Senior Research Scholar

Azza Ahmad

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Arabic; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

Dr. Azza Ahmad obtained a PhD in foreign language education with a specialization in teaching Arabic as a foreign language from the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. Her research interests include teaching effectiveness, motivation in foreign language classrooms, second language acquisition, and learners’ metacognitive knowledge. In 2011, she was appointed as a postdoctoral fellow by the Department of Educational Psychology at UT to expand on her doctoral research on motivation of learners of less commonly taught languages.

Dr. Ahmad taught Arabic language and culture at...

Wali Ahmadi

Professor of Persian Literature and Department Chair; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

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...

Asad Q. Ahmed

Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures; Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies; Affiliate Professor of Philosophy
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures
Philosophy

Asad Q. Ahmed is Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, and Affiliate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.A. in 2000 from Yale University, majoring from the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Literature. He was awarded a Ph.D. in 2007 from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University.

Professor Ahmed specializes in early Islamic social history and pre-modern Islamic intellectual history, with a special focus on...

Peter Bartu

Lecturer, Global Studies; CMES Senior Research Scholars
Global Studies

Peter Bartu teaches courses at the University of California, Berkeley on political transitions in the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Gulf States. In 2011 he was a member of the UN’s stand-by mediation team and worked in Benghazi and Tripoli during the Libyan revolution. He also undertook other assignments in Djibouti, Iraq and Malawi. In 2008-2009 he led a United Nations team that produced a seminal report on the disputed internal boundaries between the Arabs and the Kurds in Iraq including Kirkuk. From 2001-2003 he was a political advisor to the UN Special...

Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed

Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature and Islamic Culture
Comparative Literature

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...

Adam Benkato

Associate Professor and Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Iranian Studies; CMES Senior Research Scholars
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

Adam Benkato is an Associate Professor in Middle Eastern Langugages and Cultures and holds the Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Iranian Studies. Before coming to UC Berkeley, he worked in Germany at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Benkato's research investigates a wide variety of textual and audio sources through the lenses of material philology, sociolinguistics, and archive studies. Although his training was largely in philology and dialectology, he has developed interests in a number of other fields and methodologies,...

Yonatan Binyam

Assistant Professor of Ancient Mediterranean & Ethiopic Studies
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

Daniel Boyarin

Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor Emeritus of Talmudic Culture; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures
Rhetoric

Daniel Boyarin is Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Emeritus Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and Rhetoric. He is also an Affiliated Member Department of Women's Studies, a Member of the core faculty in the minor in Gay and Lesbian Studies and of the graduate group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, and faculty member for the designated emphasis in Women, Sexuality, Gender Studies, as well as the core faculty of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture.

Professor Boyarin began his education at Goddard College and...

Robin Buller

Tandem Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Migration, Institute for European Studies; Independent Journalist; CMES Senior Research Scholar

Robin Buller a historian of Sephardi Jews, the Jewish Mediterranean, and Jewish migration and a Tandem Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Migration at University of California Berkeley's Institute for European Studies and the German Historical Institute West. Dr. Buller received her PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was previously a dissertation fellow with the Association for Jewish Studies and a Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies with the Claims Conference. She is also a podcast host for New Books in Jewish...

Elsa El Mahdy

Arabic Language Coordinator; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

After receiving her B.A. in Arabic from UC Berkeley, Elsa El Mahdy moved to Egypt to study at the American University in Cairo. There she received her M.A. in Arabic Studies, focusing on Arabic literature, followed by an M.A. in Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL). Elsa’s current research project in Arabic language pedagogy is entitled “Teacher and Student Beliefs about Written Corrective Feedback on Student Writing in the Arabic Foreign Language Classroom.”