First Year
Email: saa9004@nyu.edu
Samar received her B.A. in Feminist Studies with a minor in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz in 2019. Her theoretical engagements include feminist and social theory, anti-colonial thought, and Marxism. She's particularly interested in the genealogy of prisons and confinement in Palestine, intellectual histories of the Palestinian left, and internationalism.
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First Year
Email: owa207@nyu.edu
Omar graduated with a B.A. in Political Science and a legal studies minor in 2020 from CUNY–City College; he previously graduated with a B.S. Political Science and Economy with a focus on the Islamic Theory in 2012 from Damascus University. His research interests include cyber State violence, conspiracy in the digital age, and digital dissent. He hopes to expand methods and agencies at NYU to refine and filter his interests into a vocational tool in cyber advocacy in the MENA region.
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First Year
Email: lha5016@nyu.edu
Leila graduated from The University of California, Irvine in 2020 where she majored in History and Global Middle Eastern Studies. In 2019, she studied abroad at the American University of Beirut. Her interests include popular movements, public space in Beirut, and sectarianism.
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First Year
Email: fbb2918@nyu.edu
Fatoumata graduated with an Honors B.A. in Political Science and an Arabic minor in 2018 from CUNY–Hunter College, where she currently is an Adjunct Instructor of Arabic. After graduation, she went on to study Modern Standard Arabic in Morocco through the Critical Language Scholarship (CLS), followed by a year in Amman, Jordan as a fellow of the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) at the Qasid Arabic Institute. Her research interests include topics in Arabic diglossia, political Islamic thought and modernity, and Islam in West Africa and the African diaspora
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First Year
Email: rb3784@nyu.edu
Romaissaa graduated from NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study in May 2020, from her living room couch. During her time at Gallatin, she studied literature, focusing on written works of resistance as a throughline in her global studies. At the Kevorkian center, she hopes to focus on race and racialization in the MENA region, especially in relation to social movements locally and globally. Romaissaa is a freelance writer, and her personal essays have appeared in outlets including Buzzfeed, McSweeney's, and The New York Times. She is also an amateur baker currently working on her pie crust technique.
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First Year
Email: hc3289@nyu.edu
Hakan earned a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Kocaeli University in Turkey, and developed an interest in world history, philosophy, and literature during his professional career in international business for several years. Then, he studied for a master’s degree in History from a global perspective at the City University of New York. He now plans to give special attention to the history of the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic at New York University, and hopes to explore the essence of intellectual change in Modern Turkey in the early 20th century from an interdisciplinary perspective.
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First Year
Email: mkd363@nyu.edu
Mehrdad graduated with a B.A. in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University, where he focused on modern politics, history, and law. His undergraduate thesis asked about the interplay between modern political thought and traditional religious concepts in the intellectual history of mid-twentieth-century Iran. At NYU, Mehrdad hopes to continue his study of Persian and Arabic. He is interested in researching the rise of new legal regimes in the Middle East, particularly in the areas of constitutional and criminal law.
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First Year
Email: dsd9820@nyu.edu
Dorsa graduated from Colorado College in 2018 with degrees in Feminist and Gender Studies and Political Science. As an undergraduate, her research explored the subjectivity formation of queer diasporic Iranians. Her research at Kevo will aim to examine how the diaspora's affective attachments to the homeland through memory and nostalgia construct particular narratives on Iran that reify or refute present ones. Her other interests include gender and sexuality, nationalism, secularism and their various intersections.
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First Year
Email: fh2088@nyu.edu
Fadi graduated from Aleppo University in Syria in 2000 with a Bachelor Degree in English Language and Literature, and in 2005 earned his MA in Sociolinguistics at Essex University in the United Kingdom. In 2008, he graduated from Essex with a PhD in Linguistics and returned to Syria to teach at Aleppo University, where he also did research on Arabic conversation analysis working on data collected from news interviews and mundane interaction. he then came to Montclair State University in New Jersey in 2013 as a visiting scholar, and currently teaches in the graduate program of Linguistics at William Paterson University of New Jersey and English classes at CUNY’s Lehman College. While studying at NYU, he hopes to explore the political dynamics of the Middle East with focus on its diverse cultures, international relations and modern history.
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First Year
Email: sj3266@nyu.edu
A settler on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories, Samaah completed her undergraduate studies at Simon Fraser University with a joint major in International Studies and World Literature and a minor in Middle Eastern and Islamic History. She recently completed a dual-degree program with an MA from Columbia University and an MSc from the London School of Economics in International and World History. Samaah’s interdisciplinary research is focused on the social and intellectual history of Islam in the twentieth century. She is interested in the movement of Islamic language and ideas, the discourse on Islam and modernity, as well as themes of justice and liberation in Islamic thought.
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First Year
Email: sk7075@nyu.edu
Sarah Kayali graduated with a BA in International Area Studies and a minor in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oklahoma in May 2020. While she specialized in nationalism and diasporic studies, her senior honors thesis explored informal means of giving and social mobility in Arab Muslim communities in the United States. For her research, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork in both Arabic and English. Sarah is interested in the variable intersections of culture, class, and gender with a special focus on the role of economic attitudes and social aspirations. She looks to study broader themes of legitimacy, authenticity, and agency.
