, once central to national discourses of technological progress and abundance, has become a metonymy for state failure, societal ruin, and ecological devastation.

Alya Karame specialises in Islamic art and material culture. She joined the OIB as Research Associate in 2022. In 2023 she was a fellow of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University. She is supported by the Paris Region award and will be pursuing her research at the Institut des civilisations at the Collège de France (2023-2024). Her book project (forthcoming 2024) on a forgotten corpus of medieval Qur’ans has been supported by numerous grants, including the Arab Funds for Arts and Culture. Karame was a Mellon Postdoctoral fellow at the American University of Beirut (2019-2020) where she also taught. She was at the Khalili Research Centre at the University of Oxford, the recipient of the Barakat Trust award (2018-2019) and prior to that she joined the Kunsthistorisches Institut research program in Florence Connecting Art Histories in the Museum and was based at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin (2017-2019). Karame obtained her PhD in 2018 in Islamic Art History from the University of Edinburgh and her MA in History of Art & Archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies. 

Since May 2022, Yasmin Amin works at the Orient-Institut Beirut as Representative of the Orient-Instituts Beirut (Max-Weber-Stiftung) in Cairo.

She is an Egyptian-German who holds a BA in Business Administration, a PGD and an MA in Islamic Studies, all three from the American University in Cairo. She received her PhD in Islamic Studies from Exeter University’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies researching ‘Humour and Laughter in the Ḥadīth’. Her research covers various aspects of gender issues, early Muslim society and culture as well as the original texts of Islamic history, law and Hadith.
 

Chiara Fontana is scholar in Arabic Philology and Literature. She was awarded a Ph.D. in Arabic Literature and Linguistics at the Sapienza University of Rome with a thesis on the rhetorical and metrical analysis of contemporary experimental poetry. Currently, she is assistant professor of Arabic Philology and Literature at the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, Italy. Between May and November 2022, Chiara will be based in Beirut as a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the OIB.

Her studies focus principally on Islamic eloquence (balāgha), interliterary processes across Arabic, Persian, Turkish, cultural heritage, and urban development observed in the light of socio-political transformations emerging in the past and contemporary Middle Eastern societies. Since 2014 she has held a number of teaching positions and continued her scholarly work at institutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Qatar, and Italy. Since 2018 Chiara is member of the research boards for some projects at the Universities of Birmingham, Exeter (UK), and Columbia University in New York. The fil rouge tying Chiara’s research experiences is the focus on the evolution of Arabic literary theory and criticism across time, with a specific emphasis on al-balāgha as a cognitive framework to understand reality creatively. 

During her stay at the OIB, Chiara will extend the insights of her prior research exploring how much material culture and crafts in 9th century Baghdad did not only affect literary investigations thematically but also how they inspired innovative frameworks of critical thinking and the re-organization of the humanities.
 

Sophia is a doctoral student at University College London.  She holds an LLM as well as an MA in Conflict Resolution in Divided Societies from King’s College London, a Maîtrise en Droit in International Law from Panthéon-Assas University/Paris II, and the German First State Examination (Humboldt University of Berlin).
Her research focuses on the role of domestic courts in consociational systems of power-sharing and involves data collection through interviewing in Northern Ireland and Lebanon. She seeks to understand how courts react to consociations and the implications of their judgments for the broader political set-up. 
 

Mahmood Makvand is an assistant professor in the department of Qur’anic studies at Khārazmi university, Tehran, Iran. His MA in linguistics allows him to research a range of subjects, including the etymology of Quranic words (with a focus on Semitic languages), semantic studies, the composition of the Qur’anic text, linguistic characteristics of the text, and the cultural and linguistic milieu of Arabia in the era of revelation. He is currently exploring the concept of the creation of woman in the Torah and in the Qur’an. More generally, Mahmood aims at showing the interaction and compatibility between the Qur’an and the Bible and the post-biblical writings. His academic publications can be seen at the following link: https://wwwkhu.academia.edu/MahmoodMakvand

Qodratullah Qorbani has been an associate professor of philosophy at Kharazmi University, in Tehran since 2011. He obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Allamah Tabatabaei University in 2010 and his current research focuses on comparative theology and philosophy of religion. He has published ten books with subjects ranging from comparative philosophical studies to the epistemic virtues of the Quran and a large number of articles in philosophical and theological issues. He has participated and presented papers in about 30 international and national conferences in Iran, India, Turkey, Romania, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Lebanon, Switzerland, Germany, and Spain. He is also the editor in chief of the journal Metaphysical Investigations. He has taken his sabbaticals at Zurich University in 2017, and is currently a visiting fellow at the Orient Institute in Beirut (OIB). 

