Senior Research Scholar

Anneka Lenssen specializes in modern painting and contemporary visual practices, with a focus on the cultural politics of the Middle East. Her research examines problems of artistic representation in relation to the globalizing imaginaries of empire, nationalism, communism, decolonization, non-alignment, and Third World humanism. Her teaching interests include modern art and international mass culture, the visual culture of resistance movements, abstraction and aniconism, translational and comparative practices, and special topic courses on Islamic art.

Lenssen is the author of...

Rita Lucarelli is Associate Professor of Egyptology in the department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. Lucarelli studied at the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” Italy, where she received her MA degree in Classical Languages and Egyptology. In 2005 she received her Ph.D. from Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her dissertation was published in 2006 as The Book of the Dead of Gatseshen: Ancient Egyptian Funerary Religion in the 10th Century BC.

From 2005 to 2010, Lucarelli held a part-time position as a Lecturer of Egyptology at the University of Verona, Italy....

Dr. Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley. He was previously Professor of History and the first holder of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University in Houston. During AY 2019-2020, Professor Makdisi was a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of History. In 2012-2013, Makdisi was an invited Resident Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin). In April 2009, the Carnegie Corporation named Makdisi a 2009...