Recent MELC Graduate Student and Alumni Achievements

May 11, 2026

The MELC Department is pleased to announce the recent achievements of its graduate students and recent alumni

Graduate Students

  • S. Shiraz Ali has been elected Cluster Fellow at the Munich School of Philosophy and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oriental Institute at the Czech Academy of Sciences.  He co-edited Islamic Intellectual HIstory in Mughal India for Cambridge University Press, co-authored the volume's introduction, and authored the chapter, "Placing Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century South Asia."
  • Doaa Atamna will be a Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Bard College beginning in Fall 2026.
  • Daniyal Channa co-edited Islamic Intellectual HIstory in Mughal India and co-authored the volume's introduction.
  • Owen Cooksy presented a paper “Movable and Immovable Faith: Monumental Visions of the Kushan World,” for the Inner Asia Session at the 236th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Premodern Asia in Los Angeles. 
  • Beatrice De Faveri wrote an article for the blog “Demon Things”, a project focused on studying the liminal entities from ancient Egypt at the University of Chicago. On April 8, 2026 she also presented the preliminary results of her dissertation research at the international conference “Perceptions of health in the Nile Valley: The social and cultural dimension of healing practice in the Egyptian context from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (4th Millennium BCE – 16th Century CE)” jointly organized by the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale (IFAO) and the Research Centre in Cairo of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw (PCMA UW).
  • Evan Grennon received support from the American Institute for Indian Studies’ Junior Research Fellowship; the John L. Simpson Graduate Student Research Fellowship from UC Berkeley's Global, International & Area Studies Program; and the Yusuf Hamza Abduljawad Student Fellowship from the Center for Middle Eastern Studies' al-Falah Program.
  • Jessica Johnson has co-authored a forthcoming publication, “Revisiting Diversity: Interview Results of the 2021 Egyptology State of the Field Survey” in Interdisciplinary Egyptology.
  • Cosimo Ragone presented a poster "Healing as smAa-xrw: Justification through Health in the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife" at the conference “Perceptions of Health in the Nile Valley. The Social and Cultural Dimension of Healing Practice in the Egyptian Context from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (4th Millennium BCE – 15th Century CE)”, in Cairo. He also presented his paper "From Coffins to Code: Toward a Digital Corpus of Egyptian Coffin Inscriptions" at the international conference, "Ancient Egypt: New Technology 3" in Alexandria, Egypt.
  • Jason Silvestri was elected the Lady Wallis Budge Junior Research Fellow in Egyptology at Christ College at Cambridge, a four-year position intended to support early-career Egyptologists in their research.
  • Wihad al-Tawil received the Graduate Division's Summer Dissertation Writing Grant for Advanced Arts and Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences Students.
  • Marwan Tayyan published “On the Epistemic Status and Ontology of Assent in Post-Avicennian Logic” in the journal Oriens, the leading journal of philosophy in the Islamic World. 
  • Jordan Weitzel won the Amman Prize that will support four months of dissertation research at the American Center of Research in Amman, Jordan. He was also awarded the John L. Simpson Graduate Student Research Fellowship from UC Berkeley's Global, International & Area Studies Program.
  • Madeline Wyse will begin her appointment as Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Fall 2026.


Recent Alumni

  • Amin Ehteshami is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vienna and has produced several articles and co-edited volumes since his graduation.
  • Muhammad U. Faruque is the Taft Distinguished Professor at the University of Cincinnati. His book, Sculpting the Self, has won the Iran World Book Prize and significant additional accolades. He has also prolifically produced articles in leading journals of Islamic Studies.
  • Hassan Rezakhany is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge and the University of Freiburg. He has published several articles in leading journals of Islamic Studies, including Oriens and Arabic Sciences and Philosophy.