Presenters and Their Lectures (Various Years)
Ziad Abu-Rish: History and Historiography of Post-Colonial Lebanon
Ziad Abu-Rish is Co-Director of the MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts, and Visiting Associate Professor of Human Rights, at Bard College. He is also a 2020–21 American Druze Foundation Fellow in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. His research explores state formation, economic development, and popular mobilizations in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Lebanon and Jordan. Abu-Rish was previously Assistant Professor of History and Founding Director of the Middle East and North Africa Studies Certificate Program at Ohio University. He serves as Co-Editor of Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, as well as Co-Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) and the Lebanese Dissertation Summer Institute. He is also a Research Fellow at the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS). Abu-Rish earned his PhD from the Department of History at the University of California Los Angeles, and his MA in Arab Studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. His publications include "Municipal Politics in Lebanon" (Middle East Report, Winter 2016), "Garbage Politics" (Middle East Report, Winter 2015), and “Protests, Regime Stability, and State Formation in Jordan,” as well as two co-edited volumes: The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (Pluto Press, 2012) and Critical Voices On and From the Middle East (Tadween Publishing, 2015).
Maria Abunnasr: Research and Public Advocacy
Maria Bashshur Abunnasr specializes in the fields of Modern Middle East History, 19th Century U.S. History, and public history, with extensive experience in oral history. Her dissertation entitled, The Making of Ras Beirut: A Landscape of Memory for Narratives of Exceptionalism, 1870-1975 (University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2013) considers the historical relationship between AUB and Ras Beirut through the multiple perspectives of community, architectural, urban, and oral history. Since 2013 she has been actively engaged with AUB’s Neighborhood Initiative, taking the lead on three projects. In The Ras Beirut Oral History Project she conducted over 60 oral history interviews with members of Ras Beirut’s oldest generation. These are now compiled into a book manuscript, entitled The Ras Beirut Oral History Project: We are in this Together, to be published in the fall of 2016. In the project “AUB’s Imprint on the Streets of Ras Beirut,” she located and identified AUB-related street names to emphasize the shared history of the university and the community in a mapped walking-story telling booklet. And in the exhibition “AUB and Ras Beirut in 150 Years of Photographs: An Exhibition,” she collected and curated a public exhibition of historic photographs that extended 180 meters along Bliss Street in May 2016. This exhibition will be published in book form by the same title in the fall of 2016. Since August 2015, she lead AUB’s 150th Anniversary Oral History Project which involved working with a professional film crew to produce documentary quality films of twenty oral histories.
Andrew Arsan: Ottoman History / The Lebanese Diaspora / Contemporary Lebanon
Andrew Arsan is Senior Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History in the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. He is a political, cultural, and intellectual historian of the modern Middle East. He is the author of two books, Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa (2014) and Lebanon: A Country in Fragments (2018), and the editor with Cyrus Schayegh of the Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle Eastern Mandates (2015). He is now at work on two book projects: a synoptic history of the lands that we now call Lebanon; and a new history of the Arab twentieth century.
Sami Atallah: Research and Public Advocacy
Sami Atallah, who is trained in economics and political science, is the director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS). Prior to joining LCPS, he served as a consultant for the World Bank, the European Union, and the United Nations Development Program in Lebanon and Syria. Atallah also served as an advisor for the Lebanese Ministries of Finance, Industry, and Interior and Municipalities, as well as in the Prime Minister’s Office. In addition, he taught economics and political economy at the American University of Beirut (AUB). At LCPS, he is currently leading several policy studies on the governance of the gas sector, electoral behavior, monitoring the parliament and political parties, economic diversification and industrial policy, and decentralization and service delivery. Atallah is the editor of Towards Achieving a Transparent and Accountable National Budget in Lebanon (Beirut: LCPS, 2013), and co-editor (with Mona Harb) of Democracy, Decentralization, and Service Delivery in the Arab World (Beirut: LCPS, 2015). Atallah has also co-authored a paper on the emergence of highly sophisticated export products: Evidence from Lebanon (with Ilina Srour, ERF working paper, 2014). As for his academic work, he is author of “The Gulf Region: Beyond Oil and Wars – The Role of History and Geopolitics in Explaining Autocracy” in Elbadawi and Makdisi, eds., Democracy in the Arab World: Explaining the Deficit (Routledge 2011). Additionally, he is the author of “Linking England to India: How Geostrategic Trade Routes have Shaped the Political Institutions in the Arab World” (ERF working paper, 2014). Atallah holds two MA degrees, one in International and Development Economics from Yale University (1996) and another in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (2004). He is currently completing his PhD in Politics at New York University.
