Senior Research Scholar

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...

Asma Kazmi

Associate Professor of Art Practice; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Art Practice

Asma Kazmi is an Assistant Professor of Art Practice, and formerly the Co-Director of the Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts. Her work is described as “transdisciplinary, performative, relational works where people, media, and objects come together,” and she has received such distinctions as a Fulbright Research Award, Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES) to India (2014), Rocket Grant, Charlotte Street Foundation and KU Spencer Museum of Art (2011), and At The Edge : Innovative Art in Chicago Award (2007). Professor Kazmi received her M.F.A. from the...

Margaret Larkin

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

Professor Margaret Larkin is a scholar of Arabic literature whose work covers both the classical and modern periods and deals with texts composed in both literary Arabic and Egyptian colloquial Arabic. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1989. She also studied at the American University in Cairo. Her areas of particular interest include: iʽjāz al-Qur’ān (the stylistic inimitability of the Qur’an); the poetry of Abu’l-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī (d. 965 CE); and the literature of the Mamlūk era, especially popular poetry.

Her publications include: The Theology of...

Anneka Lenssen

Associate Professor of Global Modern Art; CMES Senior Research Scholar
History of Art

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...

Sarah Levin

Lecturer in Jewish Studies; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Center for Jewish Studies

Sarah Levin is a Lecturer in Jewish Studies. Her research interests focus on Jewish communities of North Africa and the Middle East, Jewish-Muslim relations, and intertextual dialogue and debate between Jews and Muslims. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Poetic Dueling, Storytelling, and Joking: Moroccan Atlas Mountain Jews and Muslims Remember Each Other. This project examines 20th-century Jewish-Muslim relations through 21st-century memories (from Muslims in Morocco and Jews who had immigrated to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s) of Amazigh (Berber) oral traditions—...

Rita Lucarelli

Associate Professor of Egyptology, Class of 1939 Chair in Undergraduate Education; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

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....