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--------R-SHIEF'S ADVISORY BOARD -------- | |
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Osama Abi-Mershed is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. His research interests include colonial Algeria, colonial education, modern France, and Franco-Maghribi relations. He teaches courses on the history of North Africa and the Western Mediterranean (medieval and modern); Muslim Spain; the Muslim and Arab worlds; and the modern Middle East. at Georgetown University. His research interests include colonial Algeria, colonial education, modern France, and Franco-Maghribi relations. He teaches courses on the history of North Africa and the Western Mediterranean (medieval and modern); of Muslim Spain; of the Muslim and Arab worlds; and of the modern Middle East. current location: Washington, D.C. |
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Miriyam Aouragh is trained as an anthropologist at the Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam), Goldsmiths University (London) and Birzeit University (Palestine), focusing on Race and Racism and Palestinian political movements, Miriyam Aouragh continued as a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam where she embarked on a study of the Palestinian Internet. She has interests in mobility, interactivity, empowerment, grassroots activism and the construction of (imagined) online communities. She is studying the implications of new generation/Internet 2.0 for Palestinian and Lebanese activists. She also taught on anthropology, sociology and ethnic and racial studies at the University of Amsterdam. After her PhD, the nature, style and political economies of what she termed 'Cyber Intifada', became her main research focus. Miriyam was awarded a Rubicon (NWO) grant to embark on this research at the current location: London, U.K. |
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Brenda E. Bickett is the Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies Bibliographer at Georgetown University Library. Educated at the University of Texas-Austin & the University of Michigan, where she earned master’s degrees in Middle Eastern Studies and Library/Information Science, her languages include Arabic, French, Italian, Persian and Turkish and she has traveled /studied/worked in Egypt, France, Sultanate of Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Her research interests are all over the maps of the region, by discipline and geography. She is active in the Middle East Librarians and the Middle East Studies associations where she has worked on digital initiatives for preservation and creation of new media. current location: Washington, D.C. |
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Shahid Buttar is a civil rights lawyer, hip-hop MC, independent columnist, grassroots community organizer, singer and poet. Professionally, he assumed leadership of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee as Executive Director in May 2009. He also organized resistance at the 2005 Counter-Inaugural and the 2004 Republican National Convention— where Democracy Now! named one of his public addresses among "The Best of 2004." Shahid graduated in 2003 from Stanford Law School. As a musician, Shahid has performed around the world for audiences as large as 50,000. His debut CD, Get Outta Your Chair, was released in 2008 and features music from the funk, blues, hip-hop, house, drum 'n bass, and South Asian fusion traditions, including Bumpin’ in My SUV and the Baghdad Blues. He also writes a column on politics and constitutional law on Huffington Post.
current location: Washington, D.C. |
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Benjamin Doherty is Technologist for the Electronic Intifada, data model expert, and community activist. He could have received an undergraduate humanities degree from the University of Chicago but chose to pursue social justice activism instead. Before beginning to work with the Palestinian solidarity movement in 1999, Doherty was focused on issues of criminal justice, poverty, homelessness, queer politics, and Chicago city politics. He has been designing posters and signs on Apple computers since age 7 and is fanatical about the Macintosh platform used by the EI Team. Doherty has been a member of the Chicago Palestine Film Festival committee since 2001. He also designs databases and other Internet applications for non-profit organizations in PHP, Java, and WebObjects 5.
current location: Chicago, Illinois |
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Carol N. Fadda- Conrey is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University. Her research and teaching interests include the study of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, war, trauma, and transnational identities in Arab and Arab-American literary texts. Her essays on Middle Eastern and Arab American literature have appeared in Studies in the Humanities, MELUS, and Al- Raida, as well as in the edited collections Arabs in America: Interdisciplinary Essays on the Arab Diaspora (2006) and Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity through Writing (2007).
current location: Syracuse, New York |
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Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East Studies Program and teaches in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University, and is Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Forthcoming, 2011, Stanford University Press). Bassam serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal, a peer-reviewed research publication, co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of a film series on Arabs and Terrorism. He is currently working on his book on Syria’s political economy, provisionally titled “The Political Economy of Regime Security: State-Business Networks in Syria.” Bassam recently directed a new film series on Arab/Muslim immigrants in Europe, titled The “Other” Threat. He also serves on the Editorial Committee of Middle East Report and is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya E-zine. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford's Program for Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World.