Joan Chaker: Archives and Research
Joan Chaker is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Harvard University. She received a B.A. in Economics and an M.A. in History from the American University of Beirut, as well as an M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics. Her previous research focused on the Ottoman tobacco market. She is currently working on a study of the social transformation of the countryside as it joins the global market over the long nineteenth century, told as a collective biography of the mule drivers of Ottoman Lebanon.
Lara Deeb: Anthropology of Lebanon
Lara Deeb is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Scripps College. She is author or co-author of three books: An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi'i Lebanon (Princeton 2006), Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi'ite Lebanon (w/ Mona Harb, Princeton 2013), andAnthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (w/ Jessica Winegar, Stanford 2015), as well as numerous articles in a variety of venues. Deeb's current project looks at how kinship can disturb sectarian notions of identity and belonging. She currently serves on the editorial boards of CSSAAMEand JMEWS, and is a founding member of the Task Force on Middle East Anthropology.
Hatim El-Hibri: Alternative Archival Terrains in Lebanon
Hatim El-Hibri is Assistant Professor of Film and Media at George Mason University. He earned his PhD at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is currently working on a book titled ‘Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure.’ His research and teaching interests are at the intersection of global and middle eastern media studies, visual culture studies, and urban studies.
Stacy Fahrenthold: The Lebanese Diaspora
Stacy Fahrenthold is Associate Professor of History at the University of California Davis. A historian specializing in labor migration; displacement/refugees; border studies; and diasporas within and from Syria and Lebanon, she is the author of Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2019). The book was awarded several prizes, including the Arab American National Museum's Evelyn Shakir Prize for scholarly non-fiction. Fahrenthold is currently at work on a new book on Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian textile workers in the Atlantic world as a Fellow with the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Irene Gendzier: Methodologies and Politics of Researching US Policy in Lebanon
Irene L. Gendzier is Professor Emerita in the Department of Political Science at Boston University. Her most recent book is Dying to Forget: Oil, Power, Palestine, and the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East. She is also the author of Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945–1958 and Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, and she is a coeditor, with Richard Falk and Robert Lifton, of Crimes of War: Iraq.
Zeina Halabi: Lebanese Literature
Zeina G. Halabi is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at the American University of Beirut. She specializes in modern Arabic literature with particular interest in questions of loss, mourning, and dissidence in contemporary literature and visual culture. She was a 2012-2013 EUME fellow at the Forum for Transregional Studies in Berlin, where she began working on her first book titled The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile, and the Nation (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) that examines the depiction of Arab intellectuals in post-1990s fiction and film. She has authored articles on the shifting notion of political commitment in the writings of canonical and emerging Arab writers in journals including the Journal of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Literatures. As a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (2018-2020), she is working on her second book project provisionally entitled Excavating the Present: History, Power, and the Arab Archive, in which she explores archival practices in contemporary literature.
Mona Hallak: Research and Public Advocacy
Mona El Hallak Ghaibeh is a Lebanese architect and heritage preservation activist. She received her B. Arch from AUB in 1990 and her Master of Architecture from Syracuse University-Florence Program in 1994. She was an Associate at Rais and Jamal -Architects and Engineers until 2000 when she started her own practice and has many residential projects built and under construction in Beirut. She is a member of APSAD "Association pour le Sauvegarde des Sites et Anciens Demeures au Liban", a founding member of “IRAB”, an N.G.O. working on the preservation of the musical heritage of the Arab world, and a founding member of “ZAKIRA”, an N.G.O. for promoting photography and its role in documenting and preserving Memory. Hallak has led several heritage preservation campaigns and succeeded in the preservation of the "Barakat Building" in Sodeco. After 15 years of lobbying, the building was expropriated by the Municipality of Beirut to be rehabilitated into Beit Beirut : a museum of memory and a cultural urban center for Beirut. She is a member of the "Scientific Committee of Beit Beirut." She is currently engaged in the "Civil Campaign to protect the Dalieh of Raouche" as well as many other campaigns to protect architectural and natural heritage sites around Lebanon threatened by real estate development, in an effort to keep them accessible to all as open shared public spaces. In 2013, Hallak was given the “Ordre National du Merite au grade de Chevalier” from the President of the French Republic in recognition of her work and achievements in preserving cultural heritage.
Ghassan Halwani: Research and Public Advocacy
Ghassan Halwani is a member of both the Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and Disappeared in Lebanon and The Right to Know Campaign.
He is also a participant in several civil campaigns and initiatives related to the protection of coastal and pubic spaces in Lebanon. He is a longtime active member of Mansion, a collective house initiative in Beirut. He works in film and public advocacy.
