University of Chicago: Department of Anthropology: About the Department

University of Chicago Anthropologists who work in the Middle East & North Africa

Faculty
Students:
     Preparing for the field
     In the field
     Writing up
     Recent PhDs

Faculty:

Hussein Ali Agrama - Middle East, Egypt (Anthropology of religion, Islam, law, colonial power)
Amahl Bishara - Middle East, Palestine, Israel (Journalism and the anthropology of media, place and cultural identities, film production)

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Students:

Preparing for the Field

Yazan Doughan - Amman, Jordan (Anthropology of media; urban regeneration in Amman; theorizing space and time; the relation between media and space; semiotics, phenomenology)
Ali Feser - Qatar (International conflict; mediation, war, the internet as a site of state power and opposition, media and technology, American military bases (Qatar), the Iraq war
Melissa Rosenzweig (A) - Zincirli, Turkey (Political economics, strategies of authority production, political aesthetics; ceramic analysis. 1st millennium BC)

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In the Field

Royal Ghazal (A) - Oman; "Craft and Trade in Bronze Age Oman from the Perspective of the Coastal Ja'alaan Region"

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Writing Up

Kelda Jamison - Southeast Turkey; " Inscribing Literacies: Standardizing Linguistic Practices and Publics in Kurdish Turkey"
Alejandro Paz (Ling) - Latin America & Israel/Palestine; "Discursive Transformation: Ethnolinguist Identities among Latin American Labor Migrants and Their Children in Israel"
Kabir Tambar - Çorum, Turkey; "Stones of Kerbela: Sectarian Dimensions of Secularism in Turkey" [Alevism, Shiism, Secularism]
Jeremy Walton - Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey; "Constructing Civic Virtue in a Neoliberal State: Islamism and Secularism among the Vakiflar in Contemporary Turkey"
Hadas Weiss - Israel/West Bank (Critical theory, ideology, agency & subjectivity, practice and field theory, theories of space and time; "Practice and Ideology in the West Bank Settlement Movement")

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Recent PhDs

Lori Allen – Ramallah; Palestine/West Bank; “Suffering through a Nationalist Uprising: The Cultural Politics of Human Rights, Violence, and Victimhood in Palestine”
Rebecca Bryant - Nicosia & Girne, Cyprus; Istanbul, Turkey; “Educating Ethnicity: On the Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus”
Tania Forte - A Palestinian Israeli Village in Galilee [N. of Haifa]; “On Making a Village: Transactions, Land and Histories in a Palestinian Village in the Galilee”
Kaylin Goldstein - Israel/Palestine; “Nations on Display: The Politics of Museums in Israeli Society”
Sarah Graff (A) - NW Syria; "Economy and Society: An Archaeological Reconstruction of the Political and Informal Economy of Northwestern Syria in the Third Millennium BC"”
Simon Hawkins – Tunisia; “Globalization vs Civilization: The Ideologies of Foreign Language Learning in Tunisia”
EngSeng Ho - Sana’a & Tarim, Southern Yemen; “ Genealogical Figures in an Arabian Indian Ocean Diaspora”
Samuel Kaplan - Gülek [near Tarsus], Turkey; “Education and the Politics of National Culture in a Turkish Community [1990]”
Krista Lewis (A) – Yemen; “Space and the Spice of Life: Food, Politics, and Landscape in Ancient Yemen”
Thomas Lyons - Algeria/France; “The Fictional Artifact: Ethnography and the Novel in Algeria”
Kimberly Mills – Tunisia; “Reproducing the Nation: The Politics of Family Planning in Tunisia”
Daniel Monterescu – Jaffa, Israel; “Spatial Relationality: Urban Space and Jewish-Arab Relations in Palestinian-Israeli Mixed Towns, 1948-2004”
Tamara Neuman - Jerusalem, Israel; “Reinstating the Religious Nation: A Study of National Religious Persuasion, Settlement and Violence in Hebron”
Caroline Seymour-Jorn - Cairo, Egypt; “Indaha Qalam: ‘She Has a Pen’, The Social Discourse of Contemporary Female Fiction Writers in Cairo”
Ian Straughn (A) - NW Syria; "Materializing Islam: An Archaeology of Landscape in Early Islamic Period Syria (c. 600-1000 CE)"

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