Lily Balloffet
Lily Balloffet is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Western Carolina University. Her work is on global migration, with particular focus on connections between the Middle East and Latin America. She is currently completing a book manuscript on networks of Syrian communities in Argentina in the 20th century, titled Argentina in the Global Arab Diaspora. From 2015 to 2016 she was the Postdoctoral Fellow at the Khayrallah Center, and she continues to serve as one of the editors for Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East & North African Migration Studies.
Beth Baron
Professor of history at the City University of New York, Beth Baron edited the International Journal of Middle East Studies from 2009-2014 and is currently president of the Middle East Studies Association. Her most recent book, The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, appeared with Stanford University Press in 2014. She also authored Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (University of California Press, 2005) and The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (Yale University Press, 1994). She directs the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at the CUNY Graduate Center and is working on a book project on the history of sexual reproductive health in Egypt.
Anna Reumert
Anna is a PhD student in Anthropology at Columbia University, where she works on African migrant labor and racism in Lebanon and Syria. Born in Copenhagen, Anna has lived, studied and worked in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine for years, and has studied different formations of migrant and refugee life there. In 2015, she conducted fieldwork among Syrian refugees in Lebanon for her Master’s degree in Near Eastern Studies at NYU, where she graduated from in 2015.
Renee Ragin
Renee Michelle Ragin is a PhD candidate in Literature at Duke University. Her dissertation research analyzes efforts by the Lebanese state and civil society to negotiate a post-civil war national identity. Prior to Duke, Renee was a Foreign Service Officer with the US Department of State, serving in Washington, DC and Saudi Arabia. She obtained her undergraduate degree in History and Literature from Harvard in 2010.
Ann-Christin Wagner
Ann-Christin Wagner is a PhD candidate in International Development at the University of Edinburgh, and associated with IFPO’s branch in Amman, Jordan. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked as research officer with the IOM in Geneva. In 2016, she conducted one year of ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian refugees in Jordan, investigating the relationship between “waiting”, forced migration and other forms of mobility.
Harry Kashdan
Harry Kashdan is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation, “Eating Elsewhere: Food and Migration in the Contemporary Mediterranean,” examines the multiple uses of food in migration narratives across the Mediterranean zone. In his research, he brings food studies into conversation with literary analysis, and argues for the continued utility of a Mediterranean perspective in the contemporary period.
Stacy Farenthold
Stacy D. Farenthold is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Fresno. She is currently completing her first book on Syrian and Lebanese migrant politics during the First World War, called Between the Ottomans and the Entente: WWI in the Syrian Diaspora. She has authored numerous articles on Arab diasporic nationalisms, migrant smuggling, and repatriation and is starting a new project on Syrian textile workers and labor politics in the Arab Atlantic.
Sofiane Bouhdiba
Sofiane Bouhdiba is a Tunisian demographer. He holds a PhD in demography from the University of Tunis. He is a professor of demography at the University of Tunis; he specialized in mortality and morbidity. He is also a consultant with the United Nations Agencies, and especially with UNFPA, WHO and UNAIDS. He has written several articles and books on the history of epidemics.
Chris Rominger
Chris Rominger is a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center where he studies migration and political consciousness in the Middle East and North Africa during the early 20th century. His dissertation focuses on the political transformation of Tunisian conscripts, political exiles, and religious minorities who crossed the Mediterranean during and following the First World War. Rominger is currently an American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) Fellow and has recently received grants from the Swiss Embassy of the United States and the Societe des Professeurs Francais et Francophones d’Amerique.
Chris Gratien
Chris Gratien is Assistant Professor of History at University of Virginia and currently an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His research studies the social and environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East. His in-progress book manuscript provisionally titled “The Mountains are Ours: the Environmental History of a Late Ottoman Frontier” examines the transformation of the Cilicia/Cukurova region of Southern Anatolia between 1856 and 1956. Chris is also co-creator and producer of Ottoman History podcast, an internet radio program that since 2011 has featured over 200 researchers and scholars of the Ottoman Empire, Middle East and the Islamicate world.
Lauren Banko
Dr. Lauren Banko is currently a post-doctoral research fellow in Israel/Palestine Studies at the University of Manchester’s Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies Department. She completed her PhD in History (Near and Middle East) at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her monograph was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2016 and is titles The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918-1947. Her current research interests include citizenship and nationality in Mandate Palestine, Palestinian Arab emigration during the interwar period, transnational movement in the Middle East, among others. Lauren is currently working on a project on subversion of borders, frontiers, and identity by migrants, travelers, and displaced persons in late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine.
