Faculty
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.