Email: sa7442@nyu.edu
First Year
Salwa Ahmed came to the United States when she was 6 years old as a refugee from Kenya. She graduated from the University of Georgia in 2016 with a bachelors in Cognitive Science. In her spare time, she enjoys dissecting the minds of people around her. She plans on studying motherhood and has a cat.
Email: aas1161@nyu.edu
First Year
Aisha graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2022 with a B.A. in Liberal Arts. At Sarah Lawrence, she focused on sectarian differences and tensions in the Persian Gulf, gendered citizenship in the Middle East and US foreign policy in the region. Aisha’s research interests include the politicization of Islam, the reemergence of modern Sufism and Islamic feminism. At the Kervorkian Center, she hopes to expand on her research and contribute to the progressive change in the UAE.
Email: eba7761@nyu.edu
First Year
Enas Alsaffadi is from Gaza, Palestine. She received her Bachelor of Law with a specialization in Human Rights Law from Al-Azhar University in Gaza, which took her during her second year to the International Criminal Court Competition to represent Palestine in the MENA Team. She completed an LLM at the University of Pittsburgh, where she developed a project on women's financial struggles and the role of the micro-finance initiative in empowering women in South Asia. Prior to joining NYU's Kevorkian Center, she has worked with the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, the Justice and Law Reform Project funded by UN Women, the United Steelworkers Union (USW), and the Arab American Family Support Center. In pursuing Near Eastern Studies at the Kevorkian Center, she is eager to continue her research in gender studies by focusing on the root causes of violence against women and girls in Gaza.
Email: apa346@nyu.edu
First Year
Aisha Arain is enrolled in the joint Global Journalism and Near Eastern Studies program. She received her B.A. from Drew University in Anthropology with a double minor in Linguistics and Archaeology. She has studied abroad in South Korea, Ireland, Puerto Rico, and Martinique. Her Honors Thesis, ‘The Politics of Linguistic Power Structure in South-Asia, explored the intersection between linguistic identity and Nationalism in Pakistan. At NYU, she hopes to further explore themes and intersectionalities of nationalism, environment, migration, and tourism throughout Asia.
Email: ard9939@nyu.edu
First Year
Amanda Raquel Dorval, originally from Queens, NYC, is a Nuyorican-Dominican artist, library professional, graduate student, and anti-war veteran who served seven years in the US Air Force. She received her BA in art history from Barnard College and graduated in May 2022 with an MS in Library and Information Science from Long Island University Post with a concentration in Archives Management and Rare Book and Special Collections. As an Iraqi Arabic linguist in the Air Force, Amanda developed a passion for Arabic language and culture, which drives much of her current academic research. Amanda currently works as a part-time Bibliographer of Indigenous American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Watson Library. She was a 2022-2023 Research Fellow at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, and also has library/archive experience at World Monuments Fund, Brooklyn Museum, The Jewish Museum, and Wildenstein Plattner Institute. Her academic research interests include Iraqi culture and history, contemporary Iraqi art and visual culture, cross-cultural influences between the Middle East and Latin America, and the protection of cultural heritage and memory in Iraq. Her writing has been published in the journal Libraries: Culture, History, and Society.
Email: sed8149@nyu.edu
First Year
Shannon Drew graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 2021 with a BA in International Relations. She spent the Spring semester of 2020 studying in Amman, Jordan through the School for International Training’s program on Refugees, Health, and Humanitarian Action. Professionally, she serves as the program director for a youth summer camp, worked in a local government managing food security projects, and has consulted on papers and reports regarding commercial and political issues in Iraq and Yemen. At NYU, she’s excited to continue her interdisciplinary education and hopes to study issues related to the role of youth in politics, nation-building, and conflict resolution.
