Core Faculty & Staff
Mohamad Bazzi

Email: Mohamad.Bazzi@nyu.edu
Mohamad Bazzi is an associate professor of journalism at New York University, where he teaches international reporting. From 2019 to 2021, he was associate director of NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. From 2009 to 2013, he served as an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), providing regional expertise and analysis. He was also the 2008 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at CFR. Before joining the NYU faculty, Bazzi was the Middle East bureau chief at Newsday from 2003 to 2008, where he established bureaus in Baghdad and Beirut. He was the lead writer on the Iraq war and its aftermath.
Jared McCormick

Email: Jared.McCormick@nyu.edu
Jared's larger research explores issues of tourism and imaginations of place across the Middle East. Digital scholarship/methods are central to his teaching and personal work. He is very interested to push the boundaries of how we conceptualize, use, and make visual/digital materials central within our research process. He completed his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, and a secondary degree in Critical Media Practices, at Harvard University and his MA from the American University of Beirut. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar before joining NYU.
Jared is working on the book manuscript of his dissertation which joins a historical analysis of the tourism/leisure industry in Lebanon with an ethnography of queer mobility since 2004. He also has been carrying out a parallel project concerning tourism in the Arabian Gulf (Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, and Bahrain) centered on “tourism” to explore state making, affective speculation, and new ways to understand infrastructures. (www.jaredmccormick.com)
Remote Office Hours: Monday 10:00 - 11:00am (https://nyu.zoom.us/my/jaredmccormick)
Bookable office hours here
Nasser Abourahme

Email: na81@nyu.edu
Nasser Abourahme works between urban geography, political theory, and postcolonial studies. His current work moves across the social sciences and the humanities to focus on issues of borders and encampment as they come up against questions of aesthetics and textuality. Nasser completed his PhD at Columbia University in 2018, was most recently a fellow at the Humanities Council and the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University, and is currently working on a book manuscript titled, The Time Beneath the Concrete: Camp, Colony, Palestine. Nasser is also the Special Features Editor at the urban studies journal, CITY, and has published widely in edited volumes and journals including IJURR, CITY, and Public Culture. His publications can be found here.
Remote Office Hours: Tuesday 5:00-6:00 pm (https://nyu.zoom.us/j/5628210092)
STAFF
James Ryan

Email: james.ryan@nyu.edu
James Ryan is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in History from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor's degree in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. His dissertation, "The Republic of Others: Opponents of Kemalism in Turkey's Single Party Era, 1919-1950" focused on the contributions of opposition figures to political and cultural life in the first thirty years of the Turkish Republic, and was supported by a Dissertation Writing Award from the Institute for Turkish Studies. He has also published on the history of the Istanbul tramway for the Journal of Urban History and Mobility in History, and has had his writing appear in public forums such as Public Books and Al-Jazeera America. Prior to his graduate studies, he served on the staff of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where he coordinated outreach programming and academic events.
Remote Office Hours: By Appointment.
Bookable Office Hours here
Fidele Harfouche

Email: fh38@nyu.edu
Fidele is the primary point of contact for MA students in administrative and academic matters and handles admission related inquiries from prospective students. She is in charge of matters relating to student employees and functions as the center’s communications specialist where she works on promoting the center and its programs through various social media platforms. Before joining NYU, Fidele worked at Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities in the Kingdom of Bahrain as a Media Specialist in the Culture and Arts Department. During her time in Lebanon, she was a Project Coordinator at Hibr Lubnani, an alternative media outlet in Beirut. Fidele received her MA with Merit from SOAS, University of London, in Near and Middle East Studies and received her BA from Drew University in Political Science and Middle East Studies and a minor in Gender Studies. She is also a freelance micro blogger, a passionate social justice advocate and an experimental vegan.
Remote Office Hours: By Appointment.
Bookable Office Hours here
Tandi Budhram (Singh)

Email: tandi.budhram@nyu.edu
Tandi began her career at NYU in 2004 as an non-credit adviser at the School of Professional Services (SPS) Foreign Languages and Global Affairs Certification program, and she also spent a number of years coordinating SPS’s McGhee division tutoring program in math, economics, and writing. During her time at SPS-McGhee, she was also involved in the Dream Careers initiative, an NYU outreach program that offered internships, housing and courses for 1000 high school and college students in cities such as Washington DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. She joined the Kevorkian Center in October 2015, and is the critical first point of contact in the day-to-day running of the Center, including providing significant support to Kevorkian’s active scholarly events calendar and its rigorous Master's degree program.