Notes on Contributors
Tijmen C. Baarda
is Subject Librarian for Middle Eastern studies at Leiden University Libraries. His research focuses on Syriac Christianity in the modern Middle East. He has recently defended his PhD dissertation called Arabic and Aramaic in Iraq: Language and Syriac Christian Commitment to the Arab Nationalist Project (1920–1950).
Leyla Dakhli
is a Senior Researcher at the CNRS (French National Centre for scientific Research), and since 2014 has been based at the Marc Bloch Centre in Berlin. She is the principal investigator of the DREAM project – Drafting and Enacting the Revolutions in the Arab Mediterranean, funded by the European Research Council. After a PhD thesis on Syrian-Lebanese intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century, she wrote on women’s mobilizations and feminisms, forms of belonging to nations and identities, as well as on the question of intellectual diasporas and languages throughout the world of the American Mahjar (migrant communities). She now focuses on the social history of protests and social movements in the Arab Mediterranean. She has recently published two comprehensive books on the Middle East: Histoire du Proche-orient contemporain, La Découverte “Repère”, 2015; and Le Moyen-Orient (fin XIXe–XXe siècle), Éditions du Seuil “Points Histoire”, 2016.
Sasha R. Goldstein-Sabbah
(PhD Leiden 2019) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leiden University Centre for the Study of Religion. She studies the philanthropic networks in identity constructions among Middle Eastern and North African Jewry between 1918 and 1948, following up on her PhD thesis, “Baghdadi Jewish Networks in Hashemite Iraq: Jewish Transnationalism in the Age of Nationalism.” Recent publications include “Censorship and the Jews of Baghdad: Reading between the lines in the case of E. Levy”, The Journal of the Middle East and Africa 7,3 (2016): 283–300 and “Jewish Education in Baghdad: Communal Space vs. Public Space,” in S.R. Goldstein-Sabbah and H.L. Murre-van den Berg (eds.), Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
Liora R. Halperin
is Associate Professor of International Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, and the Jack and Rebecca Benaroya Endowed Chair in Israel Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948 (Yale, 2015).
Robert Isaf
is a poet, translator, and journalist from Atlanta. He is pursuing a doctoral degree at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, engaged with the Syriac-language poetry of Gregory Bar ʿEbroyo, also called Barhebraeus. He has worked extensively with the traditions and literatures of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the American South, with a focus on national identity formation and communal memory.
Michiel Leezenberg
(PhD 1995) teaches philosophy and intellectual history in the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the intellectual and linguistic history of the modernizing Ottoman empire, the Kurdish question, and the history and philosophy of the humanities. Among his recent publications are: (with Gerard de Vries) History and Philosophy of the Humanities: An Introduction (Amsterdam University Press, 2018) and De minaret van Bagdad: Seks en politiek in de islam (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2017).
Merav Mack
is a Research Fellow at the Harry S. Truman Institute at the Hebrew University as well as the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology in Amman. She received her PhD in Medieval History from the University of Cambridge. Her research is focused on contemporary Christian communities in the Middle East. Her recent book Jerusalem: City of the Book, a collaboration with Benjamin Balint and the photographer Frederic Brenner, was published by Yale University Press in 2019.
Heleen Murre-van den Berg
(PhD Leiden 1995) is Director of the Institute of Eastern Christian Studies and Professor of Global Christianity at Radboud University. She published extensively on Christianity in the Middle East, especially on the Syriac/Assyrian traditions. Recent publications include (with S.R. Goldstein-Sabbah, eds.), Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East (Brill: Leiden, 2016) and Scribes and Scriptures: The Church of the East in the Eastern Ottoman Provinces (1500–1850) (Louvain: Peeters, 2015). As of October 2019, she started a new ERC-funded project: “Rewriting Global Orthodoxy: Oriental Christians in Europe (1970–2020).”