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First Year
Email: mkz5975@nyu.edu.pk
Manal Khan has studied film and journalism for her bachelors while also being actively involved in the women's movements in Pakistan. She has been published in Dawn, Herald Magazine, The Third Pole and others since she started writing some 3 years ago. Manal is also one of the 25x25 SheDecides fellow highlighting the issues of bodily autonomy and menstrual health awareness. She has also been selected for a Caravan Magazine narrative journalism workshop for the year 2020.
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First Year
Email: el3417@nyu.edu
Eden graduated from Colorado College in 2019 with a BA in Feminist and Gender Studies and Political Science. For her senior thesis, she explored the secular-religious divide in Israeli society with a focus on the erasure of Palestine from Israeli national consciousness, and the enabling construction of the Zionist secular feminist discourse vis a vis increasing ultra-orthodox visibility in the public sphere and in the military specifically. After graduation Eden returned to her hometown of Lod (Lydda), where she worked on the election campaign of the Joint List Party, and joined the organization Mesarvot, a political support network of conscientious objectors. At NYU, Eden hopes to explore ethnography and media studies as tools to study historical amnesias and the tensions between nationalism, religion, and secularism.
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First Year
Email: arm582@nyu.edu
Anna graduated from Boston University in 2016 with a B.A. in International Relations and Middle East & North Africa Studies. After graduating, she worked in political fundraising for several years in Washington, DC. She has spent the last two years living in Ankara, Turkey - first as a Fulbright English teaching fellow, and then a program assistant for the Turkish Fulbright Commission. She is in the Global and Joint Studies Journalism program at NYU. Anna is particularly interested in Turkish nationalism, Kurdish statehood, the intersection of religion and politics, and food culture.
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First Year
Email: tmo6245@nyu.edu
Timothy O'Shea graduated from Case Western Reserve University with his BA in Political Science and minors in History, Public Policy, and Economics. His research interests include Middle East politics and critical political economy through the lens of global capitalism and western imperialism. Timothy's work at CWRU focused on a critical history of Israel's weapons industry and the political economy of occupation. At the Kevorkian Center, he is particularly interested in continuing to study war economies, oil and security politics, capital flows and supply chains, and the arms trade and defense offsets.
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First Year
Email: mao9271@nyu.edu
Miriam Osman graduated with a BA in International Studies from Macalester College where she focused on global political economy and critical theory by investigating questions of labor, class, and the politics of beauty in the Middle East. After graduation, Miriam went on to work in the non-profit education sector, which grew her interest in working in higher education. While at NYU, Miriam hopes to expand her knowledge of anthropological methods to study the making and performance of class identities, notions of mobility, and feelings of national belonging in Egypt.
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First Year
Email: ss8140@nyu.edu
Sahar holds a degree in English Education from both Queens College (B.A.) and Teachers College, Columbia University (M.A.), where she used an interdisciplinary approach to curriculum and pedagogy to challenge normative framings of the Middle East. Sahar is particularly interested in issues of knowledge construction and the politicized nature of (mis)representation around Iran; namely, how the hypervisibility or invisibility of Iranians is a product of power, and what gets showcased or hidden in mainstream media is dependent on the positionality of those in control of the narrative. As such, her current research examines Iranian forms of aesthetic production, such as literature and film, that respond to hegemonic Western knowledge about the region, while also considering the sociopolitical and historical contexts that profoundly affect the ways in which these counternarratives are commercialized and consumed in the West.
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First Year
Email: pw1329@nyu.edu
Peixian graduated from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2016 with a BS in Astronomy, specializing in computational astrophysics. He is currently working on risk management systems as a software engineer at Bloomberg LP. Through his work on global markets, he became interested the development of contemporary Iraq. At NYU, he hopes to delve into the political economy of Iraq, and the various ways economics, politics, and militias determine state reconstruction.
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First Year
Email: rz1399@nyu.edu
Ryan Zohar graduated from the Dual BA Program Between Columbia University and Sciences Po in 2019 with degrees in Political Science and Middle East, South Asian & African Studies. After finishing his undergraduate studies, he studied in Amman, Jordan as a Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) Fellow. His research interests include the politics of Mizrahiyut in Israel/Palestine, Iraqi-Jewish cultural production, archival studies, and literary translation. Beyond his studies at the Kevorkian Center, Ryan works as a Program Assistant for the International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).
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First Year
Email: ekz209@nyu.edu
Eleni graduated with a BA in the History of Art from the University of Michigan in 2014 and completed a masters in Histoire et civilisations comparées at the Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7) in 2018. Her masters research focused on collections and exhibitions of Islamic art in late 19th-early 20th century Paris, and she wrote her thesis on a 1912 exhibition of “Miniatures Persanes” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. After her degree, she went to Ioannina, Greece through the IKY Greek State Scholarship Foundation to study Modern Greek language and history, during which time she began to explore Greek Ottoman history and heritage. Her current research interests include visual culture, cultural heritage, and maritime networks in the Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea.
