Senior Research Scholar

Christine Philliou

Professor of History; Interim Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies
History
Christine Philliou specializes in the political and social history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey and Greece as parts of the post-Ottoman world. Her first book, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (University of California Press, 2011) examined the changes in Ottoman governance leading up to the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. It did so using the vantage point of Phanariots, an Orthodox Christian elite that was intimately involved in the day-to-day work of governance even though structurally excluded from the...

Benjamin Porter

Associate Professor and Curator of Middle Eastern Archaeology; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

Benjamin W. Porter is Associate Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures and Curator of Middle Eastern Archaeology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology where he served as the Museum’s director from 2015 to 2019. Porter is a Near Eastern archaeologist who investigates how past Middle Eastern and Mediterranean societies built resilient communities and institutions in arid and semi-arid zones. He directs field archaeology projects in Jordan at the Iron Age capitals of Dhiban and Busayra. From 2015 to 2018 he served as teh He...

Sugata Ray

Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art
History of Art
South & Southeast Asian Studies

Sugata Ray is Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian art in the History of Art Department and the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies. Trained in both History (Presidency College; Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta) and Art History (Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda; University of Minnesota), Sugata Ray’s research focuses on the intersections among early modern and colonial artistic cultures, transterritorial ecologies, and the natural environment. His first book,...

Terry Regier

Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science; Director of the Language & Cognition Lab; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Linguistics
Cognitive Science

Terry Regier is a Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science and the Lab Director of the Language & Cognition Lab. He is interested in semantic categories, why they vary across languages in the ways they do, and what that cross-language variation reveals about the mind and about communication. He also has an interest in political language use concerning the Palestine question and the Arab world generally.

Barbara Richter

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

Barbara Richter is a Lecturer in Egyptology in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures, where
she earned her degrees in Egyptology (M.A., 2008; Ph.D., 2012) and has taught the various
stages and scripts of the ancient language since 2008. Before pursuing her life-long interest in the
languages and cultures of the ancient Near East, she earned an A.B. degree in music from
Stanford University.

Dr. Richter’s primary research interest is in the ancient Egyptian language and religion, with
particular emphasis on the texts and their multi-layered...

Jason Silvestri

Egyptology Researcher
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

Dr. Jason Silvestri is an Egyptologist and archaeologist, currently based in Cambridge(UK). Originally hailing from Massachusetts (USA), he received his PhD in Egyptian Art and Archaeology in 2026, at the UC Berkeley, and he is currently elected Lady Wallis Budge Junior Research Fellow in Egyptology at Christ’s College, Cambridge.

His current book-project, entitledViolent Priests, Pious Warlords, and Libyan Elders, utilizes his own critical re-translation of...

Francesco Spagnolo

Curator, Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life; Associate Adjunct Professor of Music; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Magnes Collection of Jewish Art & Life
Music
Center for Jewish Studies

Francesco Spagnolo is a multidisciplinary scholar focusing on Jewish studies, music, and digital media. At the University of California, Berkeley, he is the Curator of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life and an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Department of Music and the Center for Jewish Studies. He is also an affiliated faculty with the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, the Institute of European Studies, the Religious Diversity Cluster of the Haas Institute, and serves on the Digital Humanities Council. Dr. Spagnolo is also a host for the cultural programs of Italian...

Nathan Spannaus

Executive Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies; CMES Senior Research Scholar

Nathan Spannaus is a specialist in early modern Islamic intellectual history and religious thought. He is a graduate of McGill University’s Institute of Islamic Studies and Harvard’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and he has held positions at University of Jyväskylä (Finland), Oxford University, University of Tennessee and Princeton University. His work has appeared in Islamic Law and Society, Muslim World, Arabica, and Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, and he has contributed to the Oxford Handbook of...

Thoraya Tlatli

Associate Professor of French; CMES Senior Research Scholar
French

Thoraya Tlatli is an Associate Professor of French with research interests in francophone literature – particularly from North Africa – as well as colonial and postcolonial historiography. She has also written and researched on 20th century French psychoanalysis, philosophy and intellectual history. Publications include: “Les ruines de l’Algérie chez Kateb Yacine” in Hommage à Kateb Yacine ed. Nabil Boudraa (L’Harmattan, Paris, 2006), La Folie Lyrique: essai sur le surréalisme et la psychiatrie (L’Harmattan, Paris, 2004), and Le Psychiatre et ses Poètes: essai sur le...

Cihan Tuğal

Professor of Sociology; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Sociology

Cihan Tuğal is a Professor of Sociology. His research explores how the interaction between religion and politics shapes everyday life, urban space, class relations, and national identity. Tugal also studies Islamic mobilization in Turkey, Iran and Egypt to understand why similar movements have not resulted in a comparable Islamic market consensus in these countries. He argues that Islamic politics has interacted with civil society and the state in different ways in these three cases, leading to the victory of neo-liberalized Islam in Turkey, its defeat in Iran, and a stalemate in Egypt....