About me:

Ashraf Osman is a PhD candidate in History of Art as part of the LAWHA project, with an international position between Università Cà Foscari (Venice) and OIB Orient-Institut Beirut (Beirut). His project investigates the representation of women and minority (sectarian, ethnic, and sexual) artists mainly at the Sursock Museum during the pre-War and War eras. 
He holds a Master of Advanced Studies in Curating from the Zurich University of the Arts (Switzerland) and a Master of Architecture from Syracuse University (New York). His diverse background and practice encompasses olfactory art, socially-engaged art, and the architectural and urbanistic memory of the Lebanese War.

Project:
Life Otherwise: The History of Art in (Spite of) Lebanon - Artists from Lebanon that told an-Other tale

My research examines the representation of women and minorities (ethnic, sectarian, sexual, etc.) in the Sursock Museum mainly during the pre-War and War era (1950s - 1980s). It is guided by two main questions: What was the dominant identitarian narrative of the pre-War Lebanese state? And, viewed through the lens of canon-formation, was the Sursock Museum a significant institutional departure from that narrative? Answering these questions would inform the growing literature on consociational politics at a point in Lebanon's history where this very prism is getting challenged in the post-2019 Uprising context.
 

Çiğdem İvren joined OIB’s LAWHA team as research associate in October 2022. In parallel, she is a research assistant at the chair of Islamic Art and Archaeology at the University of Bamberg, from which she holds an MA in Islamic Art and Archaeology. Çiğdem is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Art History, Free University Berlin. Her dissertation investigates the art production and cultural infrastructure of the Civil War period in Lebanon. Within LAWHA, she will focus on the civil war period and the database and digital platform.

Fatima al-Bazzal is a PhD student from the Lebanese University, in Information and Communication Studies. She has been a professional librarian and researcher over the last decade, first in the Lebanese National Library Rehabilitation Project as a junior librarian, where she was introduced to the concepts and practices of librarianship and enrolled in different projects that aimed at describing the library’s collection, and managing its preservation and accessibility. She then worked for different Lebanese cultural; Shamaa Arab Educational Database, The Fire horse Archive, Knowledge Workshop-The Feminist Library, and March Lebanon-Virtual Museum of Censorship Project. Building over her librarianship background, and driven by the notions of accessibility and open access, her PhD. research project tackles an under-represented intellectual archive of Amil Mountains Region in Southern Lebanon (known as Jabal Amil). Following the circulation of a series of manuscripts in Lebanon and abroad, she is studying the various texts, agents and places contributing to the creation, management, distribution, and transmissions of this archive.

Research Project

Archiving Absence and Loss
Amili manuscripts in libraries worldwide

My project tackles an under-represented and highly dispersed literary manuscripts archive. It aims to counter the collective memory narrative that recalls Ahmad Pasha el-Jazzar, the Ottoman Governor of Acre, confiscation and burning of the rich Amili intellectual heritage. Though this incident cannot be confirmed, it refers to a rich cultural heritage that was documented within bio-bibliographical references. This project aims at virtually re-constructing this heritage by tracing it within different manuscript collections in the world. By these means, it wishes to structure a provisional identity for the Amili manuscript archive and identify what is available counterpointing the gaps and what has been lost.

Muhammad Fariduddin Attar is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. His dissertation deals with the reception of Avicenna’s cosmology by the 12th century theologian and polymath Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī. He has lectured on history, philosophy, Islamic thought, and religion in several universities in Jakarta, Indonesia. He resides in Montreal, Canada.

Research Project

Hermetic Cosmology in Islamic Philosophical Thought
Astrology, Celestial Divinities, and Occult Powers of the Soul according to Abū al-Barakāt al-Baghdādī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, and Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī

This research project aims to develop a framework of inquiry that can shed light on the fascinating but complex interaction between philosophy (falsafa or ḥikma), theology (ʿilm al-kalām), and the so-called “occult sciences” (al-ʿulūm al-gharība) in the 6th/12th century Islamic East (mashriq). It will focus primarily on disciplines that closely connected to the Arabic Hermetica, such as astrology, astral-magic, and to some extent alchemy. The study will begin with Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), who developed the theoretical framework for the systematic examination of the universe as a unified physical system. It is through this model of inquiry that later thinkers, such as Abū al-Barakāt al-Baghdādī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, and Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī would attempt to integrate the cosmological teachings of the Arabic Hermes (Idrīs). Each of these thinkers adopted aspects of the Hermetic tradition in distinct own ways and within the limits of their respective philosophical projects and methodologies. This research will outline their distinct approaches to Hermetic cosmology and argue that its inclusion is motivated by the need to offer an accurate, systematic, and rational account of the universe.

