Faculty

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Dina A. Ramadan, Director

At Bard since 2010, Dina A. Ramadan is Continuing Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies, and Faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies. Concerned with the intersection of aesthetic and politics, her interdisciplinary teaching and research focus on modern and contemporary cultural production (including literature, film, and visual arts) from the MENA, decolonial movements, labor, and migration. She received her PhD from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University and was a EUME postdoctoral fellow at the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien from 2013–14. Ramadan has contributed articles and reviews to Art Journal, Arab Studies Journal, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Review of Middle East Studies, Journal of Visual Culture, Middle East Research and Information Project, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, among others. She is author of The Education of Taste: Art, Aesthetics, and Subject Formation in Colonial Egypt (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press) and co-editor (with Sarah Rogers) of The Borders of Art: Migration, Mobility, and Artistic Practice (forthcoming, Rowman and Littlefield). She has served as a senior editor of Arab Studies Journal since 2010. A founding member of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA), she participated in Mapping Art Histories in the Arab World, Turkey & Iran, a research project funded by the Getty Foundation. Ramadan is a 2023 recipient of The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and her writing on contemporary art has appeared in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, frieze, e-flux Criticism, ArtReview, and Art Papers.

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Dror Abend-David

Dror Abend-David graduated with a PhD in comparative literature from New York University and has taught in a number of countries: Israel, Turkey, Cyprus, Lithuania, and the United States. He has published one monograph, “Scorned My Nation”: A Comparison of Translations of The Merchant of Venice into German, Hebrew, and Yiddish (Peter Lang, 2003), and two scholarly collections: Media and Translation: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014; soft cover, 2016) and Representing Translation: Languages,Translation, and Translators in Contemporary Media (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019; soft cover, 2020). He has also published articles on translation in relation to media, drama, literature, and Jewish culture.

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Ziad Abu-Rish

Ziad Abu-Rish is the director of the MA Program in Human Rights & the Arts, and Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College. His research centers around state formation, economic development, and popular mobilizations, particularly in Lebanon and Jordan.

Ziad holds a PhD in History from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He is currently completing a book project, “The State of Lebanon: Popular Politics and Institution Building in the Wake of Independence.” He serves as co-editor of Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya e-zine, and co-director of the Lebanese Dissertation Summer Institute and Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative. Ziad is co-editor of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (2012), Critical Voices: A Collection of Interviews from and on the Middle East (2015), and What Is Political Economy?(2016). He is the author of articles appearing in Middle East Report and Review of Middle East Studies and chapters in edited volumes on the political economy of the Middle East, the Arab uprisings, and teaching Middle East history. He is currently a member of the board of directors of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).

Ziad teaches courses on human rights, comparative state formation, various themes in Middle East history and contemporary politics, and research methodologies.

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Erin Atwell

Erin Atwell is an Islamic Studies scholar whose work explores intersections of classical Islamic texts, contemporary Muslim practices, and forms of modern power. Trained as an anthropologist and textualist specializing in Classical Arabic literature, her interdisciplinary research spans contemporary Islamic ethics, early Arabic literature, religion and atheism, embodiment and the senses, religious authority, and the aesthetics of oration and orality. Her current book project is a study of early Islamic ethical and aesthetic expressions of godfearingness (taqwā), and how these expressions shape efforts to renew religious discourse in post-revolutionary Egyptian religious spaces. Publications include “Hold Fast the Reins and Be Guided: Embodied Expressions of Taqwā in Prophetic Hadith and Orations of ʿAli ibn Abī Ṭālib” in the Journal of Arabic Literature, and “Renewing Religious Discourse: The Azhar Documents and Conceptions of Reform in Contemporary Egypt” in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Reform. Erin holds a B.A. from Loyola University Chicago, an M.A. from Fordham University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and Anthropology from the University of Chicago.

