Jana Ababneh
Email: ja5002@nyu.edu
First Year
Jana's is interested in advocating for enhanced civic space, sustainable development, and human rights in MENA & beyond.
Veena Ali Khan
Email: ja5002@nyu.edu
First Year
Veena Ali-Khan has spent the past 6 years living and working across the Middle East as a political analyst. In 2021, she joined the International Crisis Group, as a member of the MENA team based in Istanbul. Veena worked alongside the Senior Analyst for Yemen in conducting extensive research into prevailing issues in Yemen. At the Kevorkian Center, she hopes to broaden the scope of her expertise beyond Yemen and Iran.
Catherine Cartier
Email: cmc9499@nyu.edu
First Year
Catherine Cartier is enrolled in the joint Global Journalism & Near Eastern Studies program. She earned her B.A. in Arab Studies and History at Davidson College in 2020. As an undergraduate student, Catherine studied in and reported from Lebanon, Tajikistan, Morocco, and Jordan. In 2019, she was named a Beyond Religion fellow by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and Michigan’s Truman Scholar. After graduating, Catherine held a Fulbright grant in Morocco, researching poetry written in Moroccan Arabic. She then worked an Investigative Analyst in Washington DC, where she focused on the intersection of conflict and economic justice. Her reporting has appeared in The Guardian, Al-Monitor, The New Arab & Middle East Eye, among others. As a journalist, Catherine aims to bring a human-centered lens to investigative reporting focused on the Southwest Asia & North Africa.
Sylvia Feghali
Email: scf8782@nyu.edu
First Year
Sylvia Feghali is a graduate from the University of Texas and University of Colorado with a B.A. in Urban Studies and M.A. in Geography. A researcher and maker, she builds work at the intersection of feminist geographies and digital humanities, engaging community praxis as a means of transcending boundaries in material and imaginative space. Her scholarship and arts practice work together to center postcolonial critiques of narrative power and modes of enacting care ethics in data collection and (re)presentation. At the Kevorkian Center, Sylvia aims to deepen her studies of Lebanese diasporic organizing and community-driven media production.
Clare Francis
Email: clare.francis@nyu.edu
First Year
Clare Francis is enrolled in the joint Global Journalism and Near Eastern Studies Program. Originally from Australia, she graduated First Class with Distinction from the University of Cambridge with a B.A. (Hons) in Politics and International Relations in 2020. From 2022-23, returned to Cambridge to complete an MPhil in Politics and International Studies. While studying, she served as a panelist on Declarations: The Human Rights Podcast, producing an episode on Iran's women-led protest movement. Between her undergraduate and postgraduate studies, Clare returned to Australia and worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, equivalent to the U.S. State Department, undertaking a short-term diplomatic posting to the United Arab Emirates. At the Kevorkian Center, she intends to pursue her research interests in human rights, governance and corruption, memory and public mourning, and political philosophy.
Farah Mina
Email: fm1469@nyu.edu
First Year
Farrah Mina holds a B.A. in Global Studies and Journalism from the University of Minnesota. Post graduation, her journalism has focused on communities impacted by the Minnesota child welfare system. At NYU, Farrah is interested in exploring the entanglement of citizenship, power, and colonial legacies in the Gulf, especially as they relate to migrant communities. Her research interests include cultural transmission, political mobilization, and social movements. In her free time, Farrah enjoys spending time with friends, indulging her sweet tooth, and reading literary fiction.
Rafiatu Nawuridam
Email: rwn5103@nyu.edu
First Year
Rafiatu graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) in 2019. At TCNJ, she double majored in International Studies (with a concentration in Middle Eastern Studies) and Arabic Language and Culture. Her research interests include the history and legacy of slavery in the MENA and conceptualizations of blackness in the region.
Daniah Nuseibeh
Email: drn7347@nyu.edu
First Year
Daniah is a Palestinian-American student from Detroit, Michigan. She is an incoming student in the MA program for Near Eastern Studies (Int. Relations Concentration) at NYU. She graduated from Wayne State University in 2022 with a BA in Political Science & Global Studies with a concentration in Peace & Conflict Studies. For her senior thesis, she researched the case of the coronavirus pandemic within the occupation of Palestine. At NYU, she hopes to pursue further research pertaining to the depiction of Palestine in the West, and the impact of regional dynamics in MENA in the post-Arab Spring era.
Delfin Ogutogullari
Email: do821@nyu.edu
First Year
Delfin graduated with a B.A. in Art History and an M.A. in Art History from George Washington University. She was one of the three students selected by the faculty to start their Master's degree during their undergraduate studies. After graduating, she returned to her home country Turkiye to work at Vehbi Koc Foundation's Mesher Museum. Her Master's research in art history focused on the typology of Alevi prayer houses and their connections to Bektasi ideologies. At NYU, Delfin hopes to continue her research on the Alevi community by employing an interdisciplinary approach. Her other research interests include body hair representation in Islamic art, deconstruction theory, and historical materialism.
