Senior Research Scholar

Emily Gottreich

Adjunct Professor of Global Studies and Political Economy; CMES Senior Research Scholar
History
International and Area Studies

Emily Gottreich is an Adjunct Professor in Global Studies and Political Economy and Faculty Affiliate in the departments of History and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. Between 2009-2013 she was the President of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS). She is also Founding Director (along with Aomar Baum, UCLA and Susan Miller, UC Davis) of the MENA-J (MENA Jewry) Program, a UC-systemwide initiative to study, document, and preserve Jewish history in the Middle East and North Africa.

Prof. Gottreich received a Ph.D. in...

Atreyee Gupta

Assistant Professor of Global Modern Art
History of Art

Atreyee Gupta’s area of expertise is Global Modernism, with a special emphasis on the aesthetic and intellectual flows that have cut across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America from the twentieth century onwards. Her research and teaching interests cluster around visual and intellectual histories of twentieth-century art; the intersections among the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement, and art after 1945; new media and experimental cinema; and the question of the global as materially, intellectually, and politically constellated around decolonization....

Dalit Gvirtsman

Lecturer in Modern Hebrew
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

Bruce Hall

Associate Professor of History; CMES Senior Research Scholar
History

Bruce Hall is Associate Professor of History. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual history in West and North Africa, located at the intersection of West Africa’s Muslim high intellectual culture and social and economic issues which that intellectual culture sought to address. His first book, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is an intellectual history of arguments made about race and slavery in the West African Sahel. It reveals the long history of racial ideas in this region, and the different work that racial ideas were made to...

Mohamed Hamed

Middle Eastern & Near Eastern Studies Librarian

Mohamed Hamed has served as the Middle Eastern and Near Eastern Studies Librarian at UC Berkeley since 2017. He holds a BA, MA, and PhD in Library and Information Science from Cairo University. Prior to Berkeley, he was the Middle Eastern and African Studies Librarian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for seven years. His earlier roles include positions at The American University in Cairo, Santa Monica College Library, and teaching Arabic at UNC.

At Berkeley, Dr. Hamed supports research in Middle Eastern, North African, and global studies. He is a past...

Charles Hirschkind

Professor of Anthropology; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Anthropology

Charles Hirschkind is a Professor of Anthropology. His research interests include religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the Middle East and North America. He has held teaching positions at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the University of Toronto, and the New School of Social Research in New York. Hirschkind received his M.A. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 1989 and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1999.

Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed

Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. Her research focuses on the continued life of Islamic philosophy as it was absorbed and transformed in Islamic theology and mysticism through both Arabic and Persian textual traditions. She earned her BA from Yale University in 2010, where she majored in Religious Studies, and her Master’s of Arts in Religion (MAR) from Yale Divinity School in 2012 with a concentration in Philosophy of Religion. In 2018, she completed her doctorate in Islamic Studies at...

Victoria Jensen

CMES Senior Research Scholar

Dr. Jensen received a B.A. and M.A from the University of Chicago in Political Science/International Relations, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology from the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation topic was “The Cemeteries of Deir el-Ballas: Non-elite burials of the 17th – 19th Dynasties and their relationship to the royal palace.” Her monograph based on this work is currently in preparation to be published in the Harvard Egyptological Studies series. Dr. Jensen has field experience at Abydos, el-...

Abhishek Kaicker

Associate Professor of History; CMES Senior Research Scholar
History

Abhishek Kaicker is an Associate Professor in the History Department. He is an historian of Persianate South Asia (c. 1200-1900) with expertise in the history of the Mughal empire. He is interested in questions of intellectual history and the history of concepts; early modern global history; religion, politics and the city; and more generally in the continuities between precolonial and postcolonial south Asia.

Kaicker's first book, The King the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (OUP 2020) shows how ordinary urbanites emerged as assertive political...

Ethan Katz

Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies; Faculty Director of the Center for Jewish Studies; CMES Senior Research Scholar
History
Center for Jewish Studies

Ethan Katz is Associate Professor in the Department of History. He is a historian of modern Europe and the Mediterranean, with specialties in modern Jewish history and the history of modern France and its empire. To date, his scholarship has focused in four principal areas: the history of Jewish-Muslim relations and the nature of belonging and exclusion in modern France and the Francophone world; the history of Jews in colonial societies; Holocaust Studies; and the relationship between the secular and religion in modern Jewish life. In all of his work, transnational and comparative...