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Karen Barkey

Karen Barkey’s research has been engaged in the comparative and historical study of the state, with special focus on its transformation over time. Her work has explored state society relations, peasant movements, banditry, and opposition and dissent organized around the state. Her main empirical site has been the Ottoman Empire, in comparison with France and the Habsburg and Russian Empires. She also pays attention to the Roman and Byzantine worlds as important predecessors of the Ottomans. Her book Empire of Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2008) explores issues such as diversity, the role of religion in politics, Islam and the state as well as the manner in which the Sunni-Shi’a divide operated during the tenure of the Ottoman Empire—topics that remain relevant today. Barkey, who was born in Istanbul, is also coauthor of Choreography of Sacred Spaces: State, Religion and Conflict Resolution (Columbia University Press, 2014), which explores the history of shared religious spaces in the Balkans, Anatolia, and Palestine/Israel, regions once under Ottoman rule. Recent publications include Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism: India, Pakistan and Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Shared Sacred Sites: A Contemporary Pilgrimage (City University of New York Publications, 2018). Barkey was awarded the Germaine Tillion Chair of Mediterranean Studies, IMéRA, Marseille for 2021–2022, and has served as professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley; Haas Distinguished Chair of Religious Diversity at the Othering and Belonging Institute; director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion; and codirector of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion. She also taught at Columbia University, where she was director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life.

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J. Andrew Bush

Andrew Bush is an anthropologist interested in the intersection of religion, gender and sexuality, law, and poetry in the Middle East. He has conducted research in the Kurdistan region of Iraq since 2004, with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Science Foundation, and Johns Hopkins University. His first book, Between Muslims: Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan (Stanford University Press, 2020), describes the kinds of ethical life available to Muslims who spurn devotional piety but retain intimate kin relations with other pious Muslims. His second book has been supported through a fieldwork grant from Wenner-Gren and a fellowship at Harvard Law School’s Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World. Tentatively titled A History of Husbands in Islamic Law, the book asks how questions of manhood or masculinity have been shaped by different legal forums adjudicating questions of marriage and divorce in Kurdistan since the 18th century. Other writing has been published in American Ethnologist, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East. He was previously a Research Fellow at Cracow University of Economics and taught for four years at New York University Abu Dhabi.

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Anne Hunnell Chen

Anne Hunnell Chen specializes in the art and archaeology of the globally-connected Roman world, and is committed to exploring how low-barrier Linked Open Data (LOD) can be harnessed not only to provide more equitable access to archaeological data in the digital realm, but also to empower stakeholder audiences as collaborative curators. She is the director and co-PI of the International [Digital] Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), an archaeological data accessibility project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, whose documentation efforts are aimed at sharing-out workflows that help to overcome disciplinary data silos and work to dislodge enduring impacts of colonialism (access inequalities; epistemic biases). Chen serves as the Annotations Activity co-coordinator and Network co-Chair for the international Pelagios Network, a role that coordinates the international pooling of knowledge and resources among Linked Open Data researchers in the historical and cultural heritage sectors. She publishes on Roman, Persian, and Digital Humanities topics and teaches equally wide-ranging coursework.

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Ziad Dallal

Ziad Dallal’s areas of research/interest include modern Arabic literature and intellectual history, critical theory, translation theory, political philosophy, philology, Marxism and finance, and film theory. He has also written about contemporary Arabic theater and contemporary music in Lebanon and served as lead translator and adviser on This Is Home: A Refugee Story, a 2017 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award winner for world cinema documentary. Publications and conference papers include “Arabic Hip Hop: El Rass and the New Identity,” in Bidayat; “The Madhahib of Modernity: Al-Shidyaq and Literary Politics” at American University of Beirut; “Sovereignty, Contingency, and Arab Tragedy: The Plays of Sulayman al-Bassam” at a conference of the Middle East Studies Association; and “Time Travel and the Recouping of the Nahdah,” an American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) paper presented in New York. Dallal has served as an instructor at New York University and American University of Beirut, teaching courses such as Antiquity and the 19th Century, Islamic Societies, On Liberation, and Arab and Middle Eastern Studies. 

BA, American University of Beirut; PhD, New York University. At Bard since 2018.