Mona Harb: Urban Studies in Lebanon
Mona Harb is Professor of Urban Studies and Politics and Associate Dean at the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, at the American University of Beirut. She received her PhD in Political Science in 2005 from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques at Aix-Marseille (France). She is the author of Le Hezbollah à Beyrouth (1985-2005): de la banlieue à la ville (Karthala-IFPO, 2010), co-author of Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi'ite South Beirut (Princeton University Press, 2013, with Lara Deeb,), and co-editor of Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World (Beirut: LCPS, 2015, with Sami Atallah). Her ongoing research investigates local governance and refugees, urban social movements, and youth in Lebanon. Harb is the recipient of grants from the IDRC, Ford Foundation, LSE-Emirates Fund, EU-FP7, Wenner-Gren, ACLS, and the Middle-East Awards. She serves on the editorial boards of IJURR and CSSAME, and is a trustee of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences. She is the founder and co-editor of the Cities Page on Jadaliyya e-zine. She served as the coordinator of the AUB graduate programs in Urban Planning, Policy and Design for several years. She provides professional advice on urban development issues for several international organizations (ESCWA, WB, EU, UNDP).
Ghenwa Hayek: Lebanese Literature
Ghenwa Hayek is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the entangled relationships between literary and cultural production, space and place, and identity formation from the nineteenth century to the present. In her first book, Beirut, Imagining the City: Space and Place in Lebanese Literature (IB Tauris, 2014), she develops an interdisciplinary engagement grounded in the fields of literary and cultural studies, critical geography, and studies of nationalism and identity to trace modes of imagining the city of Beirut in Lebanese fiction. Her forthcoming book project explores transnational imaginings of the Lebanese diaspora and the particular racial, sexual, and national anxieties that emigration elicits in Lebanese literary culture.
Najib Hourani: Alternative Archival Terrains in Lebanon
Najib Hourani is a Middle East specialist teaching in the Department of Anthropology and the Global Urban Studies Program at Michigan State University. His primary research interest is the political economy of urban redevelopment in the Arab world, with a focus on Beirut and Amman. His research on the post war reconstruction of Beirut appears in Monk and Mundy’s The PostConflict Environment: Investigation and Critique (2014), and Peterson and McDonogh’s Global Downtowns (2012). A further piece, appearing in Human Organization compares the approach taken by Solidere in the central suq of Beirut to that of Wa’d in Harat Hreik. His research on the redevelopment of Amman appears in The Journal of Urban Studies. His secondary research interest is in the political economy of the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war, and has been published in Geopolitics and Middle East Critique. Dr. Hourani is currently working on a book-length manuscript, entitled Glass Towers and Heritage Trails: Neoliberal Urbanism in Beirut and Amman. Dr. Hourani holds a PhD in Political Science (New York University, 2005), an MA in Political Science (Tulane University) and another in Modern Middle Eastern and North African Studies (University of Michigan). Prior to MSU he taught Modern Middle East History at Fordham University and International Affairs at the New School.
Syrine Hout: Lebanese Literature
Syrine Hout is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Beirut. Her publications include Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), "Viewing Europe from the Outside: Cultural Encounters and Critiques in the Eighteenth-Century Pseudo-Oriental Travelogue and the Nineteenth-Century 'Voyage en Orient'" (Peter Lang, 1997), chapters in Politics, Culture and the Lebanese Diaspora, Arab Voices in Diaspora, Literature and Nation in the Middle East, Nadia Tuéni: Lebanon: Poems of Love and War, and Christian Encounters with the Other, in addition to over fifteen articles in international, refereed journals.
Ilham Khuri-Makdisi: History and Historiography of Ottoman Lebanon
Ilham Khuri-Makdisi is Associate Professor of Middle East and World History at Northeastern University, Boston. Among her publications is The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), and various writings on the intellectual history of the Nahda in late 19th- and early 20th-century Egypt and the Levant. Her current research project is on translation movements between Arabic and Ottoman Turkish between 1860 and 1914.
Maya Mikdashi: Anthropology of Lebanon
Maya Mikdashi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and a lecturer in the program in Middle East Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Maya is an anthropologist (PhD Columbia University, 2014) who is deeply engaged in ethnographic, legal, and archival theory and methodology. She currently is completing a book manuscript that examines the war on terror, sexual difference, secularism, and state power in the contemporary Middle East from the vantage point of Lebanon. Maya is also at the beginning stages of a book project that focuses on settler colonialism, the multiple and simultaneous temporalities of history and the “present,” and the affects of both archives and archival research. She engages with these questions via the collected and auto-ethnographic story of her great grandmother, who was an Ojibwa woman living in the early twentieth century Midwestern United states. Maya has been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow from 2014-2016 at Rutgers University, and a Faculty Fellow/Director of Graduate Studies, Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University (2012-2014). She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, in addition to online platforms. She is a co-founding editor of the e-zine Jadaliyya.com. Maya is also a filmmaker and writer, she is co-director of the feature length documentary film About Baghdad (2004), co- founding member of filmmaking cooperative Quilting Point Productions, and director of Notes on The War (2006). Most recently Maya co-conceptualized, co-wrote (with director Carlos Motta), and performed in a historical fantasy film set in 19th century Beirut and Bogota, Deseos/رغبات", which is currently playing in international film and art festivals.
