The Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University

Each academic year, CMES hosts visiting researchers doing work on any number of projects related to the Middle East.  The bios for the 2011-12 Visiting Researchers are below.

Visiting Scholars

Murat Borovali
Murat Borovali holds a PhD in Political Theory from the University of Manchester. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at Istanbul Bilgi University. He has worked extensively on liberal theory and distributive justice. Borovali’s present research interest is centred on liberalism and the challenges it faces, most particularly in its relation with religion. His work focuses especially on issues relating to the presence of religion in the public square, and the nature of secularism in a liberal democracy. During his time as Visiting Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Borovali aims to conduct research that attempts to provide a theoretically informed analysis that is also sensitive to contemporary political issues dominating public discussions. Among his recent publications is an article on the debates over the wearing of the headscarves in universities in Turkey: ‘Islamic Headscarves and Slippery Slopes’ in Cardozo Law Review, June 2009.

S. Koray Durak
Koray Durak received his PhD from Harvard University in History and Middle Eastern Studies in 2008. He is an assistant professor at the Department of History at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. He has been teaching courses on the history of the medieval Mediterranean region, the Byzantine history, and the history of Byzantine Constantinople. His main areas of research interest include Byzantine and medieval Islamic trade and networks of exchange, historical geography, geographical imagination in the Middle Ages, and medieval imperial ideology. He won The Young Scientists Award of The Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA-GEBİP). Among his recent publications is an article on the contemporary use of archaizing terms in Byzantine literature in Jahrbuch der Oesterreichischen Byzantinistik (May 2009), and another one on the Definition of Bilad al-Rum (Land of the Romans) in Medieval Islamic Geographies in The Journal of Intercultural Studies (June 2010). He is currently working on the exchanges and communications between the Byzantines and the Islamic Near Easterners in the early Middle Ages.

Mahdi Farhani Monfared
Dr. Mahdi Farhani Monfared is a historian concentrating on Iran and cultural matters of the middle centuries.  His other interests include the methodology and philosophy of history, Persian literature, and history and historiography of medieval Iran.  He has taught courses on these topics since 1999 in the History Department of Al-Zahra University in Tehran.  He has also worked as a researcher at the Persian Language and Literature Academy in Iran.  Dr. Farhani Monfared also is a poet and has published a collection of his Persian classic and modern poems.  His current research project is titled, “Criticism in history: based on Islamic and Iranian Historiography.”  He is the author of Shi`a Scholars Emigration From Jabal Amel to Iran Under the Safavids  (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1996) in Persian. His second important book addresses the relation between politics and culture of the last four decades of the Timurids in Iran.  He has published many other historical and literary articles.  A listing of his books and articles can be found on his website: www.fmonfared.com.

Zhiyu Li
Zhiyu Li received her MA at Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey, under the supervision of Professor Nadir Engin Uzun. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Asian and African Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU). She has worked extensively on Turkish teaching and has published four books and several articles about Turkish learning and translating. Currently as a PhD candidate in International Relations at BFSU, she focuses on Turkey’s domestic and foreign affairs, as well as the Middle East countries.

Caner Taslaman
Caner Taslaman graduated from the Sociology Department, Bogazici University.  He received MA and PhD degrees in Philosophy and Religious Studies program at Marmara University.  For his master thesis he wrote, Philosophical and Religious Analysis of the Big Bang Theory.  In his PhD he studied theory of evolution in a dissertation entitled Philosophical and Religious Analysis of the Theory of Evolution.  He received his second PhD degree from Istanbul University, Faculty of Political Sciences with a second dissertation entitled Islam in Turkey in the Globalization Process.  Additionally, he published a text on quantum theory, Quantum Theory, Philosophy and Theology.  He carried out post-doctoral research projects at Tokyo University and Oxford University.  Currently he is affiliated with Yildiz Teknik University, Istanbul, as an associate professor of philosophy.

Fellows

Lala Aliyeva
Lala Aliyeva holds PhD in history and she is currently a Senior lecturer in the History Department at Baku State University, Azerbaijan. Lala has been teaching the courses on the history of medieval Azerbaijan.  She has worked extensively on ethnogenesis of Azerbaijanis and her main areas of research interest include the ethnic and religious processes in the Caucasus, particularly in Azerbaijan during the spreading of Islam and the subsequent period. She is the author of a monograph Kipchaks and Azerbaijan: in the context of ethnogenesis (Baku, BSU press, 2006) in Azerbaijani. She has published also a number of articles concerning her research issues. Lala’s present research interest is focused on the role of religion in the formation of nation. During her time as a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Lala Aliyeva aims to continue her research on the context of comparative history and interdisciplinary manner. Among her recent publications is an article on the role of Islam, particularly Shi’ism in the formation of nation and national consciousness, titled  “Religion as one of the factors in the process of formation of ethnos” (History and its problems, 2010). 