Email: hf967@nyu.edu
First Year
Hajra Farooqui graduated with a dual degree from Duke Kunshan University and Duke University, where she majored in Ethics and Leadership, with a concentration in Religious Studies. For her honour’s thesis, she examined the implications of a gendered, faith-motivated, middle-class consciousness in shaping the veiling and unveiling practices of Sunni Muslim women from Lahore, Pakistan. Her research interests include Modern Islamic Thought, Qurʾānic Studies, Lived Religion, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and South Asian Muslim History. At NYU, she hopes to continue studying Arabic while researching the links between class identity, religion and morality, and dressing practices in colonial India. Hajra is passionate about queer feminist perspectives, true crime documentaries, fantasy novels, and tea!
Email: rag9149@nyu.edu
First Year
Email: kk5034@nyu.edu
First Year
Khadija Kakar is a recent refugee from Afghanistan who completed her bachelors degree from Pune University in India studying business management and concentrating in Human Resource Management. After her graduation, she worked in education sector where she helped women education, development and amplify girls voices to help support young leaders launch into societies and institutions to become better world citizens. Kakar is proud to have received one of the prestigious scholarships in NYU where she will start her journey in Eastern studies and international relations as a Masters student.
Email: jjk659@nyu.edu
First Year
John Jamil Kallas is a Syrian-American student, writer, and organizer based in New York City. He is a student in the M.A. Program for Near Eastern Studies at New York University and holds a B.A. in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University (2022). An aspiring scholar of the Middle East, Kallas' research interests include political economy, geography, and the under/development of the Global South with a particular focus on Syria in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is also personally interested in studying the Arabic language and it's poetic/literary forms. Kallas is the Assistant Managing Editor of the e-zine Jadaliyya, publishing critical pedagogy and analysis on historical and contemporary developments in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2020, he was named a Gallatin Global Human Rights Fellow. You can follow Kallas and his work on twitter @johnjamilkallas.
Email: tk2648@nyu.edu
First Year
Tony graduated with a B.A. in Politics and minors in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies from New York University. During undergrad, he explored the evolution of humanitarian aid systems, and through this program at the Hagop Kevorkian Center, he hopes to further understand the roles these systems play in the crises affecting the Middle East and its people. As a Syrian immigrant, Tony is especially interested in examining the relationship between the work of INGOs and the social and cultural wellbeing of Syrian refugees across the globe.
Email: sl4524@nyu.edu
First Year
Email: rm6384@nyu.edu
First Year
Rana graduated from CUNY Hunter College in 2022 with a B.A in English Literature, minoring in Arabic and Sociology. Being a recipient of both the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center's SALAM scholarship as well as the Ibn Battuta Scholarship, Rana studied Arabic abroad in Oman and Morocco following graduation. Rana is a Moroccan-Egyptian American and fluent in Darija. At NYU, Rana hopes to continue her studies of Arabic and is interested in literary translation as well as decolonial thought in Morocco.
Email: ao2493@nyu.edu
First Year
Email: sgr346@nyu.edu
First Year
Email: act9518@nyu.edu
First Year
Abigail graduated with a B.A. from Bard College in 2022, where she majored in Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies. She is interested in multimedia and interdisciplinary approaches to questions of space, land sovereignty, and urban geography. In her senior thesis, she examined American University in Cairo’s new campus as a site for environmental transformation and spatial segregation in Cairo. Through archival research, she reconstructed the story of AUC’s move to New Cairo, which highlighted possible narratives, contestation, and context of gated compounds in Cairo. She is interested in various mediums of academic and activist work, such as live art, visual mapping, and sound. In 2022, she was a part of the exhibition translations / مشاع in Berlin with the Critical Practice Studio. After graduating from Bard, she received a Critical Language Scholarship to study Arabic in Morocco. At NYU, she hopes to continue working with notions of space, memory, and the ideological charge of landscapes in the Middle East.
Email: jvp26@nyu.edu
First Year
Jake holds a BA in Modern and Medieval Languages (Russian and Spanish) from the University of Cambridge (Jesus College) and an MSc in Speech and Language Processing from the University of Edinburgh. Before coming to NYU, he worked as the Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing Specialist at Tufts University. His primary research interests are the intellectual, social and cultural histories of Muslims in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. He is particularly interested in Islamic modernist movements in Central Asia and the Volga-Urals region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the Kevorkian Center, Jake hopes to continue pushing methodological and disciplinary boundaries in Near Eastern regional studies by incorporating computational research methods and framing Central Asia as an integral region in the study of Islamic societies.
