Middle East Center Staff
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet received her B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead Scholar. She completed her M.A., M.Phil., & Ph.D. in history at Yale University. Her book, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946 (Princeton University Press, 1999) discusses Iranian nationalism and analyzes the significance of land and border disputes, with attention to Iran 's shared boundaries with the Ottoman Empire (later Iraq and Turkey), Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf region. Her book is being translated into Persian by Kitabsara Press, Tehran, Iran.
Professor Kashani-Sabet teaches courses on various aspects of modern Middle Eastern history, including ethnic and political conflicts, gender and women's issues, popular culture, diplomatic history, revolutionary ideologies, and general surveys. She is finishing a book on the history of women in modern Iran. She is also completing a book on America's historical relationship with Iran and the Islamic world. (Prof. Kashani-Sabet's website)
Erika Tapp is the Research Assistant of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She supports the Director and Associate Director in their projects at the MEC. She is currently finishing her dissertation in Art History entitled “Colonial Modernismo: The Architecture of Spanish Morocco.” Her research interests focus on 19th and 20th- century architecture in the Middle East and North Africa. She has taught a wide variety of courses at Penn and Rosemont College. She received her Bachelors of Architecture from Cornell University, and has worked as a architectural and urban designer in Los Angeles, New Mexico, and Philadelphia. She worked for several years on reconstruction efforts in Bosnia Herzegovina with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture's Mostar 2005 program, and has exhibited her photography of the region.
Jinhee Song provides administrative support for staff, faculty and students at the Middle East Center. She received her B.A. in Chinese language and Business Administration at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea, which is a highly specialized school in foreign languages and area studies. She also studied at Capital Normal University in Beijing, China, from 2000 to 2002 and spent a year in India, where she worked as an interpreter/translator in Korean-English-Chinese.