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MAAS Alumni: Spillman, Fischbach, DeLong-Bas, Berlekamp, Howes, Gaballa, Shereen, Hattar, Roch, Scharnweber, Abul-Magd, Boutz, Longley, Perrier, Mubarak, El Moustapha, de la Cruz, Tabet, Laidi, Naughton, Mohni, Somers, Al-Qatami, Bolz, Baskey, Eadeh, Slad
Published in 2004
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Kathleen Spillman (1985) moved to Philadelphia this summer to take a job as Associate Director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where she will focus on outreach.
Michael R. Fischbach’s (MAAS 1986, CCAS history fellow 1992) book, Records
of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Confl ict, received honorable mention in the first annual book award contest held by the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis.
Over the coming year, Natana DeLong-Bas (1993) will be teaching courses on Islamic Civilization and Islamic Institutions in the Theology department at Boston College and the Center for Near East and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University, respectively. Her book on Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad (Oxford Uniersity Press, 2004) was released in June and has been reviewed in The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe.
Persis Berlekamp (1994) writes: “As of January 2004 I have joined the University of Texas at Austin as Assistant Professor with a joint tenure track appointment in Art History and Middle Eastern Studies. My article “Painting as Persuasion: A Visual Defense of Alchemy in an Islamic Manuscript of the Mongol Period” came out in Muqarnas 20, 2003. I will be presenting the following talks this fall: 1) “Narrative Images in a Neoplatonic Frame: an Inju Arabic Qazwini manuscript dated 1322, and the transtition from Arab to Persian painting” at the upcoming Arab Painting conference to be held at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in September. 2) “Seeing Wonder in Everything” at the conference of the Society for Literature, Science and Art to be held in Durham, NC, in October 2004.”
Rachel Howes (1994) completed her PhD at UC Santa Barbara and is now teaching Islamic history at Cal State Northridge. Andy Ivaska (1995) fi nished his doctorate in African history at the University of Michigan and is on the faculty of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
Sherry Lowrance Gaballa (1995) is now teaching political science at the University of Georgia-Athens, after completing her PhD in government at the University of Texas-Austin.
Congratulations to CCAS’s own publications coordinator, Laila Shereen (1998), who has had three poems, “Give Voice”, “On Becoming Arab”, and Human Skin” published in the latest issue of Mizna (Vol. 6, Issue 1); see www. mizna.org.
Talal Hattar (1998), working on his PhD in political science at the University of Washington in Seattle, apologizes to his MAAS friends for “falling off the face of the earth.” In the past two years he has been busy dealing with personal developments and health issues including “short-term recall problems, making me into a caricature of an absent-minded professor (and without the benefi t of tenure).” Talal won a departmental teaching award for last year and a FLAS fellowship for the current year, during which he will be translating Arabic and not teaching, and he has lots of other news for those who contact him.
Taryn Roch (2001) this fall began a teaching fellowship in a two-year master’s in Urban Planning program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, following three years as Grant Specialist at the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation in New York.
Greta Scharnweber (2001) in June left her position with the Ford Foundation in New York to become PIER (Programs in International Educational Resources) Director for Middle East Studies at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies in New Haven. Her first project was a summer 2004 institute on Understanding Islamic Societies. For more information on it, see http://www.outreachworld.org/article.asp?articleid=70 She notes that Yale made great use of CCAS’s Community Resource Service materials as part of the workshop.
Georgetown History PhD candidate Zeinab Abul-Magd (2004) spent much of the summer working in Egypt and Tunisia as a research assistant for Dr. Stephen King of the Government Department, for his book on privatization in four Arab countries. In her spare time, she studied French, held meetings with Egyptain feminist activists in the field of Islamic law, volunteered with an Egyptian NGO for youth to support women’s small enterprises, and read some of the latest Arabic novels, including Amrikanly by Sun’ Allah Ibrahim – “an excellent source of knowledge for both history and politics.” In addition, the article she co-authored with Dr. Barbara Stowasser, on “Tahlil Marriage in Shari’a, Legal Codes, and the Contemporary Fatwa Literature,” came out this summer in the edited volume Islamic Law and the Challenges of Modernity (B. Stowasser and Y. Haddad, eds.).
Gary Boutz (2004) studied Iraqi dialect in a special course at Georgetown in June, and MSA in Fes, Morocco in July. He is beginning a PhD in Arabic at Georgetown and has been awarded a FLAS fellowship for 2004-05.
April Longley (2005) spent the summer in the Arab world: “I spent five weeks at the Yemen Language Center in Sana’a studying Arabic and doing preliminary research on Hizb al-Islah. After leaving Yemen, I went to Cairo for two weeks as a research assistant, along with Zeinab Abul-Magd (2004), for Dr. Stephen King.”
Aurelie Perrier (2005) spent the summer working as an intern with the French Center for the Study of Archaeology and Social Sciences (CEFAS: Centre Francais d’Etudes archeologiques et de Sciences Sociales) in Sana’a, Yemen. “I did translation work, organized an exhibit, and helped index the library among many other things; I also did some research of my own.”
Hadia Mubarak (2005) spent the summer in Jordan researching her MAAS thesis on the historic role of women in managing awqaf; she returned to assume the presidency of the National Muslim Student Association.
Yacoub El Moustapha (1982) recently informed us that he is now posted to the Embassy of Mauritania in London. For the previous two years, he was in Mauritania
serving as Director of International Cooperation at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation. He notes that oil production is expected to start in Mauritania in 2006.John Wetter (1983), senior country economist, West Bank and Gaza, the World Bank, was one of the participants in a workshop in Houston at Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy in early July. Titled “Disengagement and the Road Map: Getting from Here to There,” the workshop focused on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan, which, if properly shaped and managed, could lead back to direct Palestinian-Israeli negotiations and contribute to making the Road Map work and realizing the two-state vision. Some of the key preliminary recommendations, developed by participating Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians and representatives of the international community, deal with economic rehabilitation and development, security and third-party presence and monitoring. Participants will continue their deliberations under the aegis of the Baker Institute, and hope to finalize their recommendations and present them to policy-makers in the fall.
Isabel de la Cruz (1987) writes from Jerusalem, where she lives with her husband and son (7), and has been working as an Operations Support Officer (OSO) for UNRWA since December 2002. She is also working as a photographer/artisan in the ArtBox with fellow OSO Mahmuda Ali from Canada in a joint project incorporating contemporary Palestinian themes in art/photography, and is involved in the Olive Branch Workshops (Bethlehem/Boston) with her sister, Gracia McGovern. The latter project focuses on the production, marketing and sale of products and crafts rooted in Palestinian traditions, including modernized olive wood carvings, candles, ceramics, soaps, honey, olive oil and similar items.
Jenny Tabet (1991) has relocated to Lebanon, where she is the Human Resource Manager for Merck Sharp & Dohme Lebanon, handling regional responsibilities.
Adila Laidi (1992) was named in late 2003 as Chairperson of the Board of the newly founded, Cairo-based Arab cultural NGO, Al-Mawred Al Thaqafy (Cultural Resource). Aiming to promote the arts in Arab countries through support for emerging independent artists, the organization gathers in its membership many independent cultural operators and non-governmental arts organizations from the region. Adila, who has since 1996 directed the Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, Palestine, spent the summer in the Netherlands taking an arts management course (management of autonomous spaces) at the Amsterdam Maastricht Summer University.
Emma Naughton (1992) recently began working as Senior