Email: btw2021@nyu.edu
First Year
Brandon graduated from Bucknell University in 2022 with a B.A. in History and Arabic & Arabic World Studies. His senior thesis at Bucknell focused on the memory of Abu Ghraib, and the manufacturing of a spectacle rooted within American Orientalism and political aims of "anti-terrorism." During his undergraduate years, Brandon also worked as a curatorial assistant for Ajam Digital Archive, and a Getty Marrow Undergraduate Intern for community-arts organization, Visual Communications, in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. At NYU, Brandon looks forward to study the Modern Middle East through visual histories, and how they often relate and contribute to public memory.
Email: az2831@nyu.edu
First Year
Ailia Zehra is a journalist from Pakistan who has served as the Managing Editor of Friday Times-Naya Daur Media, having previously worked at different media outlets. She has reported and written extensively on the rise of authoritarianism in Pakistan, religious extremism, and human rights issues among other subjects. She has also interviewed ministers, policymakers, lawmakers and rights activists from Pakistan and abroad in addition to holding panel discussions on the aforementioned subjects. As an editor, Ailia made it a point to commission articles and reports on issues which are least discussed or ignored by Pakistan’s mainstream media — such as persecution of religious minorities, misuse of blasphemy laws and enforced disappearances. She also launched campaigns through her platform to promote constitutional awareness as well as critical thinking about Pakistan’s political history, which is often distorted by the powers-that-be to peddle a certain narrative. She also occasionally appears on television talk shows to discuss social issues. Ailia is a 2022 Falak Sufi scholar at NYU, where she hopes to study the factors contributing to the rise of fascism around the world and the various ways in which journalists operating under repressive governments are fighting back. She also intends to conduct research on the rise of multimedia journalism and how rigorous standards can be instituted into digital media expressions.
Second Year
Email: aa9379@nyu.edu
Nabi Abdelnabi is a filmmaker and a visual artist. Soon after he graduated from John Molson School of Business in Montreal, he pursued a filmmaking degree from the École Internationale de Création Audiovisuelle et de Réalisation in Paris. Since then, he has worked as a director, cinematographer, and editor on countless projects. He is planning on taking an interdisciplinary approach to his MA thesis.
Second Year
Email: jra8597@nyu.edu
Jonathan graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Yale University in 2018 with a B.A. in History and Philosophy, where his research focused on the history of British imperial policy, the development of oil infrastructure, and Palestinian political resistance in Mandatory Palestine. After graduating, he spent a year studying Arabic at the Sijal Institute in Amman and working at Adalah – the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. Before joining the Kevorkian Center, Jonathan was a policy assistant at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) in New York and managing editor of Tadween Publishing, a project of the Arab Studies Institute. His writing has been published in various outlets and journals, including +972 Magazine, Jadaliyya, The North Carolina Historical Review, and Jewish Historical Studies. At NYU, Jonathan hopes to study the history of U.S policy towards Palestine and Palestinian refugees, and explore the broader histories of empire and migration in the Middle East.
Second Year
Email: ma6776@nyu.edu
Mohiba Ahmed graduated from Government College University Lahore in 2018 with a BA in English Literature. Her thesis research focused on analysing the effects of Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamisation on women’s literature. Mohiba has been a very vocal feminist and student rights activist. She is a core member of many grassroot student and feminist organisations based in Pakistan. Mohiba helped orchestrate the Students’ Solidarity March in 55 cities of Pakistan in 2019, and became the spokesperson of Student Action Committee (SAC) the first national students’ alliance in Pakistan since the 1980s. She also co-founded Women’s Collective Pakistan, a political organisation that educates, organizes and agitates on the feminist principles of love, empathy and solidarity. It aims at consciousness building of women with regards to their status in the society. She has worked as Project Manager with the South Asian Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAAPE) based in Nepal for their women rights campaign in Pakistan. Under that role she researched upon various issues faced by women in Pakistan and explored innovative solutions for change.She also worked as Project Manager at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) where the focus of her work was ‘Gender and Technology’. At NYU, she hopes to engage further with the ideas of politics, power and gender and expand her knowledge about the history of the Near Eastern Region.
