Adjunct Assistant Professor of Arabic & Islamic Studies
Azza Ahmad is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies. Since joining the UC Berkeley faculty in 2020, Professor Ahmad has introduced a number of new courses to both graduate and undergraduate students centered on the interpretation and linguistics of historical and traditional Islamic texts. Professor Ahmad’s research interests are at the intersection of Islamic studies, language pedagogy, and linguistics. Throughout her courses, pedagogical techniques of language teaching (the subject of Professor Ahmad’s Ph.D. research) are often...
Wali Ahmadi, a native of Kabul, Afghanistan, came to the United States after graduating from high school in 1982. He received his B.A. in Political and Social sciences from California State University, Hayward (now East Bay) in 1987. In spring 1997, he was awarded a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. From 1997-2000 he taught at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. Since 2000, he has been teaching Persian literature in the Near Eastern Studies Department at UC Berkeley.
Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures
Asad Q. Ahmed is Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Affiliate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, and the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.A. in 2000 from Yale University, majoring from the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Literature. He was awarded a Ph.D. in 2007 from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University.
Professor Ahmed specializes in early Islamic social history and pre-...
Associate Professor, Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Iranian Studies
I'm currently an Associate Professor, and holder of the Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Iranian Studies, in MELC. Before coming to UC Berkeley, I worked in Germany at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
My research investigates a wide variety of textual and audio sources through the lenses of material philology, sociolinguistics, and archive studies. Although my training was largely in philology and dialectology, I’ve developed interests in a number of other fields and methodologies, including sociolinguistics, codicology,...
Assistant Professor of Ancient Mediterranean & Ethiopic Studies
Yonatan Binyam is Assistant Professor of Ancient Mediterranean and Ethiopic Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. Before coming to Berkeley, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He earned his Ph.D. from Florida State University, where he wrote his dissertation on the receptions of Josephus’s Jewish War within late-antique Latin and medieval Hebrew, Copto-Arabic, and Ge’ez (or Ethiopic) historiographical traditions. In addition to the receptions of ancient Greek and Latin works within medieval Ethiopic literature, his...
Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed is Assistant Professor of Islamic Thought in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. Her research focuses on the continued life of Islamic philosophy as it was absorbed and transformed in Islamic theology and mysticism through both the Arabic and Persian textual traditions. She earned her BA from Yale University in 2010, where she majored in Religious Studies, and her Master’s of Arts in Religion (MAR) from Yale Divinity School in 2012 with a concentration in Philosophy of Religion. In 2018, she completed her doctorate in Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago...
Associate Professor of Egyptology, Class of 1939 Chair in Undergraduate Education
Rita Lucarelli is an Associate Professor of of Egyptology and Class of 1939 Chair in Undergraduate Education in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture. She is also the Faculty Curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and a Fellow of the Digital Humanities at UC Berkeley. She is presently working at a project creating 3D models of ancient Egyptian coffins, the Book of the Dead in 3D. She is also completing a new monograph on demonology in ancient Egypt entitled Agents of Punishment...
Maria Mavroudi is a Professor of History and Classics. She is a Byzantinist, whose research focuses on the relations between Byzantium and the Arabs, especially bilingualism in Greek and Arabic in the Middle Ages and its implications for cultural exchange between the Byzantine and Islamic world, including the development of Byzantine and Islamic science. Mavroudi earned her B.A. in Philology from the University of Thessaloniki and her Ph.D. in Byzantine Studies at Harvard University. Mavroudi is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2004-2009).
Christine Philliou is Professor of History and MELC Department Chair.
She specializes in the connected histories of the Balkans and Middle East since the 17th century, focusing particularly on the emergence of the Greek and Turkish nation-states out of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has worked, and is interested more broadly in comparative empires and in interfaces between cultures and histories in Europe and the Middle East. Her books, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (2011), and ...
Benjamin W. Porter is an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology. An archaeologist and anthropologist, Porter studies the Bronze and Iron Age societies of the Middle East and Mediterranean, with a particular focus on the Levant. Porter conducts field archaeological research in Jordan at the Iron Age capital settlements of Dhiban and Busayra. A full list of Porter’s publications can be read here.
Professor Porter does not accept media requests nor signs or endorses petitions and statements, including those...