Lama Mourad: Archives and Research
Lama Mourad is an assistant professor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University. Her research focuses on the intersection of forced migration, local governance, and the politics of borders, with a regional focus on the Middle East. She received her PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She previously held fellowships at Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania, and at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Abir Saksouk-Sasso of Dictaphone Group
Abir Saksouk-Sasso is an architect and urbanist. She has been involved in several research projects in Lebanon, including the history of informal suburbs, the social production of shared spaces in the city, and more recently housing rights and tenants claims in Beirut. Through collaborative projects, she is currently developing ways in which community engagement is possible in planning and actively shaping the future of cities. Such projects include the preservation of the socio-cultural value of Saida's orchards, making youth spaces in Nahr Bared Palestinian camp, as well as the designing a library in Rashidiyye camp in south Lebanon. She is co-founder of Dictaphone Group (2009) and Studio for Public Works (2012).
Nisreen Salti: Economics of Lebanon
Nisreen Salti is an Associate Professor of Economics at the American University of Beirut. She obtained her PhD in Economics from Princeton University in 2006 after completing a Master’s in Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs at Princeton University in 1999. While she has conducted research on a wide variety of topics in Development Economics, her interests lie primarily in inequities and inequalities in economic outcomes and health, particularly of vulnerable populations. She has been engaged in several research projects on Lebanon and the region. She is a founding member of the Lebanese Economic Association. Her work has been published in Social Science and Medicine, the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, the Journal of Economic Studies, the International Journal of Equity in Health, the Middle East Development Journal, the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Refugee Survey Quarterly and the International Journal of Development and Conflict.
Nadya Sbaiti: History and Historiography of Mandate Lebanon
Nadya Sbaiti is Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She earned her MA in Arab Studies and her PhD in History from Georgetown University and specializes in the social and cultural histories of the modern Middle East. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Pedagogical Constituencies and Communities of Knowledge in Mandate Lebanon,” which examines the central role of education to the formation of multiple national narratives and the production of history in Lebanon under French mandate. Her recent publications include “ A Massacre Without Precedent’”; “‘If the Devil Spoke French’: Strategies of Language and Learning in French Mandate Beirut,” and has written articles that guide researchers through Lebanon’s postwar archival terrain. Additional research interests include spatial manifestations of colonial and national projects; colonial methods of social control through prisons and asylums; the production of history as both discursive and material practice; tourism and heritage; and contemporary popular culture (music, film, game shows, and reality television). Sbaiti has taught introductory surveys of modern Middle Eastern history, courses on women and gender in the Middle East, the history of education, the Middle East and World War I, aspects of colonialism and nationalism, as well as nonwestern urban history. In addition, she is a co-editor of Jadaliyya e-zine, and served as co-editor of the peer-reviewed Arab Studies Journal.
Hana Sleiman: Researching Palestinian Communities in Lebanon / Research and Archive
Hana Sleiman is an archivist and a historian of the modern Middle East whose research focuses on intellectual history, histories of print and archive theory. She joined Murray Edwards as a Research Fellow in History in 2020. She is an Affiliate Researcher with the Arab Oral History Archive at the American University of Beirut, and sits on the International Advisory Panel of the British Library’s Endangered Archives Program.
Fawaz Traboulsi: Political Economy of Lebanon
Fawwaz Traboulsi is Visiting Professor of Political Science and History at the American University of Beirut. He has been a visiting professor at New York University, the University of Michigan, Columbia University, New York University, and Vienna University. He is a fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His twenty books and numerous lectures, papers, and articles have dealt with history, politics, liberation, and social movements, political philosophy, memoirs, folklore and art in the Arab World. Traboulsi’s latest translations include Edward Said’s Out of Place (2003) Humanism and Democratic Critique (2005), and On Late Style (2015). His recent work includes A History of Modern Lebanon (2007, 2012) Al-Dimuqratiyah Thawra (Democracy is a Revolution, 2011), Hareer wa Hadeed (On Silk and Iron, From Mount Lebanon to the Suez Canal, 2013), Al-Tabaqat al-Ijtima’iyyah wa-l-Sulta al-Siyassiyyha fi Luban (Social Classes and Political Power in Lebanon, 2106), Damm al-Akhawayn. Al-`Unf Fil Hurub al_Ahliyah (On Violence in Civil Wars, 2017). Traboulsi, a long time journalist, is the editor of the quarterly cultural journal Bidayat, founded in spring 2012.
