Senior Research Scholar

Wali Ahmadi, a native of Kabul, Afghanistan, came to the United States after graduating from high school in 1982. He received his B.A. in Political and Social sciences from California State University, Hayward (now East Bay) in 1987. In spring 1997, he was awarded a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. From 1997-2000 he taught at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. Since 2000, he has been teaching Persian literature in the Near Eastern Studies Department at UC Berkeley. He was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in...

Hamid Algar, Ph.D. was Professor of Persian and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, now the Department of Middle Eastern Languages of Cultures. Professor Algar began his studies of Arabic, Persian and Islamic Civilzation at Cambridge in 1959. After graduating, he spent a lengthy and fruitful period of travel in Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan before returning to Cambridge in 1963 and completing his doctorate there two years later. He taught at UCB in the Department of Near Eastern Studies from 1965 to 2010, providing a wide range of instruction in the fields of...

Robert Alter is Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University...

Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature and Islamic Culture in the Department of Comparative Literature. He obtained his B.A. in 2009 from the University of Tunis and his Master’s from the University of Notre Dame in 2016. In 2022, he completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. His research focuses on modern Arabic literature and thought, with particular interest in questions of temporality, receptions of the...