Senior Research Scholar

Lisa Maher

Associate Professor of Anthropology; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Anthropology

Lisa Maher is an Assistant Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology. Her research focuses on hunter-gatherer societies in the Near East, North Africa and Arabia with the aim of reconstructing human-environment interactions during the Late Pleistocene. The transition between hunting and gathering and farming in this region is well-studied, but tends to focus on the later Neolithic as heralding the beginnings of a series of significant changes in human social organization, economy, technological innovation, and ideology. Maher’s work focuses on the periods leading up to...

Ussama Makdisi

Chancellor's Professor of Middle East History; CMES Senior Research Scholar
History

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...

Maria Mavroudi

Professor of History and Ancient Greek & Roman Studies; CMES Senior Research Scholar
History
Ancient Greek & Roman Studies

Maria Mavroudi is a Professor in the department of Ancient Greek & Roman Studies (DAGRS) and History. She is a Byzantinist, whose research focuses on the relations between Byzantium and the Arabs, especially bilingualism in Greek and Arabic in the Middle Ages and its implications for cultural exchange between the Byzantine and Islamic world, including the development of Byzantine and Islamic science. Mavroudi earned her B.A. in Philology from the University of Thessaloniki and her Ph.D. in Byzantine Studies at Harvard University. She is one of the world’s foremost scholars in the field...

Nasser Meerkhan

Assistant Professor of Spanish and Arabic Literature
Spanish & Portuguese
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

Nasser Meerkhan is Assistant Professor in the departments of Spanish & Portuguese and Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on transcultural, transtemporal and translinguistic texts. Since beginning his graduate studies in the United States in 2011, he has been drawn to Medieval Iberia as a place of paradox: at once a space of uncertainty and of turmoil, yet also one of hope and toleration. In addition to historiography, his research includes Islamic influence on Cervantes, maqamat art in Medieval Iberia, the picaresque...

Sanjyot Mehendale

Lecturer in Central Asian Archaeology; Chair of Tang Center for Silk Road Studies; Vice-Chair of the Numata Center for Buddhist Studies; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures
Tang Center for Silk Road Studies
Numata Center for Buddhist Studies

Dr. Sanjyot Mehendale is an archaeologist specializing in trade and cultural exchange of the early Common Era. She serves as Chair of the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, Vice-Chair of the Numata Center for Buddhist Studies and Lecturer in Central Asian Archaeology in the...

Minoo Moallem

Professor of Gender and Women's Studies; Director of Media Studies; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Gender & Women's Studies

Minoo Moallem is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies. She chaired the Gender and Women’s Studies department at the University of California, Berkeley from 2008–2010 and the Women’s Studies department at San Francisco State University from 2001–2006. Moallem has recently ventured in digital media. Her online project, “Nation-on-the Move”(design by Eric Loyer), was recently published in Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular (Special issue on Difference, Fall 2007). She is currently working on a book exploring the commodification of the nation through...

Haitham Salah El-Din Mohamed

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

Haitham Mohamed has been lecturer of Arabic at Berkeley since 2013. Prior to that he taught at the American University in Cairo.

Khalid M. Mosalam

Taisei Professor of Civil Engineering; Director of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Civil & Environmental Engineering

Khalid M. Mosalam is Director of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center and Taisei Chair Professor of Civil Engineering at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the built environment and infrastructure and their resiliency in the face of extreme events. Prof. Mosalam also chairs the Al Falah Program in Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley, which aims at facilitating technical and academic exchange between UC Berkeley and counterparts in the Middle East or Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries on issues of science and technology that are of common interest...

Laura Nader

Professor of Anthropology; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Anthropology

Laura Nader is a Professor of Anthropology. Her current work focuses on how central dogmas are made and how they work in law, energy science, and anthropology. Nader’s areas of interest include comparative ethnography of law and dispute resolution, conflict, comparative family organization, the anthropology of professional mindsets and ethnology of the Middle East, Mexico, Latin America, and the contemporary United States. Her films To Make the Balance and Little Injusticesare widely disseminated. Nader is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in...

Stefania Pandolfo

Professor of Anthropology; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Anthropology

Stefania Pandolfo is an Associate Professor of Anthropology. Her research involves the study of theories and forms of subjectivity and their contemporary predicaments in the Middle Eastern and Muslim world. Pandolfo’s writing, teaching and research cover the following themes: narrative, trauma, psychoanalysis and the unconscious, memory, historicity and the hermeneutics of disjuncture, language and poetics, experimental ethnographic writing, anthropology and literature, dreaming and the anthropological study of the imagination, intercultural approaches to different ontologies and systems...