Ata Anzali
Ata Anzali is a PhD candidate at Rice University in the Department of religious studies.  He is currently working on his dissertation titled “Towards a Broader Genealogy of Islamic Mysticism: Deconstructing 'Irfan' as a Comparative Category in Modern Persian Literature.”  The thesis investigates the socio-cultural forces behind the rise of the term irfan in contemporary Persian literature as a normative category at the expense of the traditional term tasawwuf and its marginalization.  He holds an MA in Islamic philosophy and Kalam from Tehran University and has extensively studied the philosophical and the mystical traditions of Islam at the Qom Seminary prior to coming to the US as a PhD student.

Jack Fairweather
Jack Fairweather received his BA and MA in English Literature from Lincoln College, Oxford.  He is an expert on the American and British military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, recent defence policy in both countries, and the issues surrounding humanitarian intervention in the Middle East.  A former Middle East correspondent, Fairweather spent four years as the Daily Telegraph’s Baghdad and Gulf correspondent.  He was an embedded reporter during the Iraq invasion, and won the British equivalent of the Pulitzer prize for his reporting on Iraq’s civil war.  Most recently, Fairweather has been the Washington Post’s Islamic world correspondent, where he has created Islam’s Advance, a multi-media Post webpage that’s viewed by 80,000 viewers a month.  He is a contributor to Mother Jones and the Atlantic Monthly and a senior editor at the Solutions Journal.

Habib Ladjevardi
Habib Ladjevardi has been director of the Iranian Oral History Project at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies since 1981 and chair of the editorial board of the Harvard Middle Eastern Monograph Series since 1990. Born in Tehran, he grew up in Scarsdale, New York, and received his BS from Yale University, MBA from Harvard University, and PhD from the University of Oxford. Dr. Ladjevardi returned to Iran in 1963 to work in his family's business, the Behshahr Industrial Group, where he was one of the managing directors. He was the principal founder of the Iran Center for Management Studies in Tehran (established in 1970 in cooperation with members of the faculty of the Harvard Business School), where he taught Public Policy until 1978. He also served on a number of boards and councils in the private and public sectors. Dr. Ladjevardi is the author of Labor Unions and Autocracy in Iran (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985).

Erol Özvar
Erol Özvar received his BA in Economics, and MA and PhD in Economic History from Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey.  He is interested in economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East.  He is the author of Osmanli Maliyesinde Malikane Uygulamasi (Life-Term Tax Farming in the Ottoman Finances) (2004), which has been awarded as best book by Garanti Bank and the Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Center in a Prize Competition for Research on History of Banking and Finance.  He also edited, with Mehmet Genc, the Ottoman budgets and financial data into two volumes, Osmanli Maliyesi: Kurumlar ve Butceler (the Ottoman Finances: Institutitons and Budgets), Istanbul, 2006.  His publications include a variety of efforts to understand changes in economic and financial institutions in the Middle East in early modern era.  He is currently studying the effects of riba (Islamic usury ban) on private and public finance in the Ottoman Empire in pre-modern period.

Post-Doctoral Fellows

Naor Ben-Yehoyada
Naor Ben-Yehoyada is a Visiting Lecturer and Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in Harvard’s Anthropology Department, Director of Undergraduate Programs at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and a Visiting Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.  He studies the historical anthropology of region formation in the Mediterranean, specifically between Sicily and Tunisia and in the Levant in the 20th century.  In his dissertation, Mediterranean, Becoming and Unbecoming: Fishing, Smuggling, and Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II, as well as in his published articles, he examines the political economy and the cultural processes that maritime region formation entails.  His publications include “The Moral Perils of Mediterraneanism: Second Generation Immigrants Practicing Personhood between Sicily and Tunisia,” in Journal of Modern Italian Studies, and “The Reluctant Seafarers: Fishing, self-acculturation, and the stumbling Zionist colonization of the Palestine Coast in the Interbellum Period,” forthcoming in Jewish Culture and History.  Naor will teach the course Mediterranean Becoming: Historical Anthropology of North Africa and Southern Europe in fall 2011, and Conflict and Coexistence: Historical Anthropology of Israel/Palestine and a seminar on Political Economy in the spring.

