Mona Atia - George Washington University
Mona Atia is Associate Professor of Geography and International Affairs at the George Washington University and Director of the Middle East Studies Program. She is a critical development geographer whose areas of expertise include Islamic charity, philanthropy, housing/urban development, the production of poverty knowledge, and the spatial politics of marginalization. She is author of Building a House in Heaven: Pious Neoliberalism and Islamic Charity in Egypt (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Elif Babül- Mount Holyoke College
Elif Babül is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. Her publications include Bureaucratic Intimacies: Translating Human Rights in Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2017), as well as a number of articles in both English and Turkish in journals such as American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review and New Perspectives on Turkey; as well as edited volumes such as Diaspora and Memory: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics.
Jessica Barnes - University of South Carolina
Jessica is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and School of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of South Carolina. Her work focuses on the culture and politics of resource use and environmental change in the Middle East. Her publications include Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt (Duke University Press, 2014), Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change (coedited with Michael Dove, Yale University Press, 2015), and articles in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Social Studies of Science, Critique of Anthropology, and Society and Space. She is currently working on a book that draws on ethnographic and archival research to examine food security in Egypt and the longstanding identification of security with self-sufficiency in wheat and bread.
Andy Clarno - University of Illinois at Chicago
Andy Clarno is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on urban marginality, policing and struggles for social justice in an era of neoliberal globalization. Andy has just completed a book manuscript tentatively titled Neoliberal Apartheid, which analyzes the impact of neoliberalization and securitization on race, class and space in South Africa and Palestine/Israel after 1994.
Ilana Feldman - George Washington University
Ilana Feldman is Professor of Anthropology, History, and International Affairs at George Washington University. Her research has focused on the Palestinian experience, both inside and outside of historic Palestine, examining practices of government, humanitarianism, policing, displacement, and citizenship. She is the author of Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-67 (Duke University Press, 2008), Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule (Stanford University Press, 2015), Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics (University of California Press, 2018); and co-editor (with Miriam Ticktin) of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Duke University Press, 2010).
Kevan Harris - University of California, Los Angeles
Kevan Harris is Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of California, Los Angeles. He is a faculty advisor to the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies and the UCLA Program on Central Asia. Harris’ work on post-revolutionary Iran can be found in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Mobilization: An International Journal, New Left Review, and The London Review of Books. His book, A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran, will be published in 2017 by University of California Press.
Anjali Kamat - Journalist
Anjali Kamat is an award-winning journalist currently working on a book on migrant labor in the Middle East. She’s a correspondent with Fault Lines, a current affairs documentary show on Al Jazeera America and Al Jazeera English, and was formerly a producer/correspondent for the independent radio and television program Democracy Now. She’s reported from the Middle East, South Asia and the United States for over a decade and spent 2011 covering the Arab uprisings from Egypt and Libya. She has an MA in Near Eastern Studies from New York University and a post-graduate diploma from the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai.
Arang Keshavarzian - New York University
Arang Keshavarzian is a faculty member in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. His teaching and research revolve around comparative politics and political economy of the Middle East with a focus on Iran and the Persian Gulf region. He is the author of Bazaar and State in Iran as well as many essays on urban politics, state-building and clerical hierarchies, smuggling, authoritarianism, and political economy of trade. He was the on MERIP’s editorial committee and editorial board in the 2000s and has rejoined in 2016.
Miriam Lowi - The College of New Jersey
Miriam Lowi is Professor of Comparative and Middle East Politics at The College of New Jersey. She is the author of Water and Power: the Politics of a Scarce Resource in the Jordan River Basin (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Oil Wealth and the Poverty of Politics: Algeria Compared (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Her current book project looks at the politics of identity in Gulf oil monarchies. She is Chair of the Middle East Studies Association’s Committee on Academic Freedom-Middle East and North Africa wing.