Ziad Abu-Rish is Co-Director of the MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts, and Visiting Associate Professor of Human Rights, at Bard College. He is also a 2020–21 American Druze Foundation Fellow in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. His research explores state formation, economic development, and popular mobilizations in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Lebanon and Jordan. Abu-Rish was previously Assistant Professor of History and Founding Director of the Middle East and North Africa Studies Certificate Program at Ohio University. He serves as Co-Editor of Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, as well as Co-Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) and the Lebanese Dissertation Summer Institute. He is also a Research Fellow at the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS). Abu-Rish earned his PhD from the Department of History at the University of California Los Angeles, and his MA in Arab Studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. His publications include "Municipal Politics in Lebanon" (Middle East Report, Winter 2016), "Garbage Politics" (Middle East Report, Winter 2015), and “Protests, Regime Stability, and State Formation in Jordan,” as well as two co-edited volumes: The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (Pluto Press, 2012) and Critical Voices On and From the Middle East (Tadween Publishing, 2015).
Maria Abunnasr: Research and Public Advocacy
Maria Bashshur Abunnasr specializes in the fields of Modern Middle East History, 19th Century U.S. History, and public history, with extensive experience in oral history. Her dissertation entitled, The Making of Ras Beirut: A Landscape of Memory for Narratives of Exceptionalism, 1870-1975 (University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2013) considers the historical relationship between AUB and Ras Beirut through the multiple perspectives of community, architectural, urban, and oral history. Since 2013 she has been actively engaged with AUB’s Neighborhood Initiative, taking the lead on three projects. In The Ras Beirut Oral History Project she conducted over 60 oral history interviews with members of Ras Beirut’s oldest generation. These are now compiled into a book manuscript, entitled The Ras Beirut Oral History Project: We are in this Together, to be published in the fall of 2016. In the project “AUB’s Imprint on the Streets of Ras Beirut,” she located and identified AUB-related street names to emphasize the shared history of the university and the community in a mapped walking-story telling booklet. And in the exhibition “AUB and Ras Beirut in 150 Years of Photographs: An Exhibition,” she collected and curated a public exhibition of historic photographs that extended 180 meters along Bliss Street in May 2016. This exhibition will be published in book form by the same title in the fall of 2016. Since August 2015, she lead AUB’s 150th Anniversary Oral History Project which involved working with a professional film crew to produce documentary quality films of twenty oral histories.
Andrew Arsan: Ottoman History / The Lebanese Diaspora / Contemporary Lebanon
Andrew Arsan is Senior Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History in the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. He is a political, cultural, and intellectual historian of the modern Middle East. He is the author of two books, Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa (2014) and Lebanon: A Country in Fragments (2018), and the editor with Cyrus Schayegh of the Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle Eastern Mandates (2015). He is now at work on two book projects: a synoptic history of the lands that we now call Lebanon; and a new history of the Arab twentieth century.
Sami Atallah: Research and Public Advocacy
Sami Atallah, who is trained in economics and political science, is the director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS). Prior to joining LCPS, he served as a consultant for the World Bank, the European Union, and the United Nations Development Program in Lebanon and Syria. Atallah also served as an advisor for the Lebanese Ministries of Finance, Industry, and Interior and Municipalities, as well as in the Prime Minister’s Office. In addition, he taught economics and political economy at the American University of Beirut (AUB). At LCPS, he is currently leading several policy studies on the governance of the gas sector, electoral behavior, monitoring the parliament and political parties, economic diversification and industrial policy, and decentralization and service delivery. Atallah is the editor of Towards Achieving a Transparent and Accountable National Budget in Lebanon (Beirut: LCPS, 2013), and co-editor (with Mona Harb) of Democracy, Decentralization, and Service Delivery in the Arab World (Beirut: LCPS, 2015). Atallah has also co-authored a paper on the emergence of highly sophisticated export products: Evidence from Lebanon (with Ilina Srour, ERF working paper, 2014). As for his academic work, he is author of “The Gulf Region: Beyond Oil and Wars – The Role of History and Geopolitics in Explaining Autocracy” in Elbadawi and Makdisi, eds., Democracy in the Arab World: Explaining the Deficit (Routledge 2011). Additionally, he is the author of “Linking England to India: How Geostrategic Trade Routes have Shaped the Political Institutions in the Arab World” (ERF working paper, 2014). Atallah holds two MA degrees, one in International and Development Economics from Yale University (1996) and another in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (2004). He is currently completing his PhD in Politics at New York University.
