STUDENT NEWS
Jennifer Jacobs (Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology) published her first article " 'Unintelligibles' in vocal perforamnce at Middle Eastern marriage celebrations" in Text and Talk 27-4.
Thomas Hill (FLAS recipient and Ph.D. candidate, Graduate School of
Education) will be leading a team based at Columbia University's Center
for International Conflict Resolution that will provide expertise to the
new Iraq Civil Society Conflict Mitigation Program in Iraq. Tom's team
will work in partnership with the international NGO Relief
International, which was awarded $22 million over two years to conduct
the new program. Tom and his colleagues will be developing and
overseeing two major elements of this project: development and promotion
of community-centered participatory conflict assessment strategies with
Iraqi activists in all of the country's 18 governorates; and the
development of a sustainable countrywide university-based network of
scholars, political figures and media professionals focused on
strengthening multidisciplinary peacebuilding practice in their sectors
as well as across sectors.
There are a total of 10 Penn faculty and students presenting at this year's Middle East Studies Association (MESA) annual Conference. Click here to see their paper titles!
Tristan James Mabry (Ph.D. –Department of Political Science) is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He has also taught international politics at Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College. His dissertation, which he defended in 2007, is entitlted “Nationalism, Language and Islam: a cross-regional comparative study of Muslim minority conflict”
Leslee Katrina Michelsen (Ph.D. candidate - History of Art) was awarded a Kolb Fellowship for 2007-2009, and just completed her second year of fieldwork in Afghanistan.
Gretchen Head (Ph.D. candidate - NELC) is teaching Arabic full-time at Drew University for 2007-2008.
Thomas Hill (Ph.D. candidate - Graduate School of Education) traveled to Sulaimani and Kirkuk in northern Iraq in June 2007 as part of a project that is supporting the enhancement of peacebuilding capacity of Iraqi universities. Tom facilitated two days of meetings with instructors from Kirkuk University and Baghdad University who are developing formal and informal educational initiatives that promote peaceful conflict
resolution strategies. The United States Institute of Peace is sponsoring Tom’s ongoing work with these two groups of scholar-practitioners.
Congratulations to our FLAS recipients for AY 07/08:
David Faris (Ph.D. candidate, Political Science)
Thomas Hill (Ph.D. candidate, Graduate School of Education)
Katherine Aid (Ph.D. candidate, Comparative Literature)
Marie Grace Brown (Ph.D. candidate, History)
Nicholas Harris (Masters Student, Near East Languages and Civilizations)
John Rossetti (Ph.D. candidate, Near East Languages and Civilizations)
Carolyn Brunelle (Ph.D. candidate, Near East Languages and Civilizations)
Ed Webb (Ph.D. candidate, Political Science), our former Research Assistant, took up a full-time teaching position at Dickinson College in the Department of International Studies and Political Science. Ed will defend his dissertation this fall.
Sarah Salwen (Ph.D. candidate, Political Science) had three book reviews published recently:
Journal of Church and State (Volume 49 Spring 2007 Number 2), “Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen” by Jillian Schwedler.
Middle East Policy (Volume XIII, Winter 2006, Number 4), “Structuring Conflict in the Arab World: Incumbents, Opponents, and
Institutions” by Ellen Lust-Okar.
http://www.mepc.org/journal_vol13/0612_Salwen.asp (full text)Journal of Church and State (Volume 48 Autumn 2006 Number 4), “Hizbullah: The Story from Within” by Naim Qassem.
Linda Meiberg (Ph.D. candidate, Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean) is currently writing her dissertation entitled "Figural Motifs on Philistine Pottery and Their Connections with The Aegean World" in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Group of Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World. For the past year she has been teaching modern Hebrew through Gratz College and working as a Research Assistant for the Center for Ancient Studies here at Penn. Linda has recently been awarded the Samuel H. Kress Traveling Fellowship and will be spending the 2007-2008 academic year at the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research and at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens completing her dissertation research.
David Faris (Ph.D. candidate, Political Science) is delivering a paper at the Association of Internet Researchers annual conference in Vancouver on October 18th, called "Crashing the Bab: Web Activism and Regime Response in the Middle East." David has been awarded a FLAS for dissertation research on the impact of the internet in Arab politics, and also has a regular column in Philadelphia’s City Paper.
Tarek Kahlaoui (Ph.D. candidate, History of Art) is working on his dissertation, "The Depiction of the Mediterranean in Islamic Cartography 11th-16th centuries". Tarek participated in the International Conference of the History of Cartography, held in Berne, Switzerland in July, 2007, with a paper titled "On a Western Islamic School of Mediterranean Navigational Knowledge and Mapmaking in the Late Medieval Period (12th-16th centuries)". He will be participating in the
upcoming MESA conference in Montreal with a paper titled "The Creation and Propagation of the Mediterranean through Islamic Cartography".
He is currently writing an article on contemporary architecture in
Tunisia for a book on Arab contemporary architecture, which will be published by the Center for the Study of Architecture in the Arab Region.
Rob Riggs (Ph.D. candidate, Near East Languages and Civilizations), has been awarded, in addition to a FLAS Summer Fellowship for 2007, three dissertation fellowships for next academic year: the De Kármán Dissertation Fellowship; Penfield Dissertation Research Fellowship; and the Harvey Fellowship. He will give talks at MESA in Montreal on "Activist vs. Quietist Ayatullahs? Correcting Misrepresentations by a Comparative Textual Analysis of 'Ali al-Sistani and Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah”, at the Dorushe Syriac Studies Conference on "Ibn Qutayba's Usage of Arabic Biblical References: A Place for Syriac Informants?", and at the University of Dundee, Scotland, on “Ali al-Sistani: A Cosmopolitan Ayatollah?"
A New Major and Minor in Modern Middle East Studies
 A prospective student studies information about the new Major and Minor at the Penn Majors Fair on Wednesday, 14 March |
The biggest news for undergraduates is the launch in academic year 2007-08 of the new Major and Minor in Modern Middle East Studies. Find out more here. The Center will host a lunch meeting for prospective students on Thursday, March 29, 12 noon-1:30 pm in Room 209, College Hall. |
Graduate students at Penn continue to study Middle Eastern issues across a range of disciplines. Some have presented their latest work in the Center's Graduate Student Colloquium: read the abstracts of their work here. As well as carrying out their research, many of Penn's graduate students doing Middle Eastern related work teach at area colleges such as Swarthmore, Haverford, and Temple, as well as at Penn, and participate in the Center's outreach efforts with the local community.