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Valentina Grasso

Valentina Grasso comes to Bard from Catholic University of America, where she taught in the Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures. She previously taught at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, and was an affiliate member of the European Research Council (ERC) project “The Qur’an as a Source for Late Antiquity” and the Cambridge Silk Road Program. Grasso has participated in archaeological projects in Iraqi Kurdistan, Sicily, Ethiopia, and Jordan; and pursued additional study in Classical Armenian, Coptic language, Ethiopian and Eritrean manuscripts, Moroccan Arabic, and Islamic archaeology, among other subjects. Professor Grasso’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge was published as a monograph, Pre-Islamic Arabia: Societies, Politics, Cults, and Identities during Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2023). A second monograph, Trading Faiths: From the Battle of Edessa to the Sack of Baghdad (260–1258 ce) is in preparation. Publications also include the forthcoming “Indian Ocean Figures that Sailed Away,” proceedings of the ISAW Roundtable Seminar Series; journal articles, book chapters, reviews, and reports in, among others, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Journal of Late Antiquity, The Study of Islamic Origins: New Perspectives and Contexts, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Harvard Theological Review, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, and Journal of Roman Studies.

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Pınar Kemerli

Prof. Kemerli teaches political theory, non-western political thought, and Middle East politics at Bard College. She completed her PhD in the Department of Government at Cornell University and holds a BA from Boğaziçi University in Turkey as well as MA degrees from Goldsmiths College of the University of London and Cornell University. Her interdisciplinary research addresses theories and practices of resistance, decolonization, violence/nonviolence, and religion and politics, and she offers courses on these topics. Prof. Kemerli is currently completing a book manuscript on war-resistance and conscientious objection in Turkey, and her articles and reviews have appeared in a range of journals including Political Theory, New Political Science, Radical Philosophy, Theory & Event, and International Journal of Middle East Studies.

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Shai Secunda

Shai Secunda is Jacob Neusner Professor in the History and Theology of Judaism at Bard College. He received a Bachelor’s degree from Ner Israel Rabbinical College, a Master’s from Johns Hopkins University, and an MA/PhD from Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Talmud in its Sasanian Context (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and The Talmud’s Red Fence: Menstruation and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and its Sasanian Context (Oxford University Press, 2020). His work uses philological analysis of the Talmud—the work which sits at the center of the classical Jewish canon—to reveal the rich cultural and religious worlds of late antique Babylonian Jewry and their neighbors in Sasanian Iran, especially the Zoroastrians. He has also published widely on Jewish studies scholarship and contemporary culture in the Jewish Review of Books, where he is a contributing editor. Before coming to Bard he taught at Yale and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At Bard since 2016.

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Heeryoon Shin

Heeryoon Shin specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of South Asia, with a particular focus on early modern and colonial India. Her research interests include sacred and urban space, cross-cultural encounters, and architectural historiography in early modern and colonial South Asia. Her current book project, tentatively titled Temples Between Empires: Architectural Encounters in Banaras, ca. 1750–1850, explores architectural revival and cross-cultural exchange during the transition between the Mughal and British empires through the lens of temple architecture in the Hindu pilgrimage city of Banaras. She is also developing a project on the global circulation of blue and white ceramics and their interaction with local production and use in South Asia. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Samsung Scholarship Foundation, and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Her work has been published in Artibus Asiae and Journal 18, a journal of 18th-century art and culture. Professor Shin also contributed a book chapter, “Chintz: Indian Textiles in English Bedrooms,” to The Eighteenth-Century Room (2020), and book and exhibition reviews to the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, a Bard Graduate Center publication. She previously served as Mellon Assistant Professor of Asian Art at Vanderbilt University; she also taught at Williams College and was a visiting lecturer at Colorado College.

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Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

Professor Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an anthropologist with research interests in infrastructure, waste, the environment, platform capitalism, the home, food, disability, and neurodivergence. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), won five major book awards and explores what happens when, as Palestinians are increasingly forced into proximity with their own wastes and with those of their occupiers, waste is transformed from “matter out of place,” per prevailing anthropological wisdom, into matter with no place to go—or its own ecology. Her current book, Unstuck: Airbnb as an Infrastructure of Detachment (under contract with Duke University Press), explores the joint world-making of austerity and home-sharing in Athens, Greece. She serves on the editorial teams of Cultural Anthropology and Critical AI. More on her scholarship and film-making can be found here: https://sophiastamatopoulourobbins.com. Education: Columbia University (BA), University of Oxford (Msc.), Columbia University (PhD).

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Ali M. Ugurlu