Faculty
Middle East Studies Steering Committee
Deborah Harrold, Coordinator, 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
Mehmet-Ali Atac, Assistant 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).
Tamara Neuman, Visiting Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Anthropology and Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies
Tamara Neuman has been at Bryn Mawr since Fall 2006. She is acting director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program and offers basic PACS courses and courses in Anthropology focussing on the Middle East. She completed her Ph.D. studies at the University of Chicago in 2001. She is also finishing an ethnography entitled “Seizing Zion: Jewish Militancy and Religious Settlement Over the Green Line.” For more, see her Bryn Mawr Now profile.
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.
