Diana Abbani
received her Ph.D. from the Sorbonne University in Arabic Studies. In her dissertation “Music and Society in Beirut in the Early 20th Century”, she presents a historical rethinking of the cultural and intellectual history of Beirut, by looking at the relation between music, technology and society.
Amit Bein
is Associate Professor of Modern Middle East History at Clemson University. His research focuses on political, diplomatic, and social changes in Turkey and the Middle East during the closing years of the Ottoman empire and the early decades of the post-Ottoman Middle East. His publications include Ottoman Ulema, Turkish Republic: Agents of Change and Guardians of Tradition (Stanford, 2011), and Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East: International Relations in the Interwar Period (Cambridge, 2017).
Ebru Boyar
is Professor in the Department of International Relations, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, where she teaches Ottoman, Turkish and modern Middle Eastern history. She is also Academic Advisor at the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on Ottoman and Turkish social, intellectual and diplomatic history. Her publications include Ottomans, Turks, and the Balkans: Empire Lost, Relations Altered (London, 2007), A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge, 2010), co-authored with Kate Fleet and Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden, 2016), co-edited with Kate Fleet.
Elizabeth Brownson
is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and the author of two articles in the Journal of Palestine Studies. Her research focuses on Palestinian women’s status in Muslim Family Law since the British Mandate period. Brownson received a Fulbright-Hays fellowship to complete her dissertation, which she is revising for publication.
Nazan Çiçek
(Ph.D., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2006) is the author of The Young Ottomans: Turkish Critics of the Eastern Question in the Late Nineteenth Century (London, 2010). She currently teaches at Ankara University in the Faculty of Political Sciences. She has published articles on the political, social and intellectual history of the Ottoman empire and Turkish republic in several edited books and journals.
Kate Fleet
is the Director of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Her books include European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: the Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge, 1999), A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge, 2010), together with Ebru Boyar, Ottoman Economic Practices in Periods of Transformation: the Cases of Crete and Bulgaria (Ankara, 2014), together with Svetla Ianeva, and Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden, 2016), edited with Ebru Boyar. She is the editor of The Cambridge History of Turkey: Byzantium-Turkey, 1071–1453 (Cambridge, 2009) and, together with Suraiya N. Faroqhi, of volume II, The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453–1603 (Cambridge, 2012). She is Editor-in-Chief of Turkish Historical Review and an Executive Editor of the Encyclopaedia of Islam Three.
Ulrike Freitag
is a historian of the modern Middle East and the Director of Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin in conjunction with a professorship at Freie Universität Berlin. She received her Ph.D. in 1991 at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg with a thesis on Syrian historiography in the twentieth century and taught at SOAS, London. In 2002 she completed her state doctorate on “Indian Ocean Migrants and State Formation in Hadhramaut” (Leiden, 2003) at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn. She has published on modern Arab and Indian Ocean history. Among her recent publications are the co-edited volumes Urban Violence in the Middle East. Changing Cityscapes in the Transition from Empire to Nation State (New York and Oxford, 2015), Understanding the City through its Margins (Abingdon, 2018), and the articles “A twentieth-century merchant network centered on Jeddah: the correspondence of Muhammad b. Ahmad Bin Himd”, Journal of Northeast African Studies, 17/1 (2017) and “Scholarly exchange and trade: Muhammad Husayn Nasif and his letters to Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje”, in The Piety of Learning, ed. Michael Kemper and Ralf Elger (Leiden, 2017).
Liat Kozma
is Associate Professor at the Department of Islamic and Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She is the author of Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law and Medicine in Khedival Egypt (Syracuse, 2011); and of Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East (Albany, 2017). Beginning from September 2017, she directs the ERC-funded research group “A Regional History of Medicine in the Middle East, 1830–1960”.
Brian L. McLaren
is Associate Professor and Chair at the Architecture Faculty, the College of Built Environments, University of Washington, Seattle. His research focuses on the relationship between architecture and politics during the Fascist period in Italy. His publications include Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent Modernism (Seattle, 2006).
Emilio Spadola
(Ph.D., Columbia University, 2007), is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Middle East and Islamic Studies at Colgate University, Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, and President of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association. His work examines intersections of religion, media, security, and modernity in Morocco and the Muslim World. His book, The Calls of Islam: Sufis, Islamists, and Mass Mediation in Urban Morocco (Indiana, 2014), was awarded Honorable Mention for both the 2014 Clifford Geertz Book Prize, by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, and the 2015 L. Carl Brown Book Prize, by the American Institute of Maghrib Studies.