Faculty
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Lucia Volk is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology. She obtained her PhD in Middle Eastern Studies and Anthropology from Harvard University in 2001. She also holds an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Her ongoing research in Lebanon focuses on the memory of violent events in Lebanon. In particular, Prof. Volk studies the role of public memorials and martyrs cemeteries to argue that memories of sacrifice of both Muslim and Christian Lebanese are at the core of national imaginings. more >> |
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Nicole Watts is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Political Science, where she teaches on comparative politics, Middle East politics, and social movements. Her research interests include ethnopolitical and national movements, state-society relations, the politics of human rights, and Kurdish politics and mobilization, particularly in Turkey. She is a graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London (1992) and the University of Washington in Seattle (2001). more >> |
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Mitra Ara is the Founding Director of The Persian Cultural Heritage Studies Initiative in the College of Humanities at San Francisco State University. Dr. Ara received her B.A. in Religious Studies, her M.A. in South Asian studies, and her Ph.D. in Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley, with a concentration on the religions and languages of South and Southwest Asia. Currently, she lectures at SFSU in the Departments of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and Jewish Studies, where she teaches Persian language and culture in addition to the world religions, including Zoroastrianism. more >> |
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Fred Astren is Professor and Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. He received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993. He holds a B.E.S. degree from the University of Minnesota with specialization in medieval history and an M.A. in Arabic from UC Berkeley. Areas of research include minority/sectarian history and sacred history in the Mediterranean Middle Ages, with special focus on Jewish history under Islam, Jewish-Muslim relations, and the Karaite Jewish sect. more >> |
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Mohammad Azadpur is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. In his work, he aims to develop and articulate post-analytic, post-colonial, and cosmopolitan forms of rationalism and humanism. Alongside Islamic philosophers (especially Alfarabi and Avicenna) and their modern critics (e.g., Corbin and Nasr), he draws from and respond to early Heidegger, later Foucault, new Wittgenstein, Kant and Hegel on the sublime, and McDowell. more >> |
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Maziar Behrooz is an Associate Professor in the History Department. He received his PhD in History from University of California, Los Angleles. His areas of expertise include the Middle East, Islamic history, an Iran in the 19th century. more >> |
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Carel Bertram is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities. She was trained in Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley (M.A.) and in Art and Architectural History at UCLA (Ph.D.) Her field is urban history and historical consciousness in the Islamic world. She teaches classes on Istanbul and Jerusalem as well as on San Francisco. Other cities of interest: Sarajevo (Bosnia), Damascus (Syria), Amasya and Safranbolu(Turkey) and Vienna (Austria). Dr. Bertram is currently working on a study-abroad project to give SFSU students an opportunity to study Turkish history through field work in an in-tact Ottoman town in Anatolia. more >> |
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Chris Chekuri is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at San Francisco State University. He received his PhD from the Unversity of Madison, Wisconsin. His area of expertise is South Asia. more >> |
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Burcu Akan Ellis is an Assistant Professor of international relations. She teaches courses in transnational relations of Muslim societies and core courses in international relations. Ph.D in international relations from American University. Her research interests include identity formation within the Muslim communities of the Balkans, and gender and transnationalism among young Turkish elite. more >> |
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Dina Ibrahim is an Assistant Professor in the Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts department at San Francisco State University, where she teaches Radio and Television News Production courses. She is also a co-producer of the radio show Arab Talk on KPOO 89.5 FM in San Francisco. She has reported for the BBC World Service Radio in London, CNN in Atlanta and Cairo, NPR in Austin, Texas, UPI in Cairo and Arab News newspaper in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Her research interests are in the area of American television news representation of Arabs and Muslims. more >> |
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Santhi Kavuri-Bauer is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department. She received her PhD in Art from University of California, Los Angeles. Her scholarly research focuses on the preservation and representation of South Asian architectural monuments, and the implications of these activities on the construction of social identities, national memory, and political protest. More broadly, her research focuses on issues of artistic agency, the intersection of modernist aesthetics in the colonial and postcolonial world, and the visual culture of contemporary Asia. more >> |
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Shirin A. Khanmohamadi (B.A. Brown, 1991; Ph.D. Columbia, 2005) is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative and World Literature department at San Francisco State University, where she specializes in comparative medieval European literature, premodern travel and ethnographic writing, cross-cultural and confessional representation within medieval literature, and literary cross-fertilization between the medieval European and Islamic worlds. She spent the 2007-2008 academic year on a Presidential fellowship leave researching her book, 'In Light of Another´s Word': the Multi-voiced Ethnography of Medieval Europe. more >> |
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Hafez Modirzadeh is an Associate Professor of Music and co-director of the Jazz and World Music Studies. Dr. Modirzadeh received an M.A. from UCLA (’86) and a PhD from Wesleyan (’92), both in ethnomusicology, and continues to develop an interdisciplinary musical approach he calls “Chromodal Discourse”. He has focused on integrative directions for the practice and education of jazz and world music. On both international and local fronts, he is active in the realms of performing, teaching, recording, publishing, and presenting cross-cultural perspectives regarding musical culture, tradition and innovation, and individual representations thereof. more >> |
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Mahmood Monshipouri is a faculty member of the Department of International Relations at San Francisco State University. He received his Ph.D. from University of Georgia in 1987. He has taught at the University of Georgia, Central Michigan University, Alma College, Quinnipiac University, Redlands University, and California State University at San Marcos. During 2003-2006, he served as a Visiting Fellow at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies—Yale University. more >> |
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Mohammad Salama is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the Arabic Program at San Francisco State University. He received his doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin- Madison, with a minor in film (2005). He also holds an M.A. in English Literature from the ‘Ayn Shams University- Egypt. His main areas of research are intellectual history and theories of Modernity, with an emphasis on comparative literary, social and cultural trends in colonial and post-colonial Europe and the Middle East. more >> |
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Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities Department. He specializes in medieval South India, (especially Kannada literature and cinema) and the cultural politics of contemporary South Asia. His primary intellectual interest is in the history of dissent and dissenting cultures, particularly pre-modern critiques of Indian society and their continuing relevance in the cultural politics of modern South Asia. more >> |
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