Bryn Mawr College

Deborah Harrold, Director, Lecturer in Political Science

Deborah Harrold’s research and teaching interests developed from her own experiences with research in the Middle East. She began field research in Algeria in the early 1990s and was struck by connections between economic transformation, new electoral politics, and the new importance of political Islam. Political, cultural, economic, and religious issues were bound together with competing visions of history. Today, in her courses, she emphasizes the interrelationships between culture and politics, between domestic politics and international relations, between economics and religion. In addition to a basic course on the politics of the Middle East and North Africa, Deborah Harrold teaches multidisciplinary courses such as Oil, politics, economy and society, and Middle East Cities

Grace M. Armstrong, Eunice M. Schenck 1907
Professor of French and Francaphone Studies
Director of Middle Eastern Languages

Mehmet-Ali Atac, Associate Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology

Research interests: visual and intellectual traditions of the ancient Near East, Neo-Assyrian art and architecture, ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian kingship.

Peter Magee, Associate Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology

Peter Magee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College. He obtained his PhD in near eastern archaeology from the University of Sydney. Before coming to Bryn Mawr he was a Research Fellow at the University of Sydney and University of Ghent (Belgium). He has published on aspects of the pre-Islamic archaeology of Arabia, Iran and the Indo-Iranian borderlands. He has excavated in Greece, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates. He is currently Director of the excavations at Muweilah (UAE), co-Director with the University of Tübingen of the excavations at al-Hamriya (UAE) and co-Director with the British Museum of the excavations at Akra (Pakistan).

Marc Ross, Professor of Political Science

Marc Howard Ross is the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor in Political Science and Peace and Conflict Studies. His interest is in long-term intractable conflicts such as those in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Israel-Palestine. He is currently completing a project comparing seven ethnic and national conflicts focusing on ways that cultural expressions and enactments in each became emotional and political focal points for participants. In the Israeli-Palestinian case his research has been on the politics of archaeology in Jerusalem's old city and he is especially interested in how the parties have used archaeological projects and evidence to make exclusive political claims. For more, see Marc Ross's webpage.

Azade Seyhan, Professor of German and Comparative Literature

Azade Seyhan is the Fairbank Professor in the Humanities, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Bryn Mawr Director of the program in Comparative Literature, and adjunct professor of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (University of California, 1992); Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton, 2001); and most recently, Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context (MLA, 2008). She has lectured extensively on German Idealism and Romanticism, critical theory, exile narratives, Turkish-German literature, and the theory of the novel.

Sharon Ullman, Professor of History

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Sharon Ullman specializes in 20th-century America with an emphasis on popular culture and gender. She is the author of Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America and Sexual Borderlands: Constructing an American Sexual Past (with Kathleen Kennedy). Her current research project, Brainwashing: The Anxious Mind of Cold War America is under contract to NYU Press. Her courses include such topics as the history of sexuality, the culture of the cold war, and film and national identity.