Senior Research Scholar

Laurie Pearce

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

Laurie Pearce is a Lecturer in Assyriology in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches courses in the Akkadian language, the history of Mesopotamia. Her research interests are focused on the social and economic history of Babylonia in the late first millennium BCE.

Tomer Persico

Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies; Shalom Hartman Institute Bay Area Scholar in Residence; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures
Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies
Center for Jewish Studies

Dr. Tomer Persico is the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies in the department of of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures, the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, and Center for Jewish Studies at UCM Berkeley, and the Shalom Hartman Institute Bay Area Scholar in Residence. Persico's fields of study are contemporary spirituality, Jewish modern identity, Jewish renewal, and forms of secularization and religiosity in Israel. He has taught at the Department for Comparative Religion in Tel Aviv University for eight years. His first book, The...

Christine Philliou

Professor of History; CMES Senior Research Scholar
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 book, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (University of California Press, 2011) examines the changes in Ottoman governance leading up to the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. It does 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 Ottoman state. Her...

Jaleh Pirnazar

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

Jaleh Pirnazar was the Persian Language Coordinator in the department of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures until her retirement in 2018. She has particular interest in Iranian Cinema, Persian Literature, Literature in Exile, and Language Teaching Pedagogy. She taught Persian Language Courses: Elementary, Intermediate, Heritage (track courses), Modern Persian Literature, Classical Persian Literature, Iranian Film and Fiction.

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,...

Carol Redmount

Associate Professor of Egyptology; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

Carol Redmount is an Associate Professor of Egyptology in the department of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures. An archaeologist with field experience in Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Cyprus, Tunisia and the U.S. and academic training in Egyptology, Syro-Palestinian Archaeology, Anthropology and Religious and Biblical Studies, Redmount has strongly cross-cultural and interdisciplinary research interests. Her current work focuses on fieldwork in Egypt, ancient Egyptian urbanism, cultural heritage destruction, and ancient ceramics.

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...

Francesca Rochberg

Professor Emerita of Assyriology, Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor Emerita of Near Eastern Studies; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures

Francesca Rochberg is Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emerita. From 1982–1987 she held the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1993. In 2008 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Rochberg was a member of the Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (formerly Near Eastern Studies) Department and a member of the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology from 2007–2022, and served as Chair of MELC from 2018–2021....