Second Year
Email: mb7718@nyu.edu
Mohamed Badran graduated with a BA in History from CUNY: Brooklyn College where he focused on the early roots of Arab Nationalism and its historical development in the Middle East. He went on to teach middle school social studies for two years in New York City, inspiring youth from diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds to learn their own histories and create positive change in their communities by vocalizing their opinions on local political matters. He is currently the K-12 NYU Outreach coordinator assisting current teachers on methods on how to present facts and the history of the Middle East in the classroom. While studying at NYU, Mohamed hopes to explore the link between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the De-Islamization of the Middle East through a Historical Analysis of the early 19th century to the modern day.
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Second Year
Email: lnb261@stern.nyu.edu
Lina Barkawi holds both a B.S. in Industrial & Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech and is a recent Tech & Entrepreneurship MBA graduate from NYU Stern, specializing in Product Management. She is currently working on designing and building out innovative products aimed at solving social and economic problems on a global scale via Mastercard's Innovation Labs. While passionate about serving as the strongest connection between product and its users, she is also ardent about similar applications in the Middle East, but recognizes the weight that contemporary political economies, cultures, and historical processes of the Middle East can have on the impact of innovation and product development in the region. She looks to study this particular intersection of business, technology, and the Middle East to ultimately create tangible, positive change.
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Second Year
Email: mab1472@nyu.edu
Mahdi graduated from The College of William & Mary in 2016 where he majored in International Relations and Middle Eastern Studies. He then moved to DC where he was a financial consultant for Tempus Inc., a global firm that specializes in foreign currency trading. During his time in DC, he also volunteered as a Presentation Coordinator with Afikra, a global nonprofit aimed at promoting intellectualism, diversity and richness of Arab culture and history. At NYU, Mahdi hopes to explore conceptions and imaginings of race and ethnicity in the context of the Maghreb, West Africa, and the Mediterranean. He is also interested in post-colonial modes of cultural production, global supply chain networks of cultural commodities, and entrepreneurship in the Global South.
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Second Year
Email: me1700@nyu.edu
Mariam graduated from Alexandria University, Egypt in 2011 with a Bachelor degree in English Literature. In 2013, she was granted a Fulbright scholarship followed by a two-year Teaching Fellowship at Bard College, NY where she was working as the Arabic TA and taking classes in English Literature, Middle Eastern Studies and MAT graduate program. Before joining the Kevorkian Center, Mariam has worked as Knowledge Organization & Management Specialist at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Editor at the Oral History Project at the AUC, Language Instructor at AMIDEAST and Edison International, Content Creator and Teacher Coordinator at “Talk in Arabic” online platform and she hosts the “Talk in Arabic” podcast. Mariam’s research interests include Urbanism and the late Ottoman Empire
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Second Year
Email: zlg222@nyu.edu
Zachary graduated from Ohio University in 2019 where he majored in Sociology with certificates in Islamic Studies and Middle East and North Africa Studies. There, he completed an undergraduate thesis exploring the relationship between protesters and police in Iran from 2009 to 2018, and how that relationship has affected the state of contentious politics within the country. While at NYU, Zachary intends to further his understanding of contentious politics within authoritarian states in the Middle East.
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Second Year
Email: hh2351@nyu.edu
Haniya graduated from Vassar College in 2018 where she majored in educational studies and psychology. As an undergraduate, her research examined the inclusion of Muslim women as subjects within academic disciplines, such as women's studies. Her current interests include the study of empire and colony, orientalism, gender studies, and cultural theory.
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Second Year
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Second Year
Email: dak478@nyu.edu
Diana Kruzman is a student in the dual Near East Studies/Journalism MA program, with an interest in stories that challenge stereotypes and provide nuanced portrayals that go beyond attention-grabbing headlines. Diana graduated from the University of Southern California in 2019 with bachelor's degrees in Middle East Studies and Journalism, and has held professional reporting internships at USA Today, Reuters and The Oregonian. The child of Russian immigrants to the U.S., Diana is particularly interested in exploring stories in Central Asia, at the intersection between Russia and the Middle East. She hopes to work as a foreign correspondent with a focus on environmental reporting, looking at how ecological problems and solutions in the Near East can be applied to other regions of the world.
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Second Year
Email: km4826@nyu.edu
Katie graduated from the University of Kentucky in May of 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and a second Bachelor of Arts in Modern and Classical Literatures, Languages and Cultures with a focus in Arabic and Islamic Studies. As an undergraduate, her research focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Uyghur population, the Yemeni revolution and civil war, and religious expressions in Arabic. Inspired and influenced by her independent study of Persian, Katie hopes to expand her research to include Iran as well as continue her interests from her undergraduate career.
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First Year
Email: sn1672@nyu.edu
Shahrooz graduated from CUNY's Hunter College in 2018 with a B.A. in Political Science with a concentration in International Affairs, as well as minors in Arabic and Human Rights. He has worked for NGOs such as PEN America supporting artists and writers under threat from censorship and persecution as well as a UN-based organization working to establish sensible gun control policies on a global scale. As an undergraduate, his research examined peacebuilding after periods of extreme violence such as the Rwandan genocide as well as the legal implications surrounding the loss of Middle Eastern cultural heritage due to war. His current interests include the study of how legal discourse is informed by linguistic identities in the Middle East. Shahrooz hopes to practice law in the future.