Rasha Chatta
Rasha Chatta recently completed her doctorate degree at SOAS, University of London with a thesis titled “Marginality and Individuation: A Theoretical Approach to Abla Farhoud and Arab Migrant Literature”. At SOAS, she has lectured on Arab cinema and Arab women’s literature. Rasha is currently working on a post-doc project on migration, war, and memory in the Arab graphic world.
Ilana Feldman
Ilana Feldman is a Professor of Anthropology, History and International Affairs at George Washington University. She is the author of Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-67 (Duke University Press, 2008) and Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule (Stanford University Press, 2015); and co-editor (with Miriam Ticktin) of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Duke University Press, 2010). Her current book project, Life Lived in Relief: Palestinian Refugee Experiences with Humanitarianism, explores the Palestinian humanitarian condition in the years since 1948.
Gerasimos Tsourapas
Gerasimos Tsourapas is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Middle East Politics at the Univeresity of Birmingham. His research interests include the determinants of authoritarian durability, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa context; emigration and diaspora politics, particularly in the Global South; and the interplay between population mobility and international relations, particularly with regard to forced migration and refugee politics. He was previously Senior Teaching Fellow in International Relations at SOAS, University of London and a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies as the American University of Cairo.
Kelsey Norman
Kelsey Norman is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine where she will finish her PhD in 2017. Her research focuses on Middle East and North African states as countries of migrant and refugee settlement and her dissertation is titled “Degrees of Ambivalence: Variation in New Host State Migrant Engagement Strategies in Egypt, Morocco and Turkey.” Her studies have been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Outreach Council, the Project on Middle East Political Science, the Kugelman Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, and the Center for Research on Immigration, Population and Public Policy. Her work has been published by the International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, The Journal of Middle East and Africa, Refugee Review, Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, The Postcolonialist, Jadaliyya, Muftah, and the Monkey Cage blog for The Washington Post.
Benjamin White
Benjamin Thomas White teaches history at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, where is also a member of the Glasgow Refugee, Asylum, and Migration Network (GRAMNet). A Middle East historian by background, he now teaches the history of refugees in the world since the late nineteenth century, and is doing research on the global history of the refugee camp. Dr. White’s first book, The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: the Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2011. His article ‘Refugees and the definition of Syria, 1920-1939’ will be published by Past and Present in May 2017. He blogs (occasionally) at http://singularthings.wordpress.com/.
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a PhD candidate in Modern Middle Eastern and Ottoman History at Stanford University. His work focuses on refugee migration in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea regions prior to World War I. Vladimir’s dissertation examines the political economy of resettlement of North Caucasus muhajirs in the Ottoman Empire and the refugees’ construction of space. For this project, Vladimir conducted archival research in Turkey, Jordan, Bulgaria, Georgia, Azerbaijan, the United Kingdom, and Russia.
Reem Bailony
Reem Bailony is the American Druze Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Her book manuscript, Transnational Rebellion: The Syrian Revolt of 1925-1927, uncovers the critical role Syrian-Lebanese migrants played in defining and shaping the anticolonial rebellion. Her article, “Transnationalism and the Syrian Migrant Public: The Case of the 1925 Syrian Revolt,” appears in the inaugural issue of Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East Migration Studies (Spring 2013). She received her doctorate in history from the University of California, Los Angeles and has taught courses on the modern Middle East at Smith College and Mount Holyoke College.
Laura Robson
Laura Robson is Associate Professor of modern Middle Eastern history at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. Her most recent book, States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (University of California, 2017) explores the history of forced migration, population exchanges, and refugee resettlement in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine during the interwar period. She is also the author of Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine and editor of the collected volume Minorities and the Modern Arab World: New Perspectives.
David Gutman
David Gutman is Assistant Professor of History at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York. His work touches on broader themes of human smuggling, migration control, sovereignty, and citizenship; and he is the author of several journal articles and book chapters related to these themes. He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Armenian Sojourners and the Ottoman State: Mobility, Sovereignty, and Citizenship in the Age of Global Migration.
Rebecca Gould
Rebecca Gould is the author of Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016), After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016, a translation from the Persian) and The Prose of the Mountains: Tales of the Caucasus by Aleksandre Qazbegi (Central European University Press, 2015, a translation from the Georgian). Her current project has received funding from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and is called Narrating Catastrophe: Forced Migration in the Caucasus from Colonialism to Postcoloniality.
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