Joan Chaker: Archives and Research
Joan Chaker is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Harvard University. She received a B.A. in Economics and an M.A. in History from the American University of Beirut, as well as an M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics. Her previous research focused on the Ottoman tobacco market. She is currently working on a study of the social transformation of the countryside as it joins the global market over the long nineteenth century, told as a collective biography of the mule drivers of Ottoman Lebanon.
Lara Deeb: Anthropology of Lebanon
Lara Deeb is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Scripps College. She is author or co-author of three books: An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi'i Lebanon (Princeton 2006), Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi'ite Lebanon (w/ Mona Harb, Princeton 2013), andAnthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (w/ Jessica Winegar, Stanford 2015), as well as numerous articles in a variety of venues. Deeb's current project looks at how kinship can disturb sectarian notions of identity and belonging. She currently serves on the editorial boards of CSSAAMEand JMEWS, and is a founding member of the Task Force on Middle East Anthropology.
Hatim El-Hibri: Alternative Archival Terrains in Lebanon
Hatim El-Hibri is Assistant Professor of Film and Media at George Mason University. He earned his PhD at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is currently working on a book titled ‘Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure.’ His research and teaching interests are at the intersection of global and middle eastern media studies, visual culture studies, and urban studies.
Stacy Fahrenthold: The Lebanese Diaspora
Stacy Fahrenthold is Associate Professor of History at the University of California Davis. A historian specializing in labor migration; displacement/refugees; border studies; and diasporas within and from Syria and Lebanon, she is the author of Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2019). The book was awarded several prizes, including the Arab American National Museum's Evelyn Shakir Prize for scholarly non-fiction. Fahrenthold is currently at work on a new book on Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian textile workers in the Atlantic world as a Fellow with the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Irene Gendzier: Methodologies and Politics of Researching US Policy in Lebanon
Irene L. Gendzier is Professor Emerita in the Department of Political Science at Boston University. Her most recent book is Dying to Forget: Oil, Power, Palestine, and the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East. She is also the author of Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945–1958 and Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, and she is a coeditor, with Richard Falk and Robert Lifton, of Crimes of War: Iraq.
Zeina Halabi: Lebanese Literature
Zeina G. Halabi is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at the American University of Beirut. She specializes in modern Arabic literature with particular interest in questions of loss, mourning, and dissidence in contemporary literature and visual culture. She was a 2012-2013 EUME fellow at the Forum for Transregional Studies in Berlin, where she began working on her first book titled The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile, and the Nation (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) that examines the depiction of Arab intellectuals in post-1990s fiction and film. She has authored articles on the shifting notion of political commitment in the writings of canonical and emerging Arab writers in journals including the Journal of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Literatures. As a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (2018-2020), she is working on her second book project provisionally entitled Excavating the Present: History, Power, and the Arab Archive, in which she explores archival practices in contemporary literature.
Mona Hallak: Research and Public Advocacy
Mona El Hallak Ghaibeh is a Lebanese architect and heritage preservation activist. She received her B. Arch from AUB in 1990 and her Master of Architecture from Syracuse University-Florence Program in 1994. She was an Associate at Rais and Jamal -Architects and Engineers until 2000 when she started her own practice and has many residential projects built and under construction in Beirut. She is a member of APSAD "Association pour le Sauvegarde des Sites et Anciens Demeures au Liban", a founding member of “IRAB”, an N.G.O. working on the preservation of the musical heritage of the Arab world, and a founding member of “ZAKIRA”, an N.G.O. for promoting photography and its role in documenting and preserving Memory. Hallak has led several heritage preservation campaigns and succeeded in the preservation of the "Barakat Building" in Sodeco. After 15 years of lobbying, the building was expropriated by the Municipality of Beirut to be rehabilitated into Beit Beirut : a museum of memory and a cultural urban center for Beirut. She is a member of the "Scientific Committee of Beit Beirut." She is currently engaged in the "Civil Campaign to protect the Dalieh of Raouche" as well as many other campaigns to protect architectural and natural heritage sites around Lebanon threatened by real estate development, in an effort to keep them accessible to all as open shared public spaces. In 2013, Hallak was given the “Ordre National du Merite au grade de Chevalier” from the President of the French Republic in recognition of her work and achievements in preserving cultural heritage.
Ghassan Halwani: Research and Public Advocacy
Ghassan Halwani is a member of both the Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and Disappeared in Lebanon and The Right to Know Campaign.
He is also a participant in several civil campaigns and initiatives related to the protection of coastal and pubic spaces in Lebanon. He is a longtime active member of Mansion, a collective house initiative in Beirut. He works in film and public advocacy.