current location: Washington, D.C. |
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Steven Keller has served since January 2006 as country director in the West Bank and Gaza for America-Mideast Educational and Training Services (AMIDEAST), a private, nonprofit organization that strengthens mutual understanding and cooperation between Americans and the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa. Prior to his current post, Steven worked at AMIDEAST's headquarters for more than three years heading up the organization's new business and program development. His interest in and focus on education and development in the Arab World began in Tunisia, where he served during the early nineties as a volunteer in the United States Peace Corps. His experience also includes working as an independent contractor for USAID in Washington, DC as well as a year-long graduate internship at the Galilee Society − The Arab National Society for Health Research and Services − which strives to achieve equitable health, environmental and socio-economic conditions for Palestinian Arabs in Israel. Steven holds a Master's degree from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, part of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, as well as a Bachelor's degree from the College of Architecture and Urban Studies at Virginia Tech. He currently lives on the West Bank in Ramallah, Palestine.
current location: Ramallah, Palestine |
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Laurie King holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Indiana University-Bloomington. She has done anthropological field research among Palestinian citizens of Israel, and in post-war Beirut. King was managing editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies the quarterly journal of the Institute of Palestine Studies (published by the University of California Press),from 2007-2009, and was editor in chief of Middle East Report (MERIP) from 1998-2000. King is also co-founder of the online news sources, Electronic Intifada, Electronic Iraq, and Electronic Lebanon. She is visiting professor of Anthropology and Arab Studies at Georgetown University.
current location: Washington, D.C. |
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Lynn Maalouf manages the Lebanon program of the International Center for Transitional Justice, a New York based human rights NGO, focusing on such issues as the missing and enforced disappearances, political initiatives dealing with postwar reconciliation, and archiving. She was formerly the Beirut correspondent for the English-language service of Radio France Internationale and a correspondent for The Washington Post. She is a board member and contributor to the Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World’s publication Al Raida, affiliated with the Lebanese American University. Prior to that, she was editor of the English-language website of the pan-Arab publication, Al Hayat, between 2002 and 2004. She has authored the script for the short film Blue Line.
current location Beirut, Lebanon |
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Marcy Newman teaches English in Lebanon and is the author of the forthcoming The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans. She is a co-founder of the U.S. Campaign of the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (www.usacbi.org). Newman has taught at Boise State University, American University of Beirut, the University of Jordan, and An-Najah University.
current location: Broumana, Lebanon |
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Sherene Seikaly is Assistant Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. She is Co-Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and co-founder and contributing editor of Jadaliyya E-zine. Her manuscript in progress, “Meatless Days: Consumption and Capitalism in Wartime Palestine 1939-1948.” Situated at the intersections of studies of consumption, political economy, and colonialism, her research traces the formation of a Palestinian Arab middle class before the defining rupture of 1948. Seikaly’s interests range from social and cultural history of daily practices to the trajectories of colonial and post-colonial development. Seikaly has taught courses on the history of the modern Middle East, Zionism, the history of Palestine/Israel, and has developed graduate seminars that wed material and cultural approaches to the history of the modern Middle East.
current location: Cairo, Egypt |
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Helga Tawil-Souri is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University where she teaches courses on Islam and media, international development, media globalization, and Israel/Palestine. Before joining academia Tawil-Souri had a career as a strategic planner at Sony Pictures Entertainment and ran her own Internet consultancy. In her academic work, Tawil-Souri focuses on issues of globalization, media technologies, cultural expressions and their relationship to economic and political change in the Middle East and especially the Palestinian Territories. Her interest in media is generally in the cultural, political, and economic significance of what happens behind the scenes. She is currently finishing her manuscript “Digital Occupation”, which analyses hi-tech infrastructures in Palestine/Israel. She has published extensively on Arab and Palestinian broadcasting industries, contemporary Palestinian culture, including research on video games, internet development, cinema, as well as spaces of control and mediation such as checkpoints and ID cards in journals ranging from Social Text and Space and Culture to Jerusalem Quarterly and International Journal of Cultural Studies. She currently serves on the editorial board and as reviews editor for the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Tawil-Souri is also a documentary filmmaker and photographer.
current location: New York, New York |