Jowel Choufani is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the George Washington University. Jowel was formerly trained as a nutritionist and dietitian and worked for several years in food security research. She has an MS in Public Health Nutrition from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and an MPhil in Anthropology from George Washington University. Jowel will be spending the 2022-2023 academic year conducting ethnographic research in Lebanon.

Research Project

Obligation and Relationality in the Wake of Critical Events in Lebanon

Description    Jowel Choufani’s dissertation project investigates how people’s sense of obligation to others comes to be defined, experienced, and materialized across a historical timescape marked by the layering of critical events. This project traces two modes of response— assistance and documentation —that people connected to Lebanon have drawn on to respond to the 2020 August 4 Beirut explosion. This multi-sited ethnography will encompass residents of Lebanon and its diaspora and will deploy a combination of semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and oral life history interviews to explore the factors that guide people’s responses to events, how sociality and community boundaries become (re)configured as a result of these responses, and how meanings of critical events change as they accrue over time. In doing so, this project theorizes how critical events present opportunities and impediments for dynamism in people’s sense and enactments of obligation towards others.

Mariam Saeed El Ali, was the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center for the Arts and Humanities at the American University of Beirut (2020-2021). She holds a doctorate in Arabic language and literature from the same university (2017). She received the Abdul Hadi Al-Debs Award for academic excellence, for her PhD dissertation that was supervised by Professor Tarif Khalidi. She transformed it into a book published by OIB in Beiruter Texte Und Studien series (volume 139) entitled Akhbar Khadija Bt. Khuwaylid in the Islamic Sources: Frames of Narration, Memory, and History (December, 2020). Mariam has several other publications in Arabic and Islamic studies and has taught Arabic and History at American University of Beirut and Université St Joseph.

Research Project

Memory at Work in Medieval Islamic Scholarship
Shaping Knowledge, Tradition, and Identities

This project examines some of the explicit expressions on memory and of memory in Islamic tradition, and how those expressions shaped its Scriptural, historical, literal, and architectural legacies.
The project is concerned with outlining the concept of memory in the nascent Islamic milieu, by chasing its textual expressions primarily in the Qurʾān. It investigates to what extent the Qurʾānic recurrent references to memory and related notions triggered interest of medieval Muslim scholars in this key concept. A comparison between memory and inimitability (iʿjāz) is sought. On the socio-historical level, the project considers the role of memory in the intellectual and cultural lives of these scholars and what values they attached to it. It looks closely at different attitudes to memory across the Muslim geographies, and communities. The project progresses along broad epistemological lines of enquiries around who, exactly, was responsible for the preservation of knowledge about the Islamic past, and what individuals, events, books, and monument pop up in the Islamic collective memory(ies) and why.

Souad Etmimi is a PhD researcher in Arab and Islamic Studies, at Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Sousse, Tunisia, Specialized in Contemporary Cultural Studies.  She is preparing a PhD thesis entitled "The Intellectual as a Subject of Criticism in Contemporary Arab Thought". She obtained a master's degree in Arabic language, literature and civilization in the field of modern civilization at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in Sousse (Tunisia).
She obtained two student exchange scholarships at two universities. The first one is in Marburg in Germany, at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) in 2018 and at the second one in 2019 at University of Ca’ Foscari in Venice, Italy.
In 2019, she published a book with the Arab House of Egypt entitled "The Pictures of the Imam in the Modern Islamic Discourse, Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal as a model". She has an article published in the same year as part of the proceedings of a symposium that took place at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in Kairouan (Tunisia), entitled “The Dialectic of the Estrangement and Communication between the Right Sciences and the Human Sciences".