Çiğdem Benam
Çiğdem holds a BSc in Political Science and public Administration from the Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey, an MScEcon in Security Studies from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, United Kingdom, and a PhD in International Relations from METU. She was a study fellow at the University of Oxford in 2007-2008 and was awarded the prestigious Chevening Scholarship by British Council to pursue her research at Oxford. While pursuing her PhD, she also worked at the Union of Chambers of Commerce and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey for almost five years. Her PhD thesis was titled “Internal Security and the New Border Management Model of the EU: Migration-Security Nexus.” Her current research interest focuses on the Middle East, more specifically, Turkish politics and relations with Iran.

Yoav Mehozay
Yoav Mehozay holds a PhD in Political Sociology and History from the New School for Social Research. Currently he is a Visiting Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and holds a fulltime joint lectureship position in the Departments of History and Political Science at Northeastern University. At Northeastern, he is affiliated with the Middle East Center for Peace, Culture, and Development and teaches Middle East history and politics. Yoav is a broadly trained interdisciplinary scholar, whose work combines history, political theory and legal theory. His research centers on the relationship between law and power. In his dissertation, titled The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Israel’s Emergency Regime Revisited, he analyzed Israel’s complex and convoluted emergency enactment. In his current study he looks at the role of emergency powers in Israel’s transformation into a free market economy. Yoav also works on a collaboration comparing emergency regimes in the Middle East.

Fariba Parsa
Fariba Parsa is a political scientist from Denmark.  She received her PhD, titled Islamic Fundamentalists and Islamic Reformists: A Discourse Analysis of the Ideological Conflict Between the Liberal Islamic Reformists and Communitarian Islamic Fundamentalists on the Concepts of “Freedom” and “Democracy” in Iran, 1997-2001 in the Department for Society and Globalisation, at Roskilde University in 2008.  The focus of that work is the ideological distinction between two kinds of Islam and their struggle to achieve political and moral-intellectual leadership.  She is now working on a post-doctoral project, entitled A theory of political secularism in Iran, concentrates on current Iranian politics.  She has a Masters Degree in Political Science from the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen.  She has taught on Iranian politics, written articles, and given both academic and popular oral presentations during the last two decades.  She is a part-time lecturer at Roskilde University and has been active in Danish NGOs and media about Iranian politics.

Özlem Sert
Özlem Sert studied Political Science and Public Administration at the Middle East Technical University, in Ankara, Turkey.  She received her MA in Islamic History from the History Department at Hacettepe University, Ankara.  She has been working in the same department since 1998 (1998-2008 as a Research Assistant and 2008-2010 as a Teaching Assistant).  Her PhD was awarded in February of 2008 from Ludwig Maximilians University under the supervision of Professor Suraiya Faroqhi.  Her doctoral thesis is titled, Reconstructing a Town from its Court Records, Rodosçuk (1546-1552).  Her research interests include urban history, climate history, mediterranean history, gender studies, minorities and historiography.  Her publications include “Becoming a Baker in Rodosçuk (1546-1552): A Textual Analysis of 'Records of Designation,'" New Perspectives on Turkey, Vol. 42 (Spring 2010): 159-178; Umudun Tarihine Yolculuk, Yedi Uyurlar Efsanesi, (Ankara: Phoenix Yay nevi, 2009); “Rodosçuk Kentinde Yasak Aşklar (1546-1549): Şer’iye Sicillerinden Zina Metinlerini Okumak," Suraiya Faroqhi’ye Armağan, Osmanli ’nin Peşinde Bir Yaşam, derleyen: Onur Yildirim, (Ankara: İmge Kitapevi, 2008); “Kelemen Mikes’in Mektuplar na Göre 1716-1758 Y llar Mevsim Takvimi: Osmanl Topraklar nda Küçük Buzul Çağ n n Etkileri Hakk nda Baz Notlar,” Kebikeç, Tarm Tarihi Dosyas 1, Vol. 23 (2007): 79-83.

Masayuki Ueno
Masayuki Ueno is a postdoctoral fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.  He studies the history of the Ottoman Empire.  His main research area is the non-Muslim community under Ottoman rule, with a focus on the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul.  Ueno received his MA in 2004 and PhD in 2010 from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo.  Using both the Ottoman Turkish and Armenian sources, in his dissertation, he dealt with the development of the Istanbul Patriarchate as the center of the Armenian community and its relation with the Ottoman government during the Tanzimat Period (1839-1876).  His current project is titled, “The Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul and Provincial Armenians in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire.”  He has published some papers on the Ottoman Armenians in academic journals in Japanese.