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Second Year
Email: tn836@nyu.edu
Tehreem graduated from New York University Shanghai Campus in 2018 with a major in neuroscience. As an undergraduate, she studied the neuro-scientific reasons behind the behavioral/mental proclivities of conformism in a body politic. She is interested in investigating how boundaries of culture, religion, and politics are shaped, crisscrossed and blurred. She now plans to proceed further and examine in Near Eastern Studies Program with a concentration in International Relations the different ways in which cultural matrix, societal configuration, and religious traditionalism disrupt the legal and political processes of just administration. She also plans to make an endeavor to trace a common set of cultural and religious leitmotif(s) between the Near East and South Asia.
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Second Year
Email: eho229@nyu.edu
Erin graduated from Princeton University in 2016 with a Bachelor of Arts in Near Eastern Studies, and a concentration in Persian Studies. Originally from Washington D.C., Erin moved to Istanbul, Turkey, where she lived for three years studying Turkish, and running communications and recruitment for a technology company. Influenced by her experience living in Istanbul, Erin is interested in exploring representations of Turkey (and the wider Middle East) in Western Media, particularly in building on her undergraduate research focusing on media representations of women and young people in the region. She is also interested in exploring the experiences and role of different minority groups in the current Turkish political system and lexicon. Erin speaks Turkish, Persian, and French.
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Second Year
Email: rs4814@nyu.edu
I graduated from Hunter College in 2018 with a bachelors in Women and Gender Studies, Sociology and a minor in Arabic. I plan to master the Arabic language in order to one day teach it. I also hope to incorporate my gender studies background and develop an interdisciplinary approach to my research. I am a Pakistani Muslim American born and raised in Brooklyn, and i have five sisters. Currently I work at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as a library page.
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Second Year
Email: gss401@nyu.edu
Gemma graduated summa cum laude from Florida State University in 2019 with a B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies, Political Science, and International Affairs. Her senior honors thesis focused on the intersection of religious identity and Arab nationalism during the King-Crane Commission. In 2018, she studied at the Qasid Arabic Institute in Amman, Jordon on a university scholarship. In 2019, Gemma helped curate an exhibit at Florida State’s Museum of Fine Arts on identity in the late Ottoman Empire. At NYU, she plans to concentrate her research on democratization movements in the Gulf and U.S. foreign policy in the region. While working towards her M.A. in Near Eastern Studies at the Kevorkian Center, Gemma plans to pursue a concentration in International Relations.
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Second Year
Email: ft647@nyu.edu
Fatima Tariq graduated from CUNY Hunter College in 2018 as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow with a BA in English Literature and Arabic. She considers herself a local of Lahore and Brooklyn. Her interest in neoliberalism's effects on national language policy and planning in education led her to write her undergraduate thesis on the place of English in central Morocco. Fatima is also interested in translation studies, Arabic pedagogy and decolonial thought. She is an ambivalent linguistic anthropologist, and an aspiring Arabic-English literary translator.
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Second Year
Email: lmt5@nyu.edu
Lucie Taylor is the Assistant Editor for the Library of Arabic Literature at NYU Press. She earned her B.A. in Arabic and French from Oxford University in 2015. While at Oxford, she studied Arabic at the Institut français in Cairo in 2012-13 and completed an internship in Amman in 2014. Her interests include Arabic literature, nationalism, modernity, and the politics of translation.
Email: jaladdin@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Arbitrating Iraq: Colonial Law and Rule in Mandate Iraq (1916-1932)"
Janna graduated from Rutgers University in 2016 with a B.S./B.A. in Public health, Middle Eastern studies, and history where she focused on environmental history and the history of medicine in the Ottoman Empire. After Rutgers, she lived in Amman, Jordan through the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) fellowship where she focused on classical Arabic. When not conjugating Arabic words, she spent time working as a translator for various nonprofits. Her research interests include the history of modern Iraq, historiography, and the intellectual history of the Arab-speaking world. As a map nerd, she hopes to expand on her potential research through the use of spatial history.
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Email: ga974@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "From Tagging to Tag Heuer: The Commercialization of Street Art in Beirut"
Grace’s university track actually originated in the realm of art and design. She graduated summa cum laude from Fashion Institute of Technology’s jewelry design program, and thereafter decided to follow her passion for language studies at NYU, where she earned a BA in German literature. Grace first took Arabic as an elective, a choice which ended up fueling her decision to pursue Middle Eastern studies. Her senior honor’s thesis led her to conduct research in Berlin, where she analyzed the impact of gentrification on an Arab community, using food culture as a tool to survey where and how distinct groups appropriate space. Grace’s study gave her contemporary insight on various issues, such as white hegemony and racism as a product of colonialism. She plans to continue examining oppressive social dynamics not only in diaspora communities, but also in the Middle East itself.
