Middle East Studies Steering Committee

Mehmet-Ali Ataç, Assistant Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology

Trained as an architect at METU, Ankara, Mehmet-Ali Ataç pursued graduate study in ancient art at the Ohio State University, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University where he earned his Ph.D. in 2003. He was recently Whiting Post-doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton University. His research interests include the art and architecture of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, ancient Near Eastern religion and literature, and ancient Greece and its interconnections with the Near East.

Deborah Harrold, 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.

Sooyong Kim, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Culture

Sooyong Kim's primary research interest is in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman literature. Of chief concern to him are questions of ruptures and continuities between an emerging literary tradition and the established traditions, Arabic and Persian, from which it was derived. Such a comparative perspective is essential if we are to give a more nuanced presentation of the cultural history of the Middle East, since literary genres and discourses often crossed linguistic lines. This emphasis on comparative perspectives is reflected in the courses he if offering Bryn Mawr College this academic year: an introductory course on Islamic civilization and an intermediate-level course on literary practices in the Middle East. In both offerings, translations of works written in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish are consisdered. More broadly, these courses are intended to highlight the rich cultural heritage of the Middle East. Sooyong "believe(s) that the development of Middle Eastern content in the undergraduate curriculum can only add to the variety of vantage points that Bryn Mawr students are already exposed to."

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, Anthropology

Tamara Neuman begins at Bryn Mawr in Fall 2006. She is acting director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program and will offer 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 elsewhere.

Azade Seyhan, Professor of German and Comparative Literature

Suzanne Spain, Associate Provost

Sharon Ullman, Associate Professor of History

Craig Borowiak, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Haverford College

Alev Cinar, Fulbright Visiting Specialist, Fall 2005; Associate Professor of Political Science at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey