Crown Center for Middle East Studies

Bellin is the author of Stalled Democracy: Capital, Labor, and the Paradox of State-Sponsored Development (Cornell, 2002), and the co-editor of Building Rule of Law in the Arab World (Lynne Reinner Press, 2016). She has written extensively on authoritarian persistence in the Middle East, the political economy of development, the evolution of civil society, and the politics of cultural change. She has been a Carnegie Scholar (2007), a Princeton University Fellow (2006), and has served as an editor of the journal Comparative Politics since 2005. In 2015, she won the Dean's Award for Outstanding Mentorship of Graduate Students at Brandeis. Before coming to Brandeis, Bellin taught at Johns Hopkins/SAIS, Harvard University, Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She earned her BA at Harvard University and her PhD from Princeton University.

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.

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.

Shai Feldman is the Raymond Frankel Chair in Israeli Politics and Society at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies and Professor of Politics at Brandeis University. From 2005 to 2019, Shai was the founder and Crown Family Director of the Crown Center. From 1997 to 2005, he served as head of Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. He was a senior research associate at the Jaffee Center since its establishment in late 1977. In 2019-2022, he served as President of Sapir Academic College in Sha’ar Hanegev, Israel. Since 1997, he has also served as Board Associate of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Shai’s numerous publications include six books, the most recent of which is Arabs and Israelis: Conflict and Peacemaking in the Middle East, with Abdel Monem Said Aly and Khalil Shikaki (second edition, London: Bloomsbury, 2022). He holds a PhD in political science from the University of California at Berkeley.

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.

Before joining the Center in 2007, Habibi was managing director of the Middle East and North Africa Division at IHS-Global Insight. He holds a PhD in economics and a MS in systems engineering from Michigan State University. He has also worked as a research fellow at the Middle East Council at Yale University. His recent publications include "Preventing Overeducation and Graduate Surplus: What Can West Asia Learn from Singapore and Hong Kong?" "Asian Education and Development Studies" (2019); and "The Politics of Development and Security in Iran’s Border Provinces," with Erik Lob, "The Middle East Journal" (Summer 2019).

Han is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Brandeis University. Her research focuses on the experiences of Baloch women in the United Arab Emirates, examining themes of migration and belonging through aesthetics. With a background in ethnographic research, Han is interested in how categories of class, gender, and citizenship are navigated aesthetically, particularly in experiences of precarity and ambiguity. She holds an MA in sociocultural anthropology from Columbia University and a BA from Wheaton College.

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.

Kaleem is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology. His work looks at the social life of oil in Doha and its entanglements with the issues of gender and masculinity. Kaleem has spent nearly two years doing ethnographic fieldwork in Qatar and holds a Bsc in Foreign Service from Georgetown University.

Karakuş holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Arizona. His interdisciplinary research lies at the intersection of cultural anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, and security studies, with a focus on the modern Middle East. His dissertation, "Queer Debt: Affective Politics of Security and Intimacy in Kurdish Turkey," analyzes the effects of emergent security regimes on the intimate lives and livelihoods of queer and transgender Kurds. While at the Crown Center, Karakuş will develop his dissertation research into a book project that examines how regional notions of debt, responsibility, repayment and right are taken up, adapted and deployed by queer and transgender Kurds as they stake a claim to livelihood, but which also ends up more deeply implicating them in the securitized logics and socialities of the Kurdish conflict. Karakuş is also a Jean Monnet Scholar who completed his MSc at University College London's Security Studies program.

Born in Baghdad, Makiya left Iraq to study architecture at MIT, later joining Makiya Associates to design and build projects in the Middle East. In 1981, he left the practice of architecture and began to write a book about Iraq. Kanan has written several books and is widely published. "Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq" (University of California Press, 1989) became a best-seller after Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In 2003, he founded the Iraq Memory Foundation, a NGO based in Baghdad and the US that is dedicated to issues of remembrance, violence and identity formation. The Iraq Memory Foundation has collected and digitized nearly 10 million pages of Ba'th era documents and has been supported by both the Iraqi and U.S. governments as well as many foundations. Makiya recently authored the novel, "The Rope" (Pantheon, 2016), which quickly became an international bestseller.

Menoret is the current director of the Center for Economic, Legal and Social Studies and Documentation in Cairo and is on leave from Brandeis University for two years. His research interests include infrastructure, urban planning, and energy—in particular the anthropology of oil. He has conducted field research in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates. He is the author of "Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt" (Cambridge University Press 2014) and "Graveyard of Clerics: Everyday Activism in Saudi Arabia" (Stanford University Press 2020). He teaches classes on urban anthropology, infrastructure, development, religion and field research methods. He holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Provence and a PhD in history from the University of Paris-1.

Murad is a PhD student in history at Brandeis. Her current research focuses on the transition away from traditional Islamic historiography in the 19th-century Levant and the historiography of al-nahḍa in relation to the historical fiction of Jurji Zaydan and his contemporaries. She is interested in the pedagogical aspects and socio-political characteristics of nahḍa intellectualism as well as in the competing historical claims over national and religious identities emergent during the same period. Murad holds a joint MA in Near Eastern and Judaic studies and conflict and coexistence studies from Brandeis.

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.

Dr. Abdel Monem Said Aly is the Chairman of the Board and CEO of Al Masry Al Youm Publishing House in Cairo, and the former Chairman of the Board, CEO, and Director of the Regional Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo. He has served as president of Al Ahram Center for Political & Strategic Studies in Cairo, Chairman of the Board and CEO of Al Ahram Newspaper and Publishing House, and was a member of the Board at Al Ahram Institutions and the Director of Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. He was also a research fellow at both the Brookings Institute and the Belfer Center at Harvard University. He is currently a Senior Fellow in the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis. In 2014, he founded The Gulf Arab States Institute in Washington. He served as a Senator in the Egyptian Shura Council and has published books, articles, and chapters on world systems, Arab relations, European integration, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Egypt’s political system, National Security, and Arms Control. He contributes regularly to newspapers and media forums. His most recent publications are State and Revolution in Egypt: The Paradox of Change and Politics (Brandeis University, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, January 2012), and Arabs and Israelis:  Conflict and Peace Making in the Middle East (London, MacMillan & Belgrave), coauthored with Shai Feldman and Khalil Shikaki. He obtained his B.A. from Cairo University and his M.A. and PH.D in Political Science from Northern Illinois University.

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.

Shikaki has directed the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah since 2000 and has conducted more than 100 polls among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1993. A world-renowned expert on Palestinian public opinion and a widely published author, he has taught at several institutions, including Birzeit University, An-Najah National University, the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, and the University of South Florida. He was also a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, in 2002.

Naghmeh 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.

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.

Barnett is an assistant professor in the School of Government and Public Policy and School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. Carolyn's research focuses on how public opinion, social norms, and political behavior in the Middle East and North Africa evolve in response to women's rights reforms and other social policies. Her work has appeared in the "Journal of Political Science," "PS: Political Science and Politics," "Middle East Law and Governance" and "Hawwa." Carolyn has held Fulbright scholarships to Morocco for research and to Egypt for language study through the Center for Arabic Study Abroad program. She has also held a Marshall Scholarship to the UK, where she earned an MSc in Middle East politics and MA in Islamic studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Carolyn earned a BSFS from Georgetown University and worked as a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies from 2012-15. She holds a PhD in politics from Princeton University.

Daniel Neep was previously the assistant director for research and a sabbatical fellow at the Crown Center. Neep is the author of Occupying Syria: Insurgency, Space, and State Formation (Cambridge 2012). He is currently finishing his second book, The Nation Belongs to All: The Making of Modern Syria, which explains Syria’s political development in terms of global transformations, changing economic infrastructures, emerging political geographies, and waves of popular protest. He holds a PhD in politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His research has been supported by the Andrew L. Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the American Druze Foundation, the British Academy, the Council for British Research in the Levant, and the Arts & Humanities Research Council (UK), in addition to the Crown Center. He has taught Middle East politics at Georgetown University and the University of Exeter, and currently teaches in the Department of Political Science at George Washington.

Philbrick Yadav is Professor and Chair of the International Relations department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Specializing in the politics of Yemen, she focuses on the work of Yemeni civil actors. Her first book, Islamists and the State: Legitimacy and Institutions in Yemen and Lebanon, was published in 2013, followed by a number of articles on Yemen's partisan and post-partisan politics. Her 2022 book was Yemen in the Shadow of Transition: Pursuing Justice Amid War; and as a Crown Center non-resident fellow, she wrote "Fragmentation and Localization in Yemen’s War: Challenges and Opportunities for Peace," a Middle East Brief.  As chair of the MENA Politics section for the APSA, she focused on the ethical challenges of field research in the MENA region, and she currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Project on Middle East Political Science, the American Institute of Yemeni Studies, and the Center for Research in Partnership with the Orient. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Jillian Schwedler is Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and the Graduate Center. She has served as elected member of the Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and the APSA Council of the American Political Science Association and as a member of the editorial committees of Middle East Law and Governance, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Middle East Report, among others. Dr. Schwedler’s research focuses on contentious politics, political geography, protest and policing, and Islamist political parties. Her books include the award-winning Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (Cambridge 2006), Policing and Prisons in the Middle East (with Laleh Khalili, Columbia 2010), and most recently, the award-winning Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent (Stanford 2022). Her articles have appeared in World Politics, Comparative Politics, Middle East Critique, and Social Movement Studies, among many others.

Yuval Evri is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish Studies at Brandeis University. He is a cultural historian specializing in Sephardi/Arab-Jewish modern history and culture, with a particular interest in Palestine during the first half of the 20th century. His current book project traces the invention of the Mizrahim/Sephardim as go-betweens and mediators on the borderline that emerged between the Jew and the Arab and between Hebrew and Arabic and explores how the fluidity inherent in this position became a source of resistance to the dominant national and monolingual forces. His last book, The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew, was published by Magnes Press in 2020.

Güvenç Ospina Leon, architectural and urban historian, is an assistant professor of fine arts at Brandeis University. She previously held the position of a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interest encompasses social movements, minority politics, urbanism, and architecture in the Middle East and beyond. Her work resides at the crossroads of contemporary social theory and the politics of urban space. She is the author of the forthcoming book, The City is Ours: Spaces of Political Mobilization and Imaginaries of Nationhood in Turkey (Cornell University Press, 2024). Drawing from over thirteen years of dedicated research, Muna Güvenç reveals that urban and architectural forms are not mere backdrops within the cityscape where political struggles unfold; instead, they constitute the very essence of these conflicts. Her current research is on the ways in which how Muslim worship spaces in American cities could be crucibles for the construction of difference and community across racial, ethnic, and religious lines. She holds a PhD in architecture with a designated emphasis on global metropolitan studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Singer is the Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Chair in Islamic Studies in the Department of History at Brandeis. She was previously a professor of Ottoman studies at Tel Aviv University. A leading scholar of Ottoman history, Singer’s publications include "Palestinian Peasants and Ottoman Officials" (1994), "Constructing Ottoman Beneficence" (2002), and "Charity in Islamic Societies" (2008). Her current research focuses on the city of Edirne, exploring how the city participated in the formation of Ottoman state and society in the first half of the 15th century. She holds a PhD in Near Eastern studies from Princeton University.