Staff
Samore previously served as President Barack Obama's White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and President Bill Clinton's Senior Director for Non-proliferation and Export Controls. In addition to directing the Crown Center, Samore is a professor of the practice of politics in the Department of Politics at Brandeis. He is also a senior fellow in the Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was a National Science Foundation Fellow at Harvard University, where he received his MA and PhD in government.
Sohrabi is the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History and the Director for Research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies. She is the author of Taken for Wonder: Nineteenth Century Travel Accounts from Iran to Europe, and is currently writing a second book on the history of the 1979 revolutionary generation in Iran, for which she has received an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship, a Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Fellowship in Comparative Revolutions (with Greg Childs), an ACLS fellowship, and the Berlin prize from the American Academy in Berlin. She was also awarded the Bernstein Faculty Fellowship (2015) and the Michael L. Walzer award for teaching excellence (2019). Professor Sohrabi is a member of the International Advisory Board, Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Science, member of Advisory Board, Women’s World in Qajar Iran: A Digital Archive, and the president of the Association for Iranian Studies from 2020–2022.
Cherniahivsky earned an MBA from Simmons School of Management in 2001. Previously, she managed the international security program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University and worked in Eastern Europe on issues around democracy and civil society in post-communist states.
Rossoukh is an anthropologist who focuses on culture and media in the Middle East. He spent time with the Bakhtiyari, a tribal group in southwestern Iran, before undertaking a three-year fieldwork project on the Iranian film industry, which is the subject of his first book project. Rossoukh co-edited (with Steven Caton) the volume Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity (Duke University Press, 2021), and contributed one of the volume’s essays on the first uses of digital film editing technologies in Iran. He is currently interested in the United Arab Emirates' efforts to develop a space agency with the goal of establishing a settlement on Mars by 2117. He holds a PhD in anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University.
Spira holds a PhD in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis. Her dissertation focuses on the development of child welfare systems in the Yishuv. She was previously a Schusterman fellow at the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. She holds an MA in Near Eastern and Judaic studies from Brandeis, an MA in religion from the University of Georgia, and a dual BA in English and religious studies from the University of Arizona. She teaches courses on Jewish and Israeli history at Brandeis and as a community educator in a variety of settings throughout the greater Boston area and New York.
Gottesman is a professional writer with years of experience writing, editing, marketing and working in communications and social media spaces. She has previously worked internationally for PBS, Warner Brothers Paris, and most recently as a writer for Harvard University. Gottesman holds a BA in journalism and attended the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey for graduate studies in French Translation and Interpretation.
Horowitz is a native of New York City and now lives in Waltham, Massachusetts. Her 2007 Sunnybank Calendar won the Dog Writers Association of America Writing Contest Maxwell Award in the calendar category. She is an avid photographer and jewelry designer.
Cohen has edited reference books, scholarly and general-interest non-fiction, and public policy and think tank publications on international relations, urban affairs and other specialties for over a quarter-century. He has also written and edited definitions for the Random House Unabridged and other dictionaries; contributed a monograph on anti-poverty policy history to Inventing Community Renewal: The Trials and Errors That Shaped the Modern Community Development Corporation; written a documentary for NPR and feature stories and reviews for magazines and newspapers; and produced a compilation CD and over 100 radio programs.