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Email: aay262@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Am I an Authentic Khaliij? Exploring Locality in the Context of GCC Museums and Cultural Institutions"
Afnan Al-Yafaey, native to Oman, graduated from the New School in 2017 with a BA in Psychology, and minors in Journalism and Japanese studies. Having focused mainly on cross-cultural psychology, she is interested in various representations of gender in Japan, Oman, and the US, more specifically comparing women’s conceptions of feminism in every day life amongst the three cultures. She is also interested in further exploring female sexuality in the Middle East, especially in the Islamic context and its relation to the hijab.
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Email: gtb254@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Merzifon Missionary Station: State Capacity and Complicating the Political"
George Boyan graduated with Honors from Wingate University in 2014 with a B.S. in Social Studies Education and a North Carolina Teaching Licensure. Upon graduation he taught a year of high school history in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, his hometown. Focusing mainly on a wide range of histories during his studies he later sparked an interest in the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic that has yet to subside. This led to the completion of a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship in Turkey, finishing in 2016. While living and working in Turkey, he studied Turkish and plans to continue his language studies at the Kevorkian Center. After spending a year working and continuing to study history on his own, he is excited to re-enter a formal setting to further his knowledge of Turkey and the wider region. His research interests include political, diplomatic and social history, as well as foreign policy, focusing on the late Ottoman Period and the early Turkish Republic. Including a strong interest in similar developments in Modern Turkey.
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Email: mje331@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Maryama: A Tale of Dispossession at the Limit of Translation"
Michael received his BA from Bard College in 2014. In 2015 he was awarded a Center for Arabic Study Abroad Fellowship to undertake a year-long Arabic intensive at the American University in Cairo. Prior to pursuing his MA at NYU's Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, Michael worked as Political Economy Project Coordinator for the Arab Studies Institute. Michael's interests include Arabic literature and film, Third World internationalism, translation studies, and Russian-Arabic literary encounters.
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Email: gk1069@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Dushanbe 2017: National Belonging through Dance"
Gordiya Khademian graduated from New York University in Spring 2017, where she majored in Politics and minored in Anthropology and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. She spent this past summer in Tajikistan, studying Persian and Tajiki through the Critical Language Scholarship (CLS), as well as taking traditional Tajik dance lessons with the Padida Dance Troupe. Gordiya is broadly interested in nationalism, diasporic identity, and political anthropology in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. She hopes to explore conceptions of identity and how these conceptions interact with state institutions and how dance and music can be seen as political forms of expression. Gordiya wants to continue her study of Persian and is thinking about learning Russian or Arabic in the future. In her free time, she likes dogs, dancing, and dessert.
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Email: cg3063@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Islands of Progress: Humanitarianism, Development, and The Near East Foundation"
Courtney graduated with honors from University of Texas at Austin with a dual BA in Arabic Language & Literature and Middle Eastern Studies. Shortly before pursuing her MA in Near East Studies at the Kevorkian center, she was awarded a Center for Arabic Study Abroad fellowship for study at the Qasid Institute in Amman, Jordan. Courtney's interests include historical and anthropological approaches to humanitarianism, humanitarian governance, neoliberalism, and NGOs.
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Email: srl461@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "The Curious Relationship: An Inquiry into the Historiography of Early Black Nationalist Support for Zionism"
After receiving a BFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011, Sarah went on to study part-time at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Southern Maine where she focused on Middle Eastern Studies, Sociology, and Arabic language. She spent the past two academic years working in her hometown of Portland, Maine within the refugee and immigrant community where she helped students with English language acquisition. Her research interests include nationalism and Zionism, institutionalized racism and mass incarceration.
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Email: em3600@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "A Constellation of Terrorisms: Imperial Russia, Post-Soviet Uzbekistan and the War on Terror"
Egina Manachova is a writer and program curator based in New York. Her work is focused on the role of Central Asia in Russian and Middle East geo-politics. She is particularly interested in thinking through authoritarianism and how the "War on Terror" is framed and shaped in the region. She was born in Tashkent, raised in Houston, and went to school in Philadelphia.
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Email: alm867@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "The Possessed Postcolonial Body: Islamic Ritual Healing in the Sudan"
Alex graduated in 2013 from the University of Virginia with a B.A. in Religious Studies, while studying Arabic in both Jordan and Lebanon. After graduating, he worked in Washington, D.C. for a documentary film nonprofit that focuses on increasing interfaith understanding. In 2015, he began working in community development at Broadway United Church of Christ, one of New York City's historic faith communities. Alex's academic interests include Arabic intellectual history, dramatic literature and performance in the Middle East and North Africa, translation studies, and Critical Theory.
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Email: jp4871@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Funding Innovation on the Nile: The Barriers for Venture Capital in Egypt"
Jonathan, also known as "Yoni", grew up in the town of Kfar-Saba, Israel. He graduated from Tel-Aviv University with a dual B.A in Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science, and his thesis focused on the historiographical debate around the causes leading to the Egyptian “open door” economic policy in the 70’s-80’s. His main interests are economic and business relations within the region. More specifically, topics like Islamic Finance, regional entrepreneurship, and the impact of venture capital on small and medium sized business initiatives. In order to gain a thorough grasp of these matters, Yoni is part of the “Business Track”, through which he takes MBA courses in the fields of Economics and Business. Yoni is also interested in journalism, and the role of the Jewish community in Iraqi classical music, but those are really just for fun.
