Notes on Contributors
Tarek Abu Hussein is pursuing his PhD in history and Middle Eastern studies at Harvard University. His research interests include Islamic education in the Ottoman Empire, and specifically Greater Syria, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as well as Ottoman-Islamic intellectual history and relations between the Arabic- and Turkish-speaking elites of the empire.
Yasmin Amin is a PhD student in Islamic studies at Exeter Univerity’s Arab and Islamic Institute. Her main research interest is the Hadith, as well as early Muslim society, literature and culture, and Muslim women. Her book Musnad Umm Salama and the Factors Affecting Its Evolution is forthcoming from Brill.
Kevin Blankinship is a PhD candidate in medieval Arabic literature at the University of Chicago and a current Fulbright-Hays scholar in Morocco. His research interests involve the interaction between language use and sociocultural identity, and what that interaction can teach us about ideologies of literary production, consumption, preservation, and transmission.
Tylor Brand is assistant professor of Middle Eastern history in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the American University of Sharjah. His research centers on the social experience and broader effects of crisis and disaster in Greater Syria, with a special emphasis on the famine in Syria and Lebanon during World War I. He also publishes a food history blog, Beirut by Belly.
Kirill Dmitriev is lecturer in Arabic at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and principal investigator in the ERC-funded project “Language—Philology—Culture: Arab Cultural Semantics in Transition” (
Eric Dursteler is professor and chair of the History Department at Brigham Young University. He is also editor of News on the Rialto and book review editor for Journal of Early Modern History. His research focuses on gender, religious identity, and food in the early modern Mediterranean. Among his most recent books are The Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean World, coauthored with Monique O’Connell (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) and Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2006).
Anny Gaul is a PhD student at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on culinary cultures, gender, the body, and domesticity in the Middle East. She also works as a translator and writes a food blog exploring the food cultures that she studies (
Julia Hauser is assistant professor of global history and the history of globalization processes. Her research interests include the history of cultural entanglements with regards to knowledge, food, religion, and gender. She is a member of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA). Her publications include German Religious Women in Late Ottoman Beirut: Competing Missions (Brill, 2015) and, coedited with Christine Lindner and Esther Möller, Entangled Education: Foreign and Local Schools in Ottoman Syria and Mandate Lebanon (19–20th Centuries) (Ergon, 2016).
Christian Junge is lecturer and research assistant at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Marburg University. His research interests include Arabic literature and philology of the Nahda, as well as Egyptian literature since the 1990s and emotion and affect theory.
Danilo Marino is currently working on the complete edition of al-Badrī’s Rāḥat al-arwāḥ. He published “Raconter l’ ivresse a l’ époque mamelouke. Les mangeurs de haschich comme motif littéraire” in Annales Islamologiques 49 (2015).
Karen Moukheiber is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Orient Institute, working on the project “Music and Gender in Kitab al-Aghani: Reflections on Women’s Cultural Roles in Classical Islam.” Her main interests are Abbasid female slavery, gender, sexuality and cultural studies.
Pedro Ribeiro Martins is a PhD candidate at University of Göttingen. His research interests are vegetarianism in antiquity, animal ethics in antiquity, discourses about justice, and fragmentary literature.
Christian Saßmannshausen is a research associate and lecturer at the institute for Islamic studies (Department of History and Cultural Studies) at Freie Universität Berlin. His current research interests include Ottoman legal culture, cultural history, and Islamic normativity and public morality in the modern Middle East. He was part of the interdisciplinary research project “Transforming Urban Worlds: Local Agency and Material Culture in Ottoman Tripoli,” from which a book is forthcoming.
Shaheed Tayob is a PhD fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Gottingen, Germany. His research investigates the ethics of exchange that emerge from the production of halal in Mumbai.
Lola Wilhelm is a fourth-year PhD student in international history and a teaching assistant at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. She is interested in the history of food-aid programmes in the early postcolonial period (1960–1980), as well as the ways transnational actors have responded to shocks and crises in the 20th century.