Each academic year, CMES hosts visiting researchers doing work on any number of projects related to the Middle East. The bios below were provided by the scholars themselves. 

 

VISITING SCHOLARS

Butrus Abu-Manneh
Butrus Abu-Manneh belongs to the Arab community in Israel. He studied History and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and after graduation he joined St. Antony's College, Oxford University where he wrote his Ph.D.under the supervision of Prof. Albert H. Hourani. In October 1971 he joined the faculty of the University of Haifa, Israel, as a Lecturer at the Department of Middle East History. Presently he is Prof, Emeritus of this University. Prof. Abu-Manneh published many studies on the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century including studies on the Tanzimat and their application, especially in the Arab provinces of the Empire. He is interested also in the expansion of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi order and its branch the Khalidi sub-order in the Ottoman lands and published a number of studies on this subject. Some of his studies were collected and published in a book entitled: "Studies on Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century, 1826-1876. (Istanbul, Isis, 2001)"

Ismail Gulec
Originally from Kadikoy, Turkey, Ismail Gülec graduated from the University of Istanbul, in 1993.  He obtained his M.A. (1997) and PhD (2002) at Istanbul University’s Institute of Social Sciences.  His doctorate dissertation was on Ismail Hakki Bursevi's Masnavi commentary. He was a researcher at the Institute of Turkish Research Studies until 2005, when he became an Associate Professor at Sakarya University in the Department of Turkish Education.  He is interested in Old Turkish literature and Turkish mystic literature, particularly Mavlana's Masnavi and its translations and commentaries.  Gülec has participated in many international symposiums and written numerous books and articles.  His most important books include Ismail Hakki Bursevi’s Ruhu’l-Mesnevi (Istanbul: Insan Publications, published in 2004) and Turk Edebiyatinda Mesnevi Tercume ve Serhleri (Istanbul: Pan, 2008).  He is married and has two sons.

David Kushner
Bio not available at this time.

Erol Ozvar
Bio not available at this time.

Yezid Sayigh
Bio not available at this time.

Michael Winter
Michael Winter is Professor Emeritus of the History of the Middle East at Tel Aviv University. He earned his MA in the History of the Muslim Countries at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1969) and his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies at UCLA (1972). Since 1972, until his retirement in 2003, he taught the history of the Middle East at Tel Aviv University. He has done research work in the Ottoman archives and in libraries in Israel, Turkey and Europe and the US. He was Visiting Professor and Visiting Scholar at US universities, among them Harvard, Cornell and the University of Arizona. Michael Winter's past and present research topics are the history of the Arab lands, mainly under the Mamluks and the Ottomans, with an emphasis on Egypt and Syria; Sufism; Muslim political thought; ulama and qadis; sada/ashraf; Arabic and Turkish historiography; cultural ties between Arabs and Turks during the Ottoman period; the Jewish community in Ottoman Egypt and education in the per-modern and modern Middle East.

 

FELLOWS

Nahid Kabir
Nahid Afrose Kabir is author of Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History (London: Routledge 2005). She is a research fellow at the Centre for Applied Social Marketing Research, School of Social Marketing, Tourism and Leisure at the Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia. At the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, she is involved in Islam in the West program. Her research interests include Australian/British/American-Muslim immigration and cultural history, media and society, youth identity, women in Islam, Islam and politics, and social marketing, and health promotion. Nahid Kabir was born in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) and studied History (BA Hons and MA) in the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. She earned an MA in Historical Studies and her PhD in History from the University of Queensland, Australia. Nahid Kabir has spent many years in Pakistan (then West Pakistan), the United States, the Middle East, and Australia. This broad cultural and international exposure is assisting her in her research. Her publications include journal articles and book chapters. Nahid Kabir has presented conference papers both nationally and internationally. 

Rajani Kanth
Rajani Kanth has held affiliations with many international institutions, including: the United Nations, Columbia University, University of Aarhus, Denmark, University of Texas at Austin, the National University of Singapore, Oxford University, Duke University, Tufts University , and Harvard University, amongst others. His various published works include Political Economy and Laissez-Faire (1986),  Explorations in Political Economy (1991) , Capitalism and Social Theory (1992),  Paradigms in Economic Development (1994) , Breaking With the Enlightenment (1997),  Against Economics (1997)., Against Eurocentrism ( 2005). His newest work  is titled “The Global Challenge of  Eurocentrism” (N.Y.: Macmillan, 2009, forthcoming). His teaching and research areas include International Political Economy, Globalization, Development, and Comparative Economics, Ethics and Public Policy, Comparative Business Cultures, Cross-Cultural Ethics, Rights, and Responsibilities, and Non-European Ideas and Institutions

Elaheh Kheirandish
Elaheh Kheirandish is a historian of science (PhD, Harvard ’91) with a specialty in sciences in Islamic lands. Her main research area is the history of mathematical sciences with a focus on mixed mathematical-physical sciences such as optics and mechanics. Her projects and publications have ranged from the Arabic and Persian traditions of ancient Greek sciences to the applications of the new technologies to historical studies. Her publications include a
two-volume published dissertation. Her recent courses are titled “From Alexandria to Baghdad: Classical Sciences in Islamic Lands” and “From Baghdad to Isfahan: Classical Sciences in Persian Lands” offered through Harvard’s Department of Classics and Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, and historical dialogues from the Near East: Case Studies in Early Science (freshman seminar). Her most recent work includes hosting with guest students from these courses, an exhibit at Houghton Library entitled : "Windows into Early Science: Historical Dialogues, Scientific Manuscripts and Printed Books" (April 22-July 23) http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/04.24/09-earlyscience.html

Habib Ladjevardi
Bio not available at this time. 

