Faculty

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Ziad Dallal, Director

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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Dina Ramadan

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, 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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Shai Secunda

Shai Secunda received his bachelor's degree in Talmudic Literature, Ner Israel Rabbinical College; master's in Liberal Arts, Johns Hopkins University; and MA and PhD, Bernard Revel Graduate School, Yeshiva University; with additional studies at Hebrew University (Iranian and Talmudic studies) and Harvard University (Iranian studies). Dr. Secunda is a religious studies scholar who has taught at universities in Israel and the United States, including the Hebrew University and Yale University, where he was the Blaustein Postdoctoral Fellow. He previously served as a member of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and lecturer in the university’s comparative religion and Hebrew literature departments. His academic interests range from rabbinic and Middle Persian literature to classical Jewish history, the Babylonian Talmud in its Sasanian context, Zoroastrianism, and critical approaches to the study of religion, including gender and religion.

Professor Secunda is the author of The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context (2014) and The Talmud’s Red Fence: Menstruation and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and Its Sasanian Context (forthcoming with Oxford University Press); and editor of Shoshannat Yaakov: Jewish and Iranian Studies in Honor of Yaakov Elman (with Steven Fine, 2012) and Encounters by the Rivers of Babylon: Scholarly Conversations between Jews, Iranians, and Babylonians in Antiquity (with Uri Gabbay, 2014). His articles have appeared in the Association of Jewish Studies Review, Bulletin of the Asia Institute, Jewish Quarterly Review, Iranica Antiqua,  Jewish Studies Quarterly, and Studia Iranica , among other publications. He has also contributed book chapters to the Wiley-Blackwell History of Jews and Judaism, and Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism. Languages include Hebrew, Aramaic, and Persian. He is a member of the Association of Jewish Studies and the International Society of Iranian Studies. Professor Secunda has taught at Bard since 2016.

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Ibrahim Elhoudaiby

Professor Elhoudaiby, a political analyst and researcher, specializes in Islamic movements and democratization and political economies of the Middle East. In addition to his academic work he has served as a research fellow at FRIDE in Madrid; the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) in Berlin; and the House of Wisdom Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo. Recent publications include “The National Game: Genealogy of the Egyptian Football League,” in Football in the Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game (July 2022); “The Birth of the Investor: Shareholding, Modern Islamic Law, and the Rise of Islamic Finance,” in Islamic Law and Society (2022); and “Rights in Islamic Legal Works,” in The Islamic Tradition and the Human Rights Discourse (2018), among others. Honors and fellowships include Leibniz Institute for European History Dissertation Completion Fellowship and, at Columbia, a Teaching Scholars Fellowship; Heyman Center for Humanities Fellowship; and Margaret Abdel-Ahad Pennar Fellowship. He has taught courses covering subjects such as contemporary civilization; politics and society in the Middle East; and shariah and society.

BS, American University in Cairo; Diploma of Islamic Studies, High Institute of Islamic Studies, Cairo; MA, political science, American University in Cairo; MA, MPhil, Columbia University. At Bard since 2022.

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Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

Ph.D. Columbia University, 2015. Professor Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an anthropologist with research interests in infrastructure, waste, environment, platform capitalism, and the home. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), has 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, Controlled Alienation: Airbnb and the Future of Home (under contract with Duke University Press) explores the joint world-making of austerity and home-sharing in Greece. Other publications include pieces in Environment and Planning E, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Arab Studies Journal, The Jerusalem Quarterly, Anthropology News, Thresholds, and The New Centennial Review. Her film "Waste Underground" (with videographer Ali al-Deek) premiered at the Sharjah Biennial in Ramallah in 2017. She serves on the editorial teams of Cultural Anthropology and MERIP. Her research has been awarded funding by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, Columbia University and the Palestinian American Research Council. At Bard since 2013. More on her work can be found here: https://sophiastamatopoulourobbins.com/.

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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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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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Anne Hunnell Chen

Anne Hunnell Chen’s areas of research interest include Roman provincial art and archaeology, global antiquity, and intercultural exchange. She previously taught at Yale University, where she was a postdoctoral associate; Hofstra University; Brown University; and Columbia University, where she earned her PhD and served as a teaching fellow. Courses taught covered subjects such as Roman art and archaeology in global context, pre-Islamic empires of Iran; introduction to ancient Near Eastern history; palaces of ancient Rome; and women and families in the ancient Mediterranean. She is currently working on the manuscript Tetrarchic Art, Architecture, and Ideology between East and West (284–324 CE). Professor Chen is the recipient of numerous awards and grants from Yale, Hofstra, and Columbia universities, as well as a World Learning Organization Grant from the U.S. State Department and the Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Archaeological fieldwork includes excavations at the Roman palace of Emperor Galerius, at the Felix Romuliana UNESCO World Heritage Site in Serbia; and at the Romano-Iberian site of Iesso in Segarra Spain. Since 2015, she has overseen a digital documentation project cataloguing Roman archaeological sites throughout the Balkan region.

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Pınar Kemerli

Dr. Pınar Kemerli teaches political theory, comparative 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, and MA degrees from Goldsmiths College of the University of London and Cornell University. Professor Kemerli previously taught at New York University, Brown University, University of South Florida, and Washington & Lee University. Her interdisciplinary research addresses theories and practices of resistance, decolonization, violence/nonviolence, and religion and politics, and she offers courses on these topics. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Muslim Nonviolence in an Age of Islamism: War-resistance and Decolonization in Turkey. Her articles and reviews have appeared in a range of journals including International Journal of Middle East Studies, Theory & Event, Political Theory, and Radical Philosophy.

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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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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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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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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.