Research Project

Intellectual as subject of Criticism in Contemporary Arab Thought

My project aims at deconstructing the image of the intellectual in the intellectuals’ discourse as a subject of their criticism. It is based on the analysis of six texts – written between 1989 and 2013 – that reveal the opinion of the thinkers in the chosen corpus. By studying the historical, political, cultural and social context of criticism the aim of my research is to look closely at the elements that constitute it in order to define its various ‘trends’ such as liberal, socialist and Islamic ones. The six texts that the research is concerned with are the following: Towards a Theory of Culture, a Critique of Eurocentrism and Reverse Eurocentrism, by Samir Amin; Representations of the intellectual, by Edward Said; Illusions of the Elite or Criticism of the Intellectual, by Ali Harb; The Rupture between the Intellectual and the Jurist: Aspects of the Estrangement between the Two Mental Structures: the Religious Intellectual and the Jurist, by Muhammad Yahya; The Cultural Bet and the Illusion of Estrangement, the Experience of Distance in the Approach of Time and Change, by Abdullah Hammoudi; and The End of the Preacher, the Possible and the Impossible in the Roles of Intellectuals, by Abdelilah Belkeziz.

Anaïs Farine is a cinema studies researcher and a film curator. She holds a Ph.D from the University of La Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III. Her Ph.D thesis focused on the so-called “Euro-Mediterranean dialogue” and its Filmic Imaginary (1995 – 2017). Her writings have been published in Kohl, Cinematheque Beirut, Trouble dans les collections, Ettijahat, Débordements, The Funambulist Magazine, Africultures, and Aniki, among others. She is a member of the organizing committee of the Festival Ciné-Palestine (Paris).Profile text    Anaïs Farine is a cinema studies researcher and a film curator. She holds a Ph.D from the University of La Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III. Her Ph.D thesis focused on the so-called “Euro-Mediterranean dialogue” and its Filmic Imaginary (1995 – 2017). Her writings have been published in Kohl, Cinematheque Beirut, Trouble dans les collections, Ettijahat, Débordements, The Funambulist Magazine, Africultures, and Aniki, among others. She is a member of the organizing committee of the Festival Ciné-Palestine (Paris).

Research Project

The making of “Arab alternative cinema” and its audiences
Babelsberg, Beirut, Damascus, Leipzig

As was the case a decade or so ago, when Rasha Salti and Daikha Dridi put out a compelling issue of ArteEast dedicated to this topic in order to update a “dormant part of Arab memory”, the history of film-clubs remains under-documented. However, film-clubs, as “spaces for free expression and activism” are an integral part of the social and cultural history of the cities and protest movements. Some films participate in the struggle and desire for social and political transformations. They document this will while giving it its forms. The visibility of these films, as well as their possible actualization in gestures in public space and daily life is also intimately linked to the existence of places allowing to come together and bring out Dissensus. It is therefore interesting to focus on the history of the spaces in which the screenings are organized, on the films selected by the film-club organizers and the form of the debates put in place.

The launch of the Arab Ciné-Club in Beirut, one year after the discussion around the creation of an “Arab Alternative Cinema” in Damascus, illustrates the growing importance of such films in the early 1970s. The “Arab Alternative Cinema” was characterized by an innovative approach to film forms and narratives while participating in the political struggles of the global 68. By seeking to counter the lack of visibility of “Arab Alternative Cinema”, the co-founders of the Arab Ciné-Club (Borhane Alaouié, Ibrahim Ariss, Walid Chmait and Georges Rassi) pursued a number of political and cultural ambitions. This film-club plays a central role in my current research on the history of film-clubs in Beirut and was one of the only places that screened films affiliated with the movement at that time in Lebanon.

During my research on the programming in film clubs, conducted in various archives in Lebanon, I frequently encountered testimonies of filmmakers or articles dedicated to the “Arab Alternative Cinema” movement (Kais Al-Zubaidi, Kassem Hawal and Faisal Al-Yasiri) which highlight the importance of Babelsberg school as well as of the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film. Devoted to the history of Beirut ciné-clubs in the 1970s and the mobility of students and filmmakers from the Middle East to Germany, my research project aims to analyze the “Arab Alternative Cinema” using a transnational perspective by focusing on the production of filmic ideas established within these films and on the exhibition of Arab alternative films in Lebanon and GDR.

Based on a systematic analysis of private and institutional archives as well as interviews with the Arab Ciné-club committee members and with former members of the film-club audience, I will look for and meet with the moderators and the audience members to document their daily activism and the kind of relations they established between each other at the film-club, as well as the type of mediation the film established in this particular space of debate.