Senior Research Scholar

Rutie Adler

Lecturer Emerita in Hebrew; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

Rutie Adler taught Hebrew language courses and coordinated the Hebrew program in the department from 1986 until 2022. She designed and implemented the UCB Hebrew site ivrit.berkeley.edu

Among the courses she teaches regularly are: Intermediate and Advanced Hebrew, Hebrew Literature, Structure of Hebrew, Advanced Biblical Hebrew, Hebrew Conversation, Teaching Hebrew in College, and Intensive Summer Workshops in Hebrew language.

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; Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures
Philosophy

Asad Q. Ahmed is Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Affiliate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, and the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies 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-...

Hamid Algar

Professor Emeritus of Persian and Islamic Studies; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

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...

Nezar AlSayyed

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Architecture, Planning, Urban Design, and Urban History

Robert Alter

Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Comparative Literature; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Comparative Literature
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures
Center for Jewish Studies

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...

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,...