Second Year
Email: jaq250@nyu.edu
Jude graduated with a B.A. in International Studies from American University, the School of International Service, and minored in French and Philosophy. At American University, she focused on Gulf-Iran-US relations through a Global and Comparative Governance, and Justice, Ethics and Human Rights lens. Jude’s research interests include cultural property, cultural heritage preservation through legal mechanisms and the relationship between material culture, memory, and contemporary national identity construction in the Gulf. At the Kevorkian Center, she is looking forward to better understanding the heightened interest in governmental patronage of the arts and cultural sectors and aims to better understand the value assigned to material culture in the political and social spheres through the field of public humanities and museum studies.
Second Year
Email: ba2233@nyu.edu
Basil AlSubee graduated with a BA in History from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, minoring in Film Studies and Anthropology in 2021. At Kevo, Basil is exploring the relationships between Syrian cinema, Latin American Third Cinema, the politics of decolonization, and political economies of film distribution. Adjacent to the academy, Basil is interested in creatively annotating the robust YouTube archives of Syrian film, television, and theater between the 1970s and the present, through a hybrid documentary-fictional screenplay.
Second Year
Email: sa6732@nyu.edu
Sheen is an NYC-based actor and first-generation college student from New York City. After living through the 2011 Egyptian revolution, he returned to the United States to work in immigration and law while attending community college in Atlanta, Georgia. He went on to graduate with B.A. from Columbia University in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. He is a dual recipient of the Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) for Arabic in 2016 and Swahili in 2018. At Kevo, his research explores how cultural and political movements of the early 20th and 21st centuries reshaped Arab and Muslim identities.
Second Year
Email: la2423@nyu.edu
Lillian Avedian graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in Peace and Conflict Studies, with a concentration in International Human Rights, and a B.A. in Armenian Language and Literature. Since graduating in the spring of 2020, she has worked as a news writer for the historic Armenian Weekly newspaper, providing in-depth coverage of human rights issues in conflict and post-conflict settings and geopolitical developments in the South Caucasus. Lillian is passionate about telling the stories of her diverse and complex global Armenian community and uplifting the narratives of women and LGBTQ+ people from Southwest Asia.
Second Year
Email: ba2259@nyu.edu
Belal Aziz is an Austrian Fulbright student at Kevo. He holds a BA in International Studies from Leiden University in the Netherlands. Belal is interested in EU - Middle East relations and diplomacy as well as contemporary issues of economic development and gender inclusion in the MENA region. For his BA Thesis, he conducted intersectional research on Islamic feminism and its societal influence on inclusive mosque movements in Europe.
Second Year
Email: mad9955@nyu.edu
Muna Diaf graduated from UC Berkeley in 2020 with a B.A. in Sociology, where she worked as a research apprentice in the Sociology department. Using qualitative methodology, her thesis focused on the relationship between colonialism and religious pluralism in postcolonial Africa. After graduating, she worked as a research assistant for Moomken, an NGO based in Tripoli, Libya. She is currently an intern at the MENA Prison Forum, seeking to address carceral issues in the Middle East and North Africa. At the Kevorkian Center, Muna hopes to employ sociological methods and theories when exploring social movements, carcerality, gender, and the state in postcolonial Libya.
