The Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia

2012-2013

Ellis Goldberg

Ellis Goldberg is a professor of political science at the University of Washington where he teaches Middle East politics. Most of his work has been on the political economy of Egypt in the 20th century including two monographs, Tinker, Tailor and Textile Worker and Trade, Reputation and Child Labor. His articles have appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and Political Theory. He has been a visiting faculty member at Princeton University, the American University in Cairo and a visiting research fellow at Harvard. He lived in Cairo during the first six months of 2011 where he attended most of the major demonstrations and rallies before and after the collapse of the Mubarak government. He is now working on two books. One is a study of political theory by influential Arab intellectuals and its relation to the revolutionary uprising of 2011. The other is a study of the origins of the concept of the rule of law in Egypt and its impact on the structure of the court system. In 2007 Goldberg was a Carnegie Scholar and in 2012 he is a Guggenheim Fellow.

Samer Traboulsi

Samer Traboulsi is Associate Professor of History of the Middle East and the Muslim World at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton in 2005. He is mainly interested in the formation and development of religious groups in the Muslim World and has published a book and a number of articles on the Isma‘ilis in Yemen, the rise of the Wahhabi movement, and the history of Saudi Arabia.

2011-2012

Carol Hakim

Carol Hakim is an assistant-professor in History at the University of Minnesota where she has taught since 2005. Her research and teaching activities focus on nationalism, state-formation and state-society relations, and authoritarianism in the Arab world. Her forthcoming book on The Origins of the Lebanese National Idea 1840-1920 will be published shortly by University of California Press. At Princeton, she will be working on Secularism, Islam and Democracy in Egypt.

2010-2011

Nabil Mouline

Nabil Mouline earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 2008 and a Ph.D. in political science from the Institute of Political Studies of Paris (Sciences Po) in 2010. He is the author of The Imaginary Caliphate of Ahmad al-Mansûr: Power and Diplomacy in Morocco in the 16th Century (Presses universitaires de France, 2009) and The Clerics of Islam: Religious Authority and Political Power in Saudi Arabia (18th-21th Centuries) (Presses universitaires de France, 2011, forthcoming). At Princeton Nabil Mouline will work on the construction of authority in Arab monarchies, especially in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, through rituals, symbols and images.

Aron Zysow

Aron Zysow received his A.B. (Classics), Ph.D. (Islamic Studies), and J.D. from Harvard. From 2000 to 2005 he served as Research Associate for the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School. Before that he taught Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle and Washington University in St. Louis and commercial law at Baruch College, City University of New York. His main academic interests are Islamic law, particularly legal theory, and theology. In addition to teaching several courses while at Princeton, Dr. Zysow will complete a book on the history of usul al-fiqh and its relationship to kalam. He is the author of "If Wishes Were… : Notes on Wishing (al-tamannī) in Islamic Texts,” in Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms: Festschrift for Wolhart Heinrichs, Leiden., 2008, and “Two Theories of the Obligation to Obey God’s Commands,” in The Law Applied: Contextualizing the Islamic Shari`a: A Volume in Honor of Frank E. Vogel, London, 2008. In addition, he has contributed articles to a number of reference works, including the Encylopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, for which he wrote the entries Ra'y, Sadaka, Sarf, and Zakat among others. He recently completed a study of the Karramiyya sect.

2008-2010

Roger Hardy

Roger Hardy has been a Middle East and Islamic affairs analyst with the BBC World Service for more than twenty years. Educated at Oxford, he worked in book publishing and then edited a review journal (Gazelle) and a monthly magazine (The Middle East), before joining the BBC in 1985. His radio series have included The Making of the Middle East, Islam: Faith and Power, Israel among the Nations, Europe’s Angry Young Muslims and, most recently, Jihad and the Petrodollar. He is the author of Arabia after the Storm, a study of the impact of the Kuwait war on the Arabian monarchies (Chatham House, 1991), and has contributed articles and reviews to the Economist, International Affairs, the New Statesman, Index on Censorship, and Middle East International. While in Princeton he completed a book entitled The Muslim Revolt: A journey Through Political Islam (Columbia University Press, 2010)

Pascal Ménoret

Pascal Ménoret earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Paris-La Sorbonne, where he wrote a dissertation entitled “Thugs and Zealots: The Politicization of Saudi Youth 1965-2007”. He is the author of The Saudi Enigma: A History (London: ZedBooks, 2005). Between 2005 and 2007, he was a visiting researcher at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh. His current research focuses on youth issues in Saudi Arabia and the Arab world. While at Princeton he worked on a book project entitled “Youth, Politics and Violence in Saudi Arabia” and completed a book entitled L'Arabie: Des routes de l'encens a l'ere du petrole (Gallimard, 2010).