Ozlem Madi
Ozlem is a Ph.D. candidate at the department of Political Science, Bilkent University. She completed her B.A. at Koc University, her M.A. at Bilgi University and second M.A. at Central European University. Currently, she is doing research and writing her dissertation at Harvard University. Her dissertation aims to examine interactive relationship between new conservative and pro-Islamic elite and the resultant new societal, economic and political landscape in Turkey after the 1980s, and to understand it in the larger Middle Eastern and global context. These elite started to be visible in 1980s, and influential in 1990s and beginning of the 2000s. Today, they, though mostly concentrated within the AKP (Justice and Development Party) cadre, are strongly represented in every segments of life, stretching from political, economic and social areas. Doubtless, emergence of these new elite is one of the most important political, economic and sociological phenomenon in contemporary Turkey and in the globe. In a Bourdieu’s sense, this new class is developing a new cultural capital and habitus, distancing itself from other elite, and also disseminating its values to the other sectors of life in Turkey. The main purpose of her dissertation is to interpret the new conservative elite in its larger societal context that takes into account specific tastes, institutions, practices, personalities and networks.  In doing so, her dissertation also attempts to contribute to the literature on multiple modernities by demonstrating how economy and culture are articulated in a specific national context. It will also indirectly address the questions of Islam and Democracy, Islam and Capitalism and Islam and the West.

Hamideh Sedghi
Bio not available at this time.

Coskun Tastan
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.

Mark Tomass
Mark Tomass is an economist (PhD, Northeastern 1991), whose research work focused on using rival economic methodologies to gain insights into monetary and financial crises, the working of economic systems, organized crime, and civil conflict.  He translated and evaluated the thesis of the medieval historian A-Maqrizi on the causes of the monetary crisis in Egypt of 1404-06 and its subsequent depression.  At present, he is working on a multidisciplinary project to explain mechanisms by which the current nation states of the Near East would disintegrate.  He published many papers and book reviews in the above fields in leading economic journals. 

 

POST-DOCTORAL FELLOWS

Karam Dana
Karam Dana is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the CMES. In 2009, he received his Ph.D. in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Washington in Seattle. A political scientist and historical sociologist by training, his dissertation, “Before Their Nakba: Palestinian Society and Politics, 1920-1940,” is currently being revised for publication. In addition to his qualitative research on the Middle east, Dr. Dana is the co-Principal investigator of the Muslim American Public Opinion Survey (MAPOS), the largest university-sponsored public opinion survey to date of Muslims living in the US. At Harvard University, Dr. Dana works with the Islam in the West Program at CMES. He researches the political behavior of Muslims in the West, and currently writing a book (with Matt Barreto) on the social and political history of Islam and Muslims in the US. 

Yusri Hazran
Yusri Hazran was born in the Druze village of Yarka. He received his PhD from Hebrew University in Israel (2007) and his dissertation, which was carried out 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, Yusri worked as a junior lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University, and he taught two main courses: “Introduction to Islamic Religion” and a methodology tutorial. Between the years of 2005-2007, he also 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.”

Erez Naaman
Bio not available at this time.

Frode Saugestad
Frode Saugestad is a Post-doctoral Fellow at CMES, involved with the Moroccan
Studies Program. At Harvard, Saugestad works on a research project which
concerns identity and nationalism in the Moroccan arabophone novel. It focuses
on how the novel has been able to articulate a Moroccan identity that was
Arabic as opposed to French after independence in 1956. Saugestad received his
PhD from SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in
Comparative Literature. His thesis, 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, analyzing the
Norwegian literature through the work of Knut Hamsun, the Irish through the
work of James Joyce, the Egyptian through the work of Naguib Mahfouz and the
Sudanese through the work of Tayeb Salih.

Ayfer Karakaya- Stump
Ayfer Karakaya-Stump received her M.A. in Islamic History from Ohio State University with a thesis based on the study of an Ottoman women’s journal published in Salonica in the aftermath of the II. Constitutional Period, and subsequently began her doctoral studies in the History/Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. She has recently completed her Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Subjects of the Sultan, Disciples of the Shah: Formation and Transformation of the Kizilbash/Alevi Communities in Ottoman Anatolia” where she investigated the development of the Alevis’ socio-religious organization, which is centered around a number of charismatic family lines called ocaks. Drawing upon a group of newly available documents and manuscripts emanating from within the Alevi milieu itself, her dissertation traces the origins of the ocak system to the cosmopolitan Sufi milieu of late medieval Anatolia and accounts for the system’s evolution up to the nineteenth century. As a post-doc fellow at CMES during the academic year 2008-09, Ayfer intends to continue her research on the Wafa’i order and its Kizilbash/Alevi offshoots in Anatolia. Her publications include several articles and encyclopedia entries in English and Turkish related to women’s history, and to the history of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities and their symbiosis with the Bektashi order.

Umut Uzer
Umut Uzer is an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Maryland University College. Between 2004 and 2007, he taught at Atilim University in Ankara Turkey. He received his Ph.D. in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia in 2006. His masters degree was from the Middle East Technical University and his undergraduate degree from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Currently, Dr. Uzer is writing a book on Turkish nationalism. His publications include "Turkish Annexation of Hatay" in Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Spring 2007 and "Racism in Turkey: The Case of Huseyin Nihal Atsiz" Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, April 2002.