Second Year
Email: yah5193@nyu.edu
Second Year
Email: sk9599@nyu.edu
Suleyman Kiroglu graduated from Marmara University in 2018 with B.A. in Islamic Studies. During his undergraduate years, he attended an Arabic program in Jordan in 2014 and an exchange program in Malaysia in 2016. His senior thesis was about the debates on contemporary Islamism in the Birikim, a leading Turkish socialist magazine, during the 1990s. He completed his M.A. in Sociology at İstanbul Şehir University in 2020. His master’s thesis focused on the Europeanization and NGO-ization of the Islamic Community Milli Görüş (IGMG), a Turkish Muslim migrant organization in Germany. For his M.A. project, he visited the IGMG headquarters in Cologne, for three months and did the fieldwork there. He is a native speaker of Turkish and fluent in English and Arabic. At NYU, Suleyman aims to expand his research interests thematically and historically backwards with a more interdisciplinary perspective by comparing Turkish and MENA-origin migrant organizations in Germany.
Second Year
Email: aum5669@nyu.edu
Aayzah graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 2019 with a major in History and Psychology. For her History thesis, she debunked British colonial notions about the social ruptures brought about by penal transportation, the policy by which thousands of Indian "convicts" were sent to prisons in other British colonies in the nineteenth century. Through her undergraduate research, and later, through her time at the National History Museum, Lahore, she has explored South Asian colonial social history, as well as histories of migration and marginalization. At NYU, Aayzah aims to analyze links between South Asia and the Middle East, especially through the field of public history and museum studies.
Second Year
Email: jlp682@nyu.edu
Everett graduated from New York University Abu Dhabi in 2021, where he majored in Arab Crossroads Studies and minored in Arabic and African Studies. His senior thesis focused on the formulation of foreign policy in the UAE. Prior to coming to NYU, he worked for several NGOs, foreign policy think tanks, and academic projects. At NYU, he is studying Persian, Arabic, and the political economy of the Persian Gulf.
Second Year
Email: ejr7493@nyu.edu
Eric graduated with a B.A. in Historical and Middle Eastern Studies from Bard College, where he focused on history, literature, and Arabic. For his senior thesis, Eric studied the Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company and its relationship with Syria following the Second World War. In the thesis, he reexamined the constitution of American power in the early years of the postcolonial period in the Middle East. Upon graduating from Bard, Eric received a Davis Project for Peace Fellowship, with which he used to develop a structured English language curriculum at the Mazi Center for refugees on Samos Island, Greece. He then went on to work as the Education Coordinator for an Arabic and English language school in Gaziantep, Turkey. At NYU, Eric is studying migration and border zones through the lens of urban studies. In the summer of 2022, Eric conducted qualitative research in Samos, Greece, exploring how the location and design of the island’s camp impact refugees’ mobility on the island and within Greece. That same summer, he also worked as a research intern for an refugee-advocacy organization based in Rome, Italy. During his last year at NYU, Eric hopes to deepen his knowledge of urban studies and how the field interacts with questions of mobility, displacement, and political economy.
Second Year
Email: ps4481@nyu.edu
Lynn graduated from Durham University in 2017 with a B.A. in History with a specialization in Eastern Europe. The following year, she received her MLitt in Transnational, Global, and Spatial History from the University of St Andrews where she worked as a graduate research assistant on Ottoman Esperantists. For her MLitt dissertation, Lynn undertook ethnographic fieldwork in several Laz-speaking villages on the Georgian-Turkish borderlands. After graduating, she moved to Northern Greece to study Modern Greek at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and do independent research on Karamanlidika and Pontic Greek. Lynn’s research looks at the contested place of ethnolinguistic minorities in the post-Ottoman nation-states. At NYU, she hopes to study how the construction and the transmission of the discourse around patria differ across communities who trace their homelands to the southeastern Blacksea littoral.
Second Year
Email: at5159@nyu.edu
Mandy Taheri graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. After graduation, she interned for an international women’s rights organization that was founded by former Iranian Minister for Women’s Affairs, Mahnaz Afkhami, and the Middle East Institute. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a political researcher at National Journal. She is currently Iranian American author, Azar Nafisi's, assistant and social media manager. Over the summer, she was an editorial intern for People Magazine.