Michael Crawford

Michael Crawford is a retired senior UK foreign service officer and an expert on the history and politics of Arabia and the Middle East more generally. He has published on 19th-century Arabian history and spent the fall 2009 semester at Princeton where he completed a book manuscript on the history of the first Saudi state (1744-1818). In addition, he presented a paper on his research at a conference in November 2009 and gave a public lecture as well as made himself available to students and faculty of the university.

2007-2008

Thomas Hegghammer

Thomas Hegghammer completed his PhD in political science at Sciences-Po in Paris in 2007, having previously studied Oriental Studies and Modern Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford. He has worked as a research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) since 2001. Thomas Hegghammer studies various aspects of violent Islamism, with a particular focus on jihadism in Saudi Arabia, developments in jihadi ideology and the history of the foreign fighters phenomenon. At Princeton, he turned his dissertation into the book Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), began work on a new book about the jihadi ideologue Abdallah Azzam, and wrote several papers. After his Transregional Institute fellowship, he was a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School (2008-2009) and a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2009-2010).

Majid Mohammadi

Majid Mohammadi built a career in Iran as a teacher, researcher, writer, and journalist before beginning his academic career in the U.S. He has published books in Persian and English, as well as numerous articles on topics as diverse as constitutional law in Iran, the philosophy of religion, sociology, and economics. At Princeton he worked on a project entitled “From Revolutionary Islamism to Military Islamism: the Development of Islamism in Iranian Society, 1977-2007.”  This work explores the variety of Islamic ideologies that have arisen in Iran and the religious, cultural, and political roots that sustain them. It will be published as a book by I.B. Tauris in London under the title Political Islam in Post-revolutionary Iran: Shi`i Ideologies in Islamist Discourse.

2006-2007

Christopher Boucek

Christopher Boucek completed his PhD at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies in 2006. Prior to this, Dr Boucek was a security editor with Jane’s Information Group and was an analyst at the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington, DC for nearly four years. He has published widely in academic and professional publications on a number of issues related to political and security developments in the Middle East and Central Asia, and has worked with a political risk consultancy in London. He is also a Lecturer in Public & International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School. While at Princeton, Dr. Boucek will research issues related to terrorism, security, and regime stability in energy producing countries in the Middle East and Central Asia. He is currently working on a project examining recent counter-terrorism and security efforts in Saudi Arabia, specifically rehabilitation and re-education programs for militants and extremists in the kingdom and the reintegration process for Guantanamo returnees.

Miriam Lowi

Miriam Lowi is Associate Professor of Political Science at The College of New Jersey. She earned her Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies from Princeton in 1990. Professor Lowi has held research grants from the World Bank, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and is a Carnegie Scholar (2008-2010) for a project entitled, Oil and Islam: the Economy of Meaning. She was a visiting research scholar at Princeton’s Transregional Institute in spring 2007. Her research focuses on the natural resource dimension of political behavior, the political economy of oil-exporting states, and politics in Algeria. She is the author of Water and Power: the Politics of a Scarce Resource in the Jordan River Basin (Cambridge, 1993, 2nd. ed. 1995), and editor (with Brian Shaw) of Environment and Security: Discourses and Practices (MacMillan, 2000). At the TRI, Miriam completed a book manuscript, Oil Wealth and the Poverty of Politics: Algeria Compared (Cambridge, 2009). As a research scholar in the Oil, Energy, and Middle East Program in 2007-08, Professor Lowi will work on a new book – to be published by Cambridge University Press -- that explores the various ways in which oil has impacted the states and societies of the Middle East and North Africa.

2005-2006

Jamila Bargach

Jamila Bargach completed her Ph.D in cultural anthropology at Rice University in 1998. She is the author of Orphans of Islam: Family, Abandonment and Adoption in Morocco (Rowman and Littlefield) and has published several articles about children’s rights, women’s rights and violence against women. She has actively contributed to the creation of one of the first shelters for women victims of domestic abuse in Casablanca and has been a consultant for several European funding agencies as well as Moroccan NGOs working in the domain of women’s and children’s rights in Morocco. Her research focuses on emerging family forms in Morocco, especially that of unwed mothers. While at Princeton, Bargach gave two presentations on her work and completed a first draft of her book which is to be published by Texas University Press.