Alex Lubin - University of New Mexico
Alex Lubin is Professor and Chair of the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico. From 2011 to 2014 he directed the Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut. His teaching and scholarship engage global histories of race and diaspora, black internationalism, and US-Middle East political and cultural encounters. His most recent book is Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
Shana Marshall - George Washington University
Shana Marshall is Associate Director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. She earned her PhD in International Relations and Comparative Politics of the Middle East at the University of Maryland in 2012. Her research focuses on the political economy of militaries in Egypt, Jordan and the UAE, and has appeared in Middle East Report (MERIP), The International Journal of Middle East Studies, Jadaliyya, and the Carnegie Middle East Center.
Pete Moore - Case Western Reserve University
Pete W. Moore is the Marcus A. Hanna Associate Professor in Politics at Case Western Reserve University. He has held previous faculty positions at Concordia University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Miami in Coral Gables. His research explores issues of political economy, state-society relations, and sub-state conflict in the Gulf and the Levant.
Mezna Qato - University of Cambridge
Mezna Qato is the Junior Research Fellow in Middle East History at King’s College, University of Cambridge. She is currently writing a social history of education for Palestinian refugees, and is more broadly engaged with questions of class, development, settler-colonialism and the politics and practices of archives. She is a founding steering committee member of the Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, and is research co-coordinator of RIMAAL, the interdisciplinary research network on Latin America and the Arab World. She is active in various refugee initiatives in the US, Europe and Arab world.
Curtis Ryan - Appalachian State University
Curtis Ryan is a Professor of Political Science at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. Ryan served as a Fulbright Scholar (1992-93) at the Center for Strategic Studies, University of Jordan, in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and was twice named a Peace Scholar by the United States Institute of Peace. He is the author of two books: Jordan in Transition: From Hussein to Abdullah (Lynne Rienner, 2002) and Inter-Arab Alliances: Regime Security and Jordanian Foreign Policy (University Press of Florida, 2009).
Atef Said - University of Illinois at Chicago
Atef Said is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests include social theory, political sociology, social movements, revolutions and sociology of the Middle East as well as sociology of colonialism and empire. Before starting his academic career, Said worked as a human rights attorney and researcher in Egypt from 1995 to 2004, where he practiced human rights law and directed research initiatives in different human rights organizations. He wrote two books “Torture in Egypt: A Judicial Reality” (2000), published by the Human Rights Center for the Assistance of Prisoners, and “Torture Is a Crime Against Humanity” (2008), published by the Hisham Mubarak Law Center. Both organizations are based in Cairo, Egypt. He is currently working on a book manuscript about the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and its aftermath.
Zakia Salime - Rutgers University
Zakia Salime is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She has published on gender, globalization, social movements, Islamophobia and neoliberalism. Her research interests include race, empire, the political economy of the “war on terror,” development policies, Islamic societies and movements and Middle East-US relations. She is the author of Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco (Minnesota, 2011) and co-editor (with Frances Hasso) of Freedom without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Uprisings (Duke, 2016).
Jillian Schwedler - Hunter College
Jillian Schwedler is Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and the Graduate Center, and a Non-resident Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council. She is author of several books, including Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (Cambridge 2006) and most recently editor (with Laleh Khalili) of Policing and Prisons in the Middle East (Columbia/Hurst 2010). Her work broadly engages questions of contentious politics, political geography, Islamist politics, policing, neoliberalism, and political dissent. She is currently finishing a book examining political protests and policing in Jordan, with special attention to the neoliberal period and the regime’s numerous rebranding projects.
Nazanin Shahrokni - Syracuse University
Nazanin Shahrokni is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Her research interests include gendered aspects of state formation, urban segregation and the politics of mobility. Nazanin also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and as a board member of the Research Committee on Women in Society at the International Sociological Association. Prior to pursuing an academic career, Nazanin worked as a journalist and senior editor for Zanan magazine, a well-known feminist monthly in Iran.
Nabil al-Tikriti - University of Mary Washington
Nabil Al-Tikriti is currently Associate Professor of Middle East History at the University of Mary Washington, and was a member of the MSF/Doctors Without Borders USA Board of Directors from 2011 to 2017, culminating as Vice President in 2016-17. He has also served as a consultant, election monitor, and relief worker at a number of field locations in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
