Senior Research Scholar

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....

Neyran Turan

Associate Professor of Architecture, CMES Senior Research Scholar
College of Environmental Design

Neyran Turan is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of California-Berkeley and a partner at NEMESTUDIO.

NEMESTUDIO, founded by Neyran Turan and Mete Sonmez, is an architectural office that produces work ranging from buildings and installations to speculative projects in various scales. NEMESTUDIO has recently received the 2016 Architectural League of New York Prize for Young Architects. The work of the office has been featured at various design magazines and platforms including Wallpaper*, ICON magazine,...

Niek Veldhuis

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

Niek Veldhuis is Professor of Assyriology (cuneiform studies) in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture (previously Near Eastern Studies). He received his PhD at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (The Netherlands) in 1997, and came to Berkeley in 2002. His primary interests are in the intellectual history of ancient Mesopotamia (History of the Mesopotamian Lexical Tradition, 2014) and Sumerian literature (Religion, Literature and Scholarship: The Sumerian Composition Nanše and the Birds, 2004). He is director of the NEH-supported Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts and...

Jason Vivrette

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

Jason Rodriguez Vivrette teaches Turkish language and literature courses in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. He holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a B.A. in Film from the University of Southern California. From 2012 to 2014, he served as Co-Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies program at San Francisco State University, where he also coordinated the Arabic language program for five years. From 2010 to 2012, he co-directed the Critical Languages Scholarship (CLS) Arabic program in Tunis.

In...

Dariush Zahedi

Director of the AMENA Center for Building Innovation Economies in the Middle East; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Haas School of Business

Dariush Zahedi is Director of the AMENA Center for Building Innovation Economies in the Middle East at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Since 2001, he has taught a diverse array of courses for the Departments of Political Science, Political Economy, and Peace and Conflict Studies as well as the Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley. Zahedi has also taught for the College of Letters and Science’s Discovery Courses Program. Teaching in the program is by invitation only, with invitations issued solely to instructors whose teaching record is stellar. He has published three books on...

Nasser Zakariya

Associate Professor of Rhetoric; CMES Senior Research Scholar
Rhetoric

Nasser Zakariya is an associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. His research interests concern science, narrative and documentary; topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics and physics; and science, law and race. His book, A Final Story: Science, Myth and Beginnings, centers on the emergence of the so-called “scientific epic” as one among a set of possible frames or genres for synthesizing branches of knowledge according to a narrative, historical structure. Over the last several years, he has been involved in interrelated collaborative research projects,...