Mona Harb: Urban Studies in Lebanon
Mona Harb is Professor of Urban Studies and Politics and Associate Dean at the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, at the American University of Beirut. She received her PhD in Political Science in 2005 from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques at Aix-Marseille (France). She is the author of Le Hezbollah à Beyrouth (1985-2005): de la banlieue à la ville (Karthala-IFPO, 2010), co-author of Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi'ite South Beirut (Princeton University Press, 2013, with Lara Deeb,), and co-editor of Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World (Beirut: LCPS, 2015, with Sami Atallah). Her ongoing research investigates local governance and refugees, urban social movements, and youth in Lebanon. Harb is the recipient of grants from the IDRC, Ford Foundation, LSE-Emirates Fund, EU-FP7, Wenner-Gren, ACLS, and the Middle-East Awards. She serves on the editorial boards of IJURR and CSSAME, and is a trustee of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences. She is the founder and co-editor of the Cities Page on Jadaliyya e-zine. She served as the coordinator of the AUB graduate programs in Urban Planning, Policy and Design for several years. She provides professional advice on urban development issues for several international organizations (ESCWA, WB, EU, UNDP).
Ghenwa Hayek: Lebanese Literature
Ghenwa Hayek is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the entangled relationships between literary and cultural production, space and place, and identity formation from the nineteenth century to the present. In her first book, Beirut, Imagining the City: Space and Place in Lebanese Literature (IB Tauris, 2014), she develops an interdisciplinary engagement grounded in the fields of literary and cultural studies, critical geography, and studies of nationalism and identity to trace modes of imagining the city of Beirut in Lebanese fiction. Her forthcoming book project explores transnational imaginings of the Lebanese diaspora and the particular racial, sexual, and national anxieties that emigration elicits in Lebanese literary culture.
Najib Hourani: Alternative Archival Terrains in Lebanon
Najib Hourani is a Middle East specialist teaching in the Department of Anthropology and the Global Urban Studies Program at Michigan State University. His primary research interest is the political economy of urban redevelopment in the Arab world, with a focus on Beirut and Amman. His research on the post war reconstruction of Beirut appears in Monk and Mundy’s The PostConflict Environment: Investigation and Critique (2014), and Peterson and McDonogh’s Global Downtowns (2012). A further piece, appearing in Human Organization compares the approach taken by Solidere in the central suq of Beirut to that of Wa’d in Harat Hreik. His research on the redevelopment of Amman appears in The Journal of Urban Studies. His secondary research interest is in the political economy of the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war, and has been published in Geopolitics and Middle East Critique. Dr. Hourani is currently working on a book-length manuscript, entitled Glass Towers and Heritage Trails: Neoliberal Urbanism in Beirut and Amman. Dr. Hourani holds a PhD in Political Science (New York University, 2005), an MA in Political Science (Tulane University) and another in Modern Middle Eastern and North African Studies (University of Michigan). Prior to MSU he taught Modern Middle East History at Fordham University and International Affairs at the New School.
Syrine Hout: Lebanese Literature
Syrine Hout is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Beirut. Her publications include Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), "Viewing Europe from the Outside: Cultural Encounters and Critiques in the Eighteenth-Century Pseudo-Oriental Travelogue and the Nineteenth-Century 'Voyage en Orient'" (Peter Lang, 1997), chapters in Politics, Culture and the Lebanese Diaspora, Arab Voices in Diaspora, Literature and Nation in the Middle East, Nadia Tuéni: Lebanon: Poems of Love and War, and Christian Encounters with the Other, in addition to over fifteen articles in international, refereed journals.
Ilham Khuri-Makdisi: History and Historiography of Ottoman Lebanon
Ilham Khuri-Makdisi is Associate Professor of Middle East and World History at Northeastern University, Boston. Among her publications is The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), and various writings on the intellectual history of the Nahda in late 19th- and early 20th-century Egypt and the Levant. Her current research project is on translation movements between Arabic and Ottoman Turkish between 1860 and 1914.
Maya Mikdashi: Anthropology of Lebanon
Maya Mikdashi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and a lecturer in the program in Middle East Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Maya is an anthropologist (PhD Columbia University, 2014) who is deeply engaged in ethnographic, legal, and archival theory and methodology. She currently is completing a book manuscript that examines the war on terror, sexual difference, secularism, and state power in the contemporary Middle East from the vantage point of Lebanon. Maya is also at the beginning stages of a book project that focuses on settler colonialism, the multiple and simultaneous temporalities of history and the “present,” and the affects of both archives and archival research. She engages with these questions via the collected and auto-ethnographic story of her great grandmother, who was an Ojibwa woman living in the early twentieth century Midwestern United states. Maya has been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow from 2014-2016 at Rutgers University, and a Faculty Fellow/Director of Graduate Studies, Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University (2012-2014). She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, in addition to online platforms. She is a co-founding editor of the e-zine Jadaliyya.com. Maya is also a filmmaker and writer, she is co-director of the feature length documentary film About Baghdad (2004), co- founding member of filmmaking cooperative Quilting Point Productions, and director of Notes on The War (2006). Most recently Maya co-conceptualized, co-wrote (with director Carlos Motta), and performed in a historical fantasy film set in 19th century Beirut and Bogota, Deseos/رغبات", which is currently playing in international film and art festivals.