Konstantinos Papastathis
is an Assistant Professor at the department of Political Science of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh). He also works on the research project: “CrossRoads: European cultural diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine. A connected history during the formative years of the Middle East,” funded by NWO, at Leiden University (PI Karène Sanchez Summerer). He has studied theology, philosophy and political science at AUTh and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He has worked as a research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2011–2013), and the University of Luxembourg (2013–2018). His main research interests involve politics and religion, church history, as well as Middle Eastern studies. He currently works on the interaction between religion and the radical right in Europe, as well as on the modern and contemporary history of Middle East Christianity. He has contributed in peer-reviewed journals (Religion, State and Society; Politics, Religion and Ideology; Middle Eastern Studies; British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies; Journal of Eastern Christian Studies; and others), as well as in collective volumes.
Franck Salameh
is Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eastern Languages and Literatures at Boston College. His areas of research and teaching are Near Eastern minorities, contemporary Middle Eastern history, history of ideas and political thought in the modern Middle East, and the literary, linguistic, and intellectual traditions of the states of the Levant. He is interested in linguistic nationalism, Arabism, Zionism, francophonie, and the history of the French language and French missionaries in the Levant. Salameh is also a memoirist, anthologist, biographer, and translator of poetry and prose spanning English, French, Arabic, Lebanese, and Hebrew. His most recent monographs include The Other Middle East; An Anthology of Levantine Literature (Yale, 2017); and Lebanon’s Jewish Community; Fragments of Lives Arrested (Palgrave, 2019).
Karène Sanchez Summerer
is Associate Professor at Leiden University. She obtained her PhDs from Leiden University and EPHE (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris Sorbonne). Her research considers the interactions between European linguistic and cultural policies and the Arab communities (1860–1948) in Palestine. She is the PI of the research project “CrossRoads: European cultural diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine. A connected history during the formative years of the Middle East,” funded by NWO. From 2012 until 2017, she was Postdoctoral Researcher in the NWO-funded research project “Arabic and its alternatives: Religious Minorities in the Formative Years of the Modern Middle East (1920–1950)” led by Heleen Murre-van den Berg. Since 2017, she is one of the coordinators of the MisSMO research program about Christian missions in the Middle East since the late 19th century, https://missmo.hypotheses.org/. Forthcoming works: Social Sciences and Missions (special issue with Philippe Bourmaud. Brill, Missions, Powers, and Arabization, 2019); Mission and Humanitarianism in the Middle East 1860–1970 (volume with Inger Marie Okkenhaug, Leiden Studies in Islam and Society. Brill, Ideologies, Rhetoric and Praxis, 2020).
Cyrus Schayegh
is Professor of International History at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva; before, he was Associate Professor at the department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton. His most recent books are The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 2017) and The Routledge History Handbook of the Middle East Mandates (Routledge, 2015), co-published with Andrew Arsan. A forthcoming edited volume is Globalizing the US Presidency: Postcolonial Views of John F. Kennedy (Bloomsbury).
Emmanuel Szurek
is an Associate Professor at the EHESS, Paris. His research focuses on the educational and ideological elaboration of “modern Turkish” by transnational linguistics and orientalism, and the implementation of linguistic policies in Interwar Turkey. He has edited Turcs et Français. Une histoire culturelle 1860–1960 (with Güneş Işıksel, 2014), Transturkology. A Transnational History of Turkish Studies (with Marie Bossaert, 2017), and Kemalism: Transnational Politics in the Post Ottoman World (with Nathalie Clayer and Fabio Giomi, 2019). He is working on revising his PhD, Governing with Words. A Linguistic History of Nationalist Turkey (under contract with Oxford University Press).
Peter Wien
is Professor for Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Maryland in College Park. He holds a PhD from the University of Bonn, and Master’s degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Heidelberg. He also worked at Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, and the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies (Zentrum Moderner Orient, ZMO) in Berlin. His publications include the books Arab Nationalism: The Politics of History and Culture in the Modern Middle East (London: Routledge, 2017) and Iraqi Arab Nationalism: Authoritarian, Totalitarian and Pro-Fascist Inclinations, 1932–1941 (London: Routledge, 2006). Peter Wien serves as President of The Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TARII).