Second Year
Email: dt1962@nyu.edu
Dillon graduated with a B.A. in Political Science and minor of International Studies in 2020 from the University of Illinois Chicago. He is interested in contemporary Iran and the Persian language. His undergraduate research focuses on modernization in Iran and the formation of national identities as observed through instances of public spectacle. At NYU, Dillon hopes to employ ethnographic research methods to examine mass gatherings and the reclamation of public space in Iran and how these phenomena relate to knowledge formation and identity construction.
Second Year
Email: tmw8644@nyu.edu
Tess M. Waggoner received a joint B.A. in Religious Studies and Asian and Middle East Studies from Kenyon College in 2013. In the 2013-15 academic years, Tess was a Fulbright U.S. Student Program ETA grantee in Kirikkale, Turkey and provided programmatic support to the Turkish Fulbright Commission from 2015-2018. Tess also studied in the M.Sc. Program in Social Anthropology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara from 2016-2018. At NYU, Tess aims to further develop critical and engaged ethnographic practices examining contemporary Turkey.
Email: saa9004@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Britain’s Prison Labor Camps: Imperial-Zionist Class War Against Palestinian Men (1917-1948)"
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.
Email: owa207@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Cyber Advocacy in the Middle East: Visual Conversation with the Cyberspace"
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.
Email: lha5016@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Lebanese Migration, Race, and Mexicanidad"
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.
Email: fbb2918@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "The Asmawian Approach to Islamic Education & Revivalism"
Fatoumata graduated with an Honors B.A. in Political Science and an Arabic minor in 2018 from CUNY–Hunter College. Following 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. She returned to her alma mater in 2019 as an adjunct instructor of Arabic. At the Kevorkian Center, Fatoumata’s research is focused on the social and intellectual history of Islam and Islamic movements in West Africa as they relate to education, spirituality, gender dualism, and social change. Other areas of her research interests include topics in Islamic political thought, secularism and modernity, and Arabic diglossia.
Email: rb3784@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Dounia is Here: A Few Short Stories of Existentialism and Diaspora"
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.
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.
Email: mkd363@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "The Carceral Terms of Sovereignty: A Reappraisal of Bryant"
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.
Email: dsd9820@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Indulging in the Ambiguous: Embodied and Affective Archives of Survival in the Iranian Diaspora"
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.
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.
Email: sk7075@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Logics of Zakat: Trust, Mutual Aid, and Communal Interdependency in the United States"
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. Sarah is particularly interested in the role of economic attitudes and social aspirations in everyday life and community building. She looks to explore relationships between different models of material giving, such as mutual aid and zakat.
Email: mkz5975@nyu.edu.pk
Thesis Title: "Tripping in Karachi: Exploring the intersection of gender and its fluidity through Psychedelic Substances"
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.
Email: el3417@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "The Political-Economy of the Oslo Accords"
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.
Email: arm582@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Brick by Brick: How Erdogan’s Megaprojects are Reconstructing Turkey"
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.
Email: tmo6245@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Sustaining Hegemony Through Crisis: Rereading US Arms Exports to the Gulf"
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.
Email: mao9271@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Far Afield from a Circumscribed Urban: Imperialism, Capitalism, and the Rural in the Development of Cairo, 1850-1880"
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.
Email: ss8140@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Getting Iran Right: How Ideologically Driven Assessments of the Islamic Republic of Iran Have Stymied U.S. Foreign Policy"
Sahar graduated with her BA in English from Queens College in 2018 and received her MA in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia University in 2020. During her master's, she focused on developing Middle East-oriented curriculums, particularly using literature of the Iranian diaspora to challenge Western hegemonic representations of Iran. Sahar's interest in education reform is coupled with her passion for politics, and her current research at NYU focuses on US foreign policy in Iran with specific attention to the US' soft power competitive strategy against the Iranian regime's revolutionary ideology.
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.
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.
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. He is a student in the Dual Degree Program Between NYU and Long Island University, concurrently studying towards a Master’s of Library & Information Science. His research interests include the politics of Mizrahiyut in Israel/Palestine, Iraqi-Jewish cultural production, library science, 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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