MENA Faculty

CMENAS Office

headshot of Omid Ghaemmaghami

Omid Ghaemmaghami

Director/CMENAS

Center for Middle East and North Africa Studies
LT 510

Research Interests

  • Islamic intellectual history
  • The Bábí and Bahá’í Faiths
  • Shīʿī Islam
  • The Quran and its interpretation
  • Arabic grammar
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Affiliated Faculty

headshot of Mona Azzam

Mona Azzam

Arabic Lecturer

Middle Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Studies
LT 504

Research Interests

  • Teaching Arabic as a foreign language (TAFL)
  • Corpus linguistics
  • Educational Technology
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headshot of Jonathan Karp

Jonathan Karp

Associate Professor; Associate Professor/ Undergraduate Director of Judaic Studies

History; Judaic Studies
LT 1309

Research Interests

  • Jewish Economic and Cultural History
  • Christian-Jewish Relations
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headshot of Michael Kelly

Michael Kelly

Lecturer

Judaic Studies
LT 1305

Research Interests

  • The social and religious history of the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages
  • "Fall" of the Roman Empire
  • The relationship between history, law and literature
  • Philosophy of history / Historical Theory
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headshot of Bryan Kirschen

Bryan Kirschen

Associate Professor; Chair; Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics

Translation Research and Instruction Program (TRIP); Linguistics Program; Romance Languages and Literatures
LN 2210

Research Interests

  • Sociolinguistics
  • Contact Linguistics
  • Language Variation
  • Documentary Linguistics
  • Language Ideologies
  • Sephardic Studies
  • Aljamiado Texts
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headshot of Lior Libman

Lior Libman

Assistant Professor of Israel Studies/ Associate Director of the Center for Israel Studies

Judaic Studies
LT 1315

Research Interests

  • Modern Hebrew Literature
  • Israeli Literature
  • Kibbutz and Socialist-Zionism's Literature
  • Cultural and Intellectual History
  • Literature and Cultural History in the formative years of Israeli statehood
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headshot of Nathaniel Mathews

Nathaniel Mathews

Undergraduate Director, Assistant Professor

Africana Studies
LN 1202B

Research Interests

  • African history
  • Modern Zanzibar
  • Islam on the Swahili coast
  • History & memory
  • History of slavery
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headshot of Shay Rabineau

Shay Rabineau

Associate Professor of Israel Studies/ Associate Director of the Center for Israel Studies

Judaic Studies
LT 1317

Research Interests

  • Israel/Palestine, Middle East Walking and Pilgrimage Routes
  • Israeli Environmental History
  • Historical Geography of the Middle East
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headshot of Andrew Scholtz

Andrew Scholtz

Associate Professor/Chair

Middle Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Studies
LT 509

Research Interests

  • The Passions 一 Especially Desire and Envy 一 in the Ancient Mediterranean World
  • The Social Psychology of Greek Rhetoric
  • Intersections of Ancient Greek & Roman Sexuality, Ideology, Politics and Literature
  • Literary Theory
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headshot of Kent F. Schull

Kent F. Schull

Associate Professor; TRIP Courtesy Title

History; Translation Research and Instruction Program (TRIP)

Research Interests

  • History of the Ottoman Empire
  • Modern Middle East History
  • Palestine-Israel
  • Turkey
  • Criminal Justice in the Middle East
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headshot of Tarek Shamma

Tarek Shamma

Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Research and Instruction Program, Undergraduate Director Comp Lit

Translation Research and Instruction Program (TRIP); Comparative Literature
LT 1508A

Research Interests

  • Arabic-English Translation
  • History of Arabic Translation
  • the Arabian Nights
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headshot of John H. Starks

John H. Starks

Associate Professor

Middle Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Studies
LT 508

Research Interests

  • Greek and Roman Comedy (theater history, performance, gender)Non-"Western" Ethnicity around the Ancient Mediterranean, esp. Africa and the Levant
  • Hellenistic and Roman Social History
  • Greek and Latin Epigraphy
  • Roman Historiography (including Greek historians of Rome) and Classical Biography
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headshot of Hebatalla Taha

Hebatalla Taha

Assistant Professor of Israel Studies/ Associate Director of the Center for Israel Studies

Judaic Studies
LT 1311

Research Interests

  • Capitalism and colonialism in Israel/Palestine
  • Political economy of Palestinians of 48
  • Nuclear histories and politics in the Middle East
  • Security and insecurity in the Middle East
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headshot of Mary Youssef

Mary Youssef

Associate Professor

Middle Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Studies
LT 513

Research Interests

  • The Contemporary Egyptian Novel
  • Modern Arabic Literature
  • Arab Diasporic Literature
  • African Literature
  • Postcolonial Studies
  • Migration Studies
  • Race Studies
  • Gender Studies
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