Sage Taber
Email: sst2746@gmail.com
First Year
Originally based in San Diego, Sage graduated with a B.A. from Point Loma Nazarene University in 2022, where she majored in International Studies with a concentration in the Middle East. After graduating, she took a year to focus on media journalism projects, including a female-focused travel series in Europe and the MENA region. At NYU, she plans to further build her skillset in media journalism and pursue her research interests of governance, religion, and women’s issues in the Middle East, with a concentration on Iran.
Huma Umar
Email: hu301@nyu.edu
First Year
Huma graduated from NYU Abu Dhabi in 2023 with a major in Social Research and Public Policy and a concentration in global public health. Her capstone thesis interrogated ideas of ‘female empowerment’ through a qualitative study of community health workers providing reproductive and maternal health care in Lahore, Pakistan. Huma worked as a college journalist during her undergraduate years, and in her senior year served as one of two Editor-in-Chiefs for The Gazelle, NYU Abu Dhabi’s independent, student-run publication. At NYU, she hopes to continue studying the legacies of welfare development and the everyday state as they relate to questions of labor, gender, sexuality, and politicized Islam in the postcolonial world. Huma is a 2023 Falak Sufi Scholar at the Kevo Center.
Varty Yahjian
Email: vy2091@nyu.edu
First Year
Varty Yahjian is an Armenian-American, Los Angeles native excited about studying cultural policies in the late Ottoman Empire, as well as literary themes of memory and nostalgia in Armeno-Turkish texts. Prior to starting at NYU, Varty was a senior analyst at a global immigration law firm. Varty is a native Western Armenian and Bulgarian speaker and is looking forward to learning Turkish at NYU; she wishes she had the linguistic capability to learn Arabic simultaneously.
Information for the rest of the cohort is forthcoming
Salwa Ahmed
Email: sa7442@nyu.edu
Second 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.
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Aisha Al Sayegh
Email: aas1161@nyu.edu
Second 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.
Enas Alsaffadi
Email: eba7761@nyu.edu
Second Year
Aisha Arain
Email: apa346@nyu.edu
Second 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.
Amanda Dorval
Email: ard9939@nyu.edu
Second 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.
Shannon Drew
Email: sed8149@nyu.edu
Second 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. Professionally, she served as the program director for a youth summer camp and worked with a local government managing food security projects. At NYU, she hopes to pursue research about missionaries, social media and storytelling, and legacies of colonialism. In her free time, she loves knitting, going on long walks, and eating ice cream in the park.
Hajra Farooqui
Email: hf967@nyu.edu
Second 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!
Raza Gillani
Email: rag9149@nyu.edu
Second Year
Raza Gillani is a Pakistani journalist and holds a bachelors degree in Political Science from Government College Lahore. Raza has been a frontline student organizer and a co-founder of Progressive Students Collective and Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement. He was a core member of the student group that orchestrated Students Solidarity Marches in more than fifty cities in Pakistan in 2019, the country’s largest student-led demonstrations since 1968. Raza has worked as an investigative reporter and served in the board of directors at Lok Sujag, a Pakistani media organization devoted to the coverage of voices from the margins of power. He has reported on issues pertaining to governance and institutional malpractice, workers’ rights and exploitation, juvenile justice system, real estate and land grabbing, and grassroots political movements in Pakistan. Raza holds an ambition to work for the resurgence of investigative fact-based journalism in Pakistan, built on an unwavering commitment to reject all patronage of state and capital, and an aspiration to uncover stories of marginalized and dispossessed communities in Pakistan and its administered/occupied territories. As a MacCracken fellow at NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center, Raza is pursuing a joint degree in GloJo and Near Eastern Studies.
Khadija Kakar
Email: kk5034@nyu.edu
Second 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.
John Jamil Kallas
Email: jjk659@nyu.edu
Second 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.
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Tony Kinani
Email: tk2648@nyu.edu
Second 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.
Saad Latif
Email: sl4524@nyu.edu
Second Year
Rana Morsy
Email: rm6384@nyu.edu
Second 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.
Aidan Orly
Email: ao2493@nyu.edu
Second Year
Sara Ramadan
Email: sgr346@nyu.edu
Second Year
Rahaf Salahat
Email: ras10112@nyu.edu
Second Year
Rahaf was born and raised in Palestine. She graduated with a BA in Political Science from Al-Quds Bard College in Palestine in 2020. Her senior thesis focused on exploitative labor in Israeli prisons between 1948 and 1984.
Abigail Toomey
Email: act9518@nyu.edu
Second 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.
Jake Vasishchev-Perl
Email: jvp26@nyu.edu
Second 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.
Brandon Waldau
Email: btw2021@nyu.edu
Second 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.
Ailia Zehra
Email: az2831@nyu.edu
Second 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.