Post-Doctoral Fellow
Sadeq Rahimi is a CIHR Research Fellow at the Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He is trained in anthropological research and clinical work at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He received his PhD in Transcultural Psychiatry and Psychoanalytic Training in Child and Adolescent Therapy. His main research interest has been the relationship between culture, identity, and mental health, a line of inquiry which has gradually evolved into his current work on subjectivity and politics. He has published on topics ranging from online therapy and virtual subjectivity to collective self-esteem, culture and psychosis, cultural logic, and political subjectivity. His forthcoming book is titled "Subjects in History: Meaning, Madness, and Political Selves in Modern Turkey."
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Frode Saugestad is a post-doctoral research fellow at CMES related to the Moroccan Studies Program. At CMES Saugestad works on a research project about identity and nationalism in the Moroccan arabophone novel. The focus is in particular on how the novel has been able articulate a Moroccan identity that was Arabic as opposed to French, and hence how the novel became the key literary genre for the Moroccan writers in their effort to create this identity after independence in 1956.
Saugestad received his PhD from SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in Comparative Literature. His thesis, which is to be published in the series “Literature in Context” by Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden 2008, dealt with the process of individuation and the shaping of identity in the modern novel focusing on four different literatures. The Norwegian through the work of Knut Hamsun, the Irish through James Joyce, the Egyptian through Naguib Mahfouz and the Sudanese through Tayeb Salih. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Oslo, majoring in European intellectual history and has a MA in Middle Eastern Studies also from SOAS.
Saugestad also runs his own publishing house that publishes both fiction and non fiction from and about the Arab Middle East translated into Norwegian.
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Jeaannie Sowers is an assistant professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. She received her doctorate from Princeton University in comparative politics. Her research interests focus on environmental politics and natural resource management in Egypt and the Arab world. Recent publications include "Nature Reserves and Authoritarian Rule in Egypt: Embedded Autonomy Revisited," the Journal of Environment and Development, forthcoming December 2007 and "The Many Injustices of Climate Change," Global Environmental Politics, 7 (4), Fall 2007. Her current project explores water management, statist environmental narratives, and land reclamation projects in Egypt and Libya.
Pre-Doctoral Fellow
Coskun Tastan is a Ph.D. candidate at the department of sociology, Middle East Technical University (Turkey). Currently, he is a visiting researcher at Harvard CMES and studying psychoanalysis under the mentorship of M.D. Lewis Kirshner of Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institution (BPSI). Coskun Tastan's primary area of interest is xenophobia. About a century later, he is revitalizing Georg Simmel's question "Who is a stranger?" with such additions as "When and how we hate or have fear of strangers?" Tastan is utilizing psychoanalysis to answer this kind of questions, by focusing on the xenophobic aspect of Turkish nationalism.
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Bio unavailable at this time.
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Umut Uzer taught as assistant professor of international relations at Atilim University, Ankara, Turkey between 2004 and 2007. He received his PhD in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville in 2006. His master’s degree was in international relations from the Middle East Technical University and his undergraduate degree, from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He has served twice as election observer in Azerbaijan and once in Palestine for the presidential election in 2005. Uzer is currently writing a book on Turkish foreign policy and Kemalist state identity. He is also working on a biography of Rauf Denktas and his impact on Turkish foreign policy making.
Post-Doctoral Fellow
I was born in the Druze village of Yarka. I received my PhD from Hebrew University in Israel (2007). My dissertation which was carried outt under the supervision of Prof. Moshe Maoz, explores the relationship between the Druze community and the Lebanese state from 1943-1975. Between the years of 1998-2006, I worked as a junior lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University, and I taught two main courses: Introduction to the Islamic Religion and Methodology Tutorial. Between the years of 2005-2007, I taught three main courses at the Open University: Introduction to the History of the Religion of Islam, Introduction to the Modern History of the Middle East, and the Middle East between the World Wars.
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