Conveners

Alejandro Velasco is Associate Professor of Modern Latin America in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and in the Department of History at New York University, and Executive Editor of NACLA Report on the Americas. He is the author of the award-winning Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela (University of California Press, 2015).

Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, translator, and scholar, originally from Iraq. His scholarly works include The Poetics of the Obscene: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014) and numerous essays on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulus, and on contemporary Iraqi culture. He is Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, and co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya.

Omar S. Dahi is Associate Professor of economics at Hampshire College and editor at MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project). His research and teaching interests are in the areas of economic development and international trade, with a special focus on South-South economic cooperation, and on the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa.

Core Participants

Paul Amar is a Professor in the Global Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he serves as Director of the MA and PhD. Programs in Global Studies. He has worked as a journalist in Cairo, a police reformer and sexuality rights activist in Rio de Janeiro, and as a conflict-resolution and economic development specialist at the United Nations. His latest book, The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (Duke University Press, 2013), was awarded the Charles Taylor Award for “Best Book of the Year” in 2014 by the Interpretive Methods Section of the American Political Science Association.

Sara Awartani is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at George Washington University. Her dissertation traces the cultural and political history of how the “Palestine problem” and Puerto Rico’s “status question” produced novel solidarities among U.S. social movements, while simultaneously enabling the expansion of U.S. empire and statecraft. She has published in Radical History Review, Arab Studies Journal, MERIP, and La Respuesta, with forthcoming contributions to Kalfou and Critical Diálogos in Latina and Latino Studies. 

Cecília Baeza received her PhD in political science at Sciences Po, Paris and is Associate Researcher at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), Brazil. She is currently the Research Program Coordinator at Noria (a think tank based in Paris). Cecilia’s areas of expertise include the transnational agency of migrants and diasporas, forced migration in the Middle East, and reception and integration policies in Latin America.

Nadim Bawalsa is a History and Arabic instructor in New York City. A native of Amman, Jordan, Bawalsa received a Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies from New York University in 2017. His dissertation is titled “Palestinian Migrants and the Birth of a Diaspora in Latin America, 1860-1940.” Bawalsa was also the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Scholar at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.

Hiba Bou Akar is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Her recent book, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (Stanford University Press, 2018), examines how Beirut's post-civil war peripheries have been transformed through multiple planning exercises into contested frontiers. Bou Akar received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Beirut (AUB) and Master in Urban Studies and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Roosbelinda Cárdenas is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies at Hampshire College. Her teaching and research focuses on identity and rights for Afro-descendants in Latin America and social theory of race and racism, social movements, place and displacement, and human rights. Her current book project is Raising Two Fists: Struggles for Black Citizenship in Multicultural Colombia.

Fernando Camacho Padilla is an Assistant Lecturer in History at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). He received his B.A. in History at the University of Seville, and has a double Ph.D degree from UAM and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2013). In the past, he has work as assistant lecturer at Stockholm University, Uppsala University, Dalarna University and Södertörn University College (Sweden). Most of his research have been focusing in Chile-Sweden political connections (1964-1990) and Swedish solidarity movements with Latin American. His latest book is Una vida para Chile. La solidaridad y la comunidad chilena en Suecia, 1970-2010 (Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, 2011).

Tariq Dana is Assistant Professor at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. He is a Policy Adviser for the Palestinian Policy Network (Al-Shabaka), and a member of the steering committee of the International Political Economy Project.

Amal Eqeiq is a native Palestinian born in the city of Al-Taybeh in the Triangle. She is an Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College. In addition to working on her manuscript, Indigenous Affinities: A Comparative Study in Mayan and Palestinian Narratives, Amal is writing her first novel. She also keeps a Facebook Blog titled: “Diaries of a Hedgehog Feminist”.

Paulo Daniel Elias Farah is Professor of Arab and African Studies at the University of São Paulo (USP), director of the African Research Center at USP and director of BibliASPA. He is the author of several works, such as Deleite do Estrangeiro em Tudo o que É Espantoso e Maravilhoso: Estudo de um Relato de Viagem Bagdali, Gramática da Língua Árabe para Estudantes Sul-Americanos and Islã: Arte e Civilização. He has translated various pieces from Portuguese to Arabic and viceversa.

Ismail Hamalaw is a London-based Kurdish novelist, writer, and co-founder of Culture Project.

Kevan Harris is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCLA and an editor of MERIP. He is the author of A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran (University of California Press, 2017). In 2016, Harris also fielded the Iran Social Survey, a nationally-representative survey of social and economic relations in the Islamic Republic of Iran. He teaches classes on development, welfare states, and the political economy of the Middle East at UCLA.

Rania Jawad is Assistant Professor and current chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at Birzeit University. She writes on performance politics in Palestine, Arab theatre, and cultural politics in colonial contexts. Her book project The Art of the Real considers the violence of settler colonialism in relation to constructions of the “real” in Palestine. 

Marwan M. Kraidy is the Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics and Culture and Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (Harvard University Press, 2016). He tweets @MKraidy.

Houzan Mahmoud is a London-based Kurdish feminist, writer, and co-founder of Culture Project. She has an MA in Gender Studies from SOAS-University of London.

Farid Matuk is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. Matuk was born in Lima, Peru, to a Syrian mother and Peruvian father, has lived in the United States since he was six as an undocumented person, a “legal” resident, and a patriated citizen. His second full-length collection, The Real Horse, is forthcoming for the University of Arizona Press.

Lena Meari is Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Birzeit University, interested in revolutionary movements and revolutionary subject formation. After completing her Ph.D., Meari spent a semester in the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, working on developing her doctoral dissertation titled “Sumud: A Philosophy of Confronting Interrogation”, which investigates the transforming colonial relations in colonized Palestine from the perspective of the interrogation-encounter.

Ali Mirsepassi is Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Sociology at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and director of NYU’s Iranian Studies Center. His most recent book is titled Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Times of Ahmad Fardid (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Eman Morsi is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research interests revolve around questions of censorship, modernization and the everyday in modern Arab and Latin American literatures and cultures. She holds a doctoral degree from New York University.

Paulo Pinto is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Boston University. His areas of interest include embodiment and the construction of religious subjectivities, ethnicity and religious nationalism, and pilgrimage processes and the constitution of transnational religious arenas.

K. Flo Raslowsky currently located in Los Angeles, is a photographer who has supported liberation movements and photographed in Palestine, Bahrain, Serbia, Ukraine, Berlin, the United States and Mexico, and many of the borderlands in between. Razowsky works to combine art with activism, which they believe can move people to act. 

Ella Shohat is a Professor at the departments of Art & Public Policy and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies at New York University. She has lectured and written extensively on issues having to do with post/colonial and transnational approaches to cultural studies. Her most recent book is titled On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings of Ella Shohat (Pluto Press, 2018).

Omar Imseeh Tesdell is Assistant Professor in the Geography Department at Birzeit University in Palestine. His research examines landscape and agroecological transformation in the Middle East and North America.