In addition to his academic personality, Yoni is also a professional musician (well, a drummer), and he claims to have moved to New York just for the bagels, 'cause they taste like heaven.'
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Email: bjp346@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "'My Country is Not Rich': Visualizing Oil Modernity in Iranian New Wave Cinema"
Brian graduated from New York University in 2017 with a M.A. in Cinema Studies. Before then, he graduated in 2014 with dual B.A. degrees in Film Studies and Political Science from Trinity College (CT). Outside of academia, Brian has personal filmmaking and directing experience, pre-production experience at Lionsgate Entertainment, and television and radio production experience at CBS News. His primary research interest concerns on post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, with other interests including the political economy of cinema in the Persian Gulf, disability studies, and the construction of social justice narratives through media.
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Email: jmr625@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "As High As Hope"
Jess Rohan is from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She is in the joint program in journalism and Near East studies. Jess has worked as a grant writer, a journalist, and in marketing for a travel company. As an undergraduate, she studied sociology, anthropology, and conflict, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. Her research interests include whiteness, imagined communities, and surveillance.
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Email: ss8200@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "The (Re)turn to Yasin al-Hafez: Alternative Futures and the Project of Critique"
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Email: zas283@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Searching for Home: Afghan Refugees in Pakistan"
Zuha Siddiqui is a journalist and a second-year student in a joint-MA program at the NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. She is also a Falak Sufi Scholar. At Kevo, Zuha has been researching migration patterns of Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Her thesis focuses on questions of citizenship, bureaucracy and surveillance.
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Email: tjs515@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Between Politics and Hate: LGBTQ Egyptians Stuck at Home and Abroad"
Trey Strange is a writer from Fort Worth, Texas. A recent graduate from University of Houston, where he studied Journalism and Middle East Studies with minors in English and Creative Work, he's interested in international minorities with a particular focus on immigrants, refugees, and LGBTQ populations.
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Email: at3650@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "New Forms of Visual Storytelling; Amateur Media and Participatory Culture in Iranian Social Media"
Shahab graduated from Allame Tabatabai University in Tehran in 2017, with a BA and an MA in Sociology. In his studies, he examined instances when writing and design break away from arborescent dualistic forms derived from historical socio-linguistic norms.
His interests lie in visual culture, from traditional pre-modern Eastern visual performance to Western and transnational digital experimental cinema and new visual communication technologies. Shahab was winner of Global Research Initiatives fellowship in the summer of 2018 ,when he traveled to Prague to conduct fieldwork in Republic Czech New Wave cinema.
In his MA thesis at NYU, he is writing about video messaging applications (Dubsmash and Instagram) through online ethnography and semiotic analysis. He highlights the various ways that simplicity in new video technologies give new opportunities to ordinary people to be more than passive spectators and analyzes how social media developed new ways of visual storytelling in Iranian post-revolutionary society, which is based on multiculturalism, trans-language and transnational exchange of ideas, culture and life style.
Shahab recently finished his first short novel called, Ruye Khate Vizhe or “In the Emergency Lane,” an auto-fiction about everyday life in the Tehran buses, which is awaiting publication. He also creates short films and is interested in visual activism as a means of political and non-violent resistance.
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Email: at3650@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Chinese Foreign Direct Investment in Egypt: Political Implications, Media Interpretations, Economic Expansion"
Neo Yi Zhang graduated from Beijing Language and Culture University in 2016 with a B.A. in Arabic Language and Literature. He completed Arabic training in Egypt through his university's exchange program. Prior to joining the Kevorkian Center, He worked for the Arabic Department at China Radio International based in Beijing, broadcasting news, current affairs and politics from the Middle East. His research interests broadly include the modern history of Egypt, urban development in the Middle East, as well as the impacts and consequences of Neoliberal Globalization. Currently, he is doing research on Chinese FDI in Egypt and its implications to the MENA region.
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Email: bay219@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "The Decisive Goal: Qatari State Investment in European Football"
Braden graduated from New York University in 2017, receiving a degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from the undergraduate department at Kevorkian Center. His primary research interests include the social politics of sport and the exchange of media between the United States and Iran. Braden is the proud owner of two adorable dogs, Zeba and Zeus, who are awaiting the completion of his degree back in his hometown of Los Angeles.
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Email: ra2465@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Port Politics: A Political Economy of the Beirut Port in the Post-Civil War Period"
Rohan graduated from Georgetown University in 2016 with a B.S. in Foreign Service, where he majored in Regional and Comparative Studies (Middle East) and focused on themes broadly relating to political economy and economic history. He also studied Arabic in both Jordan and Morocco. His undergraduate thesis examined free trade zones in Palestine and their effect on development. His research and academic interests include class formation, state formation, migrant labour, and the spatial aspects of global capitalism. Outside of academics and other exercises in self-imposed misery, there’s nothing he loves more than laying down funky bass lines.