Lama Mourad: Archives and Research
Lama Mourad is an assistant professor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University. Her research focuses on the intersection of forced migration, local governance, and the politics of borders, with a regional focus on the Middle East. She received her PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She previously held fellowships at Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania, and at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Abir Saksouk-Sasso of Dictaphone Group
Abir Saksouk-Sasso is an architect and urbanist. She has been involved in several research projects in Lebanon, including the history of informal suburbs, the social production of shared spaces in the city, and more recently housing rights and tenants claims in Beirut. Through collaborative projects, she is currently developing ways in which community engagement is possible in planning and actively shaping the future of cities. Such projects include the preservation of the socio-cultural value of Saida's orchards, making youth spaces in Nahr Bared Palestinian camp, as well as the designing a library in Rashidiyye camp in south Lebanon. She is co-founder of Dictaphone Group (2009) and Studio for Public Works (2012).
Nisreen Salti: Economics of Lebanon
Nisreen Salti is an Associate Professor of Economics at the American University of Beirut. She obtained her PhD in Economics from Princeton University in 2006 after completing a Master’s in Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs at Princeton University in 1999. While she has conducted research on a wide variety of topics in Development Economics, her interests lie primarily in inequities and inequalities in economic outcomes and health, particularly of vulnerable populations. She has been engaged in several research projects on Lebanon and the region. She is a founding member of the Lebanese Economic Association. Her work has been published in Social Science and Medicine, the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, the Journal of Economic Studies, the International Journal of Equity in Health, the Middle East Development Journal, the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Refugee Survey Quarterly and the International Journal of Development and Conflict.
Nadya Sbaiti: History and Historiography of Mandate Lebanon
Nadya Sbaiti is Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She earned her MA in Arab Studies and her PhD in History from Georgetown University and specializes in the social and cultural histories of the modern Middle East. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Pedagogical Constituencies and Communities of Knowledge in Mandate Lebanon,” which examines the central role of education to the formation of multiple national narratives and the production of history in Lebanon under French mandate. Her recent publications include “ A Massacre Without Precedent’”; “‘If the Devil Spoke French’: Strategies of Language and Learning in French Mandate Beirut,” and has written articles that guide researchers through Lebanon’s postwar archival terrain. Additional research interests include spatial manifestations of colonial and national projects; colonial methods of social control through prisons and asylums; the production of history as both discursive and material practice; tourism and heritage; and contemporary popular culture (music, film, game shows, and reality television). Sbaiti has taught introductory surveys of modern Middle Eastern history, courses on women and gender in the Middle East, the history of education, the Middle East and World War I, aspects of colonialism and nationalism, as well as nonwestern urban history. In addition, she is a co-editor of Jadaliyya e-zine, and served as co-editor of the peer-reviewed Arab Studies Journal.
Hana Sleiman: Researching Palestinian Communities in Lebanon / Research and Archive
Hana Sleiman is an archivist and a historian of the modern Middle East whose research focuses on intellectual history, histories of print and archive theory. She joined Murray Edwards as a Research Fellow in History in 2020. She is an Affiliate Researcher with the Arab Oral History Archive at the American University of Beirut, and sits on the International Advisory Panel of the British Library’s Endangered Archives Program.
Fawaz Traboulsi: Political Economy of Lebanon
Fawwaz Traboulsi is Visiting Professor of Political Science and History at the American University of Beirut. He has been a visiting professor at New York University, the University of Michigan, Columbia University, New York University, and Vienna University. He is a fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His twenty books and numerous lectures, papers, and articles have dealt with history, politics, liberation, and social movements, political philosophy, memoirs, folklore and art in the Arab World. Traboulsi’s latest translations include Edward Said’s Out of Place (2003) Humanism and Democratic Critique (2005), and On Late Style (2015). His recent work includes A History of Modern Lebanon (2007, 2012) Al-Dimuqratiyah Thawra (Democracy is a Revolution, 2011), Hareer wa Hadeed (On Silk and Iron, From Mount Lebanon to the Suez Canal, 2013), Al-Tabaqat al-Ijtima’iyyah wa-l-Sulta al-Siyassiyyha fi Luban (Social Classes and Political Power in Lebanon, 2106), Damm al-Akhawayn. Al-`Unf Fil Hurub al_Ahliyah (On Violence in Civil Wars, 2017). Traboulsi, a long time journalist, is the editor of the quarterly cultural journal Bidayat, founded in spring 2012.