Senior Research Scholar

Robin Buller

Tandem Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Migration
Institute of European Studies

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...

Joseph Cross

Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

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.”

Elsadig Elsheikh

Director of the Global Justice Program, Othering & Belonging Institute; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Othering & Belonging Institute

Elsadig Elsheikh is the Director of the Global Justice Program at the Othering & Belonging Institute, where he oversees the program’s projects on corporate power, food systems, forced migration, inclusiveness index, Islamophobia, and human rights mechanisms; and manages the Shahidi Project, and the Nile Project.

Elsadig's research interests focus on the themes and socio-political dynamics related to state and citizenship; race and corporate power; and measuring social policies of exclusion and inclusion...

Samera Esmeir

Associate Professor of Rhetoric; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Rhetoric

Samera Esmeir is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching are at the intersection of legal and political thought, Middle Eastern history and colonial and post-colonial studies. Her central intellectual focus thus far has been to examine how late-modern colonialism, with a particular focus on the Middle East, has introduced liberal juridical logics and grammars that in turn shaped modalities of political praxis, and how those have persisted in the post-colonial era and have traveled in different countries in the Middle East. Her first book, Juridical...

Munis Faruqui

Associate Professor of South & Southeast Asian Studies; Director of the Center for South Asian Studies; CMES Senior Research Scholar
South and Southest Asian Studies

Munis D. Faruqui is a historian. His focus is on the Muslim experience in South Asia, especially during the Mughal period. His books include: Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504-1719 (Cambridge, 2012), Expanding Frontiers in South Asian and World History (co-edited with Richard Eaton, David Gilmartin and Sunil Kumar)(Cambridge, 2013), and Religious Interactions in Mughal India (co-edited with Vasudha Dalmia) (Oxford, 2014). He is currently working on a book focused on the Mughal Empire in the latter half of the seventeenth century. In 2014, Dr. Faruqui was one of...

Keith Feldman

Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Ethnic Studies

Keith P. Feldman is Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies and a core faculty member in the Program in Critical Theory. Trained in literary and cultural studies, his research interests include Theories of Race and Ethnicity; Cultures of the African, Arab, and Jewish Diasporas; Visual Culture Studies; Postcolonial Theory; and Critical Theory. Feldman received his BA in Literature from Brown University in 2000, his MA in Literature from the George Washington University in 2003, and his PhD in Literature from the University of Washington in 2008.

Mia Fuller

Associate Professor of Italian Studies; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Italian Studies

Mia Fuller is an Associate Professor of Italian Studies. She is a cultural anthropologist who has combined fieldwork and archival research in her studies of architecture and city planning in the Italian colonies between 1869 and 1943. Her book on the subject, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism (Routledge, 2007) won the International Planning History Society Book Prize, 2008. She is also the co-editor (with Ruth Ben-Ghiat) of Italian Colonialism (Palgrave, 2005), and she collaborated with filmmaker Caterina Borelli on the documentary film “Asmara...

Reza Ghahramani

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

Born in Shiraz, Iran, Reza Ghahramanifirst started to learn German after High school on his own and quickly grew to love the German language, and eventually decided to earn two bachelor’s degrees at once: one in German Language and Literature from the Shahid Beheshti University (SBU) and one in the Applied Translation (German-Persian) from the Islamic Azad University Central Tehran Branch (IAUCTB) both in Tehran.

Ghahramani continued his education at the Tarbiat Modares University (TBU) in Tehran receiving a M.A. in German Pedagogy with a MA thesis entitled “...

Deniz Göktürk

Professor of German; CMES Senior Research Scholar
German

Professor Göktürk earned her Dr.phil. at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, in 1995, with a dissertation on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture. She also worked as a certified translator of Turkish for law courts, hospitals and publishers for several years. Her first full-time teaching appointment was at the University of Southampton, UK, in the School of Modern Languages and the Film Program from 1995 to 2001. She joined the Department of German at Berkeley in fall 2001. She has served as graduate adviser and, since 2013, department...