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Email: oaa234@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Yemeni Weddings: Processes of Ethical Formation"
Orubba Almansouri is a native of Yemen. In 2016, she graduated with Honors as Salutatorian of the City College of New York with a B.A in History and English. As a Mellon Mays Fellow she worked on researching the intersection of oral traditions and literature in the works of Yemeni author Nadia Al-Kokabani and the importance of oral poetry and folklore in Yemen. Orubba aims to continue her journey in learning how Muslim women plot themselves into history and their contributions to and roles in oral traditions and cultures of the Middle East. Going through this journey as a scholar and creative writer she aspires to discover her inner stories in the process of documenting and preserving the rich Yemeni folklore. Orubba will utilize her education at the Kevorkian center to prepare for a doctoral degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies focusing on the Arabian Peninsula, and to continue advocating for girls education and social justice.
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Email: aa173@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "UD Aid and Syrian Nationalism: Chapter in Cold WAr History"
Adham graduated from the University of Aleppo with B.A. in Law. In the summer of 2016, he visited both Lebanon and Syria where in Syria he worked with local grass-roots organizations that help internal displaced families. His academic interests are political theory, contemporary Syrian politics, political economy, globalization, forced migration, and Islamic movements. He work at New York University, Division of Libraries /Middle Eastern Collection.
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Email: arb698@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Order, Legibility, and Commissions of Inquiry in Mandate Palestine."
Annabel Bruno is a Vermonter according to most. She graduated in 2013 with honors and distinction from McGill University with a B.A. in International Development Studies and a minor in Middle Eastern Languages. Her research interests touch upon issues of settler-colonialism, gender, whiteness, and the politics of solidarity and activism and are inspired by experiences in Palestine, Jordan, Toronto and elsewhere. Outside of school she is excited to learn about NYC, practice Arabic and get involved in community organizing.
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Email: mc6269@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "The Uses of Ancestors: Mobilizing the Tomb of Suleyman Shah"
Miray Cakiroglu graduated from Bogazici University in 2010 with a BA degree in Western Languages and Literatures and a double major in Philosophy with High Honors. She completed her MA in Critical and Cultural Studies in 2014 at the same university with her thesis titled “Reconstructing the City and the Urban Citizen through the ‘Istanbul Courses’”. Investigating the Istanbul course books in terms of their world construct, conception of history and urban identity, she argued that the city is defined as a ‘postcard space’ and the urban citizen is expected to perform the roles of a spectator, tourist, and a tourist guide. Miray worked as a research assistant at Istanbul Bilgi University, Department of Arts and Cultural Management. She is also a published poet with her book Taslarin Sesi Kesildi, which won the Yasar Nabi Nayir Poetry Prize in 2014. She regularly writes on art, society and literature for the Turkish literary magazine Varlik. Her research interests include modern Turkey, sociology of the Middle East, and ethnographic methods
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Email: jd3289@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "American Cotton Manufactures and the 19th Century Indian Ocean Market"
Jordan Daniels graduated from Georgetown University in 2012 with a B.S. in Foreign Service. She has completed Arabic training in Amman, Jordan, and Cairo, Egypt, through the Critical Languages Scholarship (CLS) program and Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) fellowship, respectively. Prior to joining the Kevorkian Center, she worked for a development implementer based in Turkey providing food, medical, and logistical assistance to communities in Syria. Her research interests broadly include the modern history of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, as well as Kurdish and Turkmen participation in the Syrian conflict.
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Email: yom208@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "The State, the Media, and Moral Panic: The Criminalization of Syrian Refugees and the Securitization of Lebanon"
Yasmeen Mobayed graduated from the University of California, San Diego in 2015 with a degree in Ethnic Studies. Her thesis, "Education Under Siege: Learning Beyond Trauma", focused on community-based psychosocial programs offered to traumatized youth living under siege in Damascus. Beyond her academic work, she has translated extensively for several grassroots organizations and for the Local Coordination Committees of Syria. In 2012, she joined a humanitarian relief trip to Northern Syria to provide aid to refugee camps and to meet with local councils. She is broadly interested in migrant labor movements, neoliberalism, class formations, gender, and sexuality and hopes to explore these themes at NYU.
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Email: fme224@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Subverting the Self: The Formation of National Subjectivities in Turkey through Psychological and Psychiatric Discourse's Displacement of Religious Belief as Behavior"
Fatima Mohie-Eldin graduated Magna Cum Laude from Boston University in 2015, where she majored in International Relations. With minors in Religion and Muslim Societies as well, she chose to research the intersection of Islamism and politics in Egypt for her award-winning senior honors thesis, which focused on the Salafist Nour Party, including the party's religious underpinnings, formation, and prospects for future political participation. She has had excerpts of her research published on Muftah.org and in the Al Noor Journal of Middle Eastern Studies at Boston College. Fatima is excited to be joining the Hagop Kevorkian Center where she hopes to focus her future research on the role of women and gender in Middle Eastern societies, the intersections of state and civil society, Islam and politics, and the social role of religious communities, particularly within Egypt and Turkey, where she previously lived from 2013-2014.
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Email: lm3127@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "From Uprising to Civil War: Narrating the Syrian Uprising fron NonViolent Revolution to a Militarized Conflict"
Loubna Mrie is a Syrian activist who participated in the initial stages of the revolution. She later became a photojournalist with Reuters based in Aleppo, where she covered the ongoing conflict in the Idlib, Aleppo, Latakia, and Hama governorates. Originally from the Syrian coastal city of Jableh, she is currently based in New York City where she is a researcher and commentator on Syrian and Middle Eastern affairs. Her work has been published in the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Foreign Policy, the New Republic, among other publications.
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Email: sn2241@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Politics of Exclusion and Securitization: How the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community has become a Target of Anti-Terror Legislation in Pakistan"
Saba Naseem graduated from the University of Arkansas with a B.A. in Journalism (with a concentration in the Middle East) and French. Her interest in Western media coverage of the Middle East led to an honors thesis that looked at the depictions of Muslim and Arab women in American print media post 9/11. Saba’s passion for Arabic took her twice to Morocco (Tangier and Rabat) and later to Amman, Jordan through the Critical Language Scholarship program. After graduation, Saba worked for the Smithsonian Magazine in Washington, D.C. and most recently completed a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Turkey. Her research interests include gender-based violence and forced migration and she looks forward to continuing her studies in Arabic.
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Email: io429@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Anti-Communist Modernization and Turkey's Dependence on the West"
Isaac Oseas majored in History and minored in Economics at The New School, and was published in the academic journal Economia Politica for a review of book “The Battle of Bretton Woods” by Benn Steil. For his undergraduate thesis, he wrote on the economic factors behind national self-determination movements in the late Ottoman Empire. Isaac has since worked as a journalist writing on developments in Turkish politics, as well as the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims. His academic interests include: economic development, international relations in Central Asia, and nationalism. Outside of academia, he enjoys antiwar literature, early jazz music, and Halloween.
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Email: lp1556@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Turkey's Gift to the World: An Analysis of Istanbul New Airport's National and Transnational Hegemonic Claims"
A New York City native, Libby graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University, where she studied Chinese, Italian and Art History. She worked in private equity for several years before embarking on a year-long solo backpacking trip around the world, which took her to Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and Morocco. In 2010, Libby moved to Istanbul, where she lived and worked for three years before returning to New York to work in international higher education. Libby’s interests include modern Turkish society and politics and how the current global geopolitical landscape is impacting national identity in former imperial powers, in particular Turkey and China.
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Email: ajr679@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Wilayat Sina': The Two States of Sinai"
Alisa graduated summa cum laude from the CUNY Baccalaureate Program for Interdisciplinary Studies at the City University of New York with a B.A. in both Middle East Studies and World Literature. Her senior thesis focused on Mizrahi Jews and their integration into Israeli society and politics. She hopes to expand her study of minorities within Israeli and Palestinian societies and communities, as well as the cultural products of such dynamics. Raised in Brooklyn, New York, she speaks Hebrew, Italian and Arabic, the latter upon which she hopes to improve during her time at Kevo. She does not like any kind of chocolate.
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Email: es4288@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Competitio and Contradition in Social Democracy in Turkey: An Analysis of the Republican People's Party's Approach to the Syrian Refugees"
Ezel graduated in 2016 from Boğaziçi University with a BA degree in Political Science and International Relations. During her undergraduate years, she gained experience in the two worlds of research: academia and journalism. She worked as a student assistant for Turkish Politics class, and led discussion sessions for political science sophomores. She was a research assistant for Prof. Hakan Yılmaz in his project of “Frames, Meanings, Actions: Political Choices in Modern Turkey”. She also carried out multiple internships in media. She worked in the national daily Cumhuriyet, TEMPO magazine, +1 TV and t24.com.tr and wrote various stories on political developments in Turkey and abroad. She spent her summer of 2015 in Budapest, Hungary with an internship at Center for Independent Journalism. Her research interests include broad topics as political regime in Turkey, Syrian refugees and their perception on integration to Turkey.
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Email: jcs795@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Back to Ayia Marina: Finding Home and Making Peace in Divided Cyprus"
Jessica Salley is a first-year student in the joint Journalism and Near Eastern Studies program. Jessica graduated in 2014 from Harvard College with a degree in History and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, with a focus on the history of the Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic. Following graduation, she held a fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., where she created academic and outreach programming for elementary, high school, and undergraduate students. At NYU, she will study national identity and urban space Turkey.
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Email: sw3537@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "From Present to Past, Through Cracks and Crevices, Palmpsest and ruination of architectural heritage in post-partition Pawalpindi. "
Shandana graduated from Forman Christian College in Lahore, Pakistan in spring 2016 with double majors in history and political science and a minor in sociology. She joins the Kevorkian Center as the 7th Falak Sufi Memorial Scholar. She interned with Punjab archives in the summer of 2015 and later became a part of the pilot study team for the archives digitalization project. She worked at Forman from 2014 to 2015. Her undergrad thesis was a theoretical study of lost cultural identity of post-colonial Punjab in the light of Fanon and Nandy. She is mainly interested in partition narratives, the post colonial state of Pakistan and the politics & culture of language, traditions, festivals, folklores, oral history and cinema. She aims to pursue a doctorate to pursue her interests in Punjab in the context of decolonization and the comparative study of south Asia and other post colonial states as well as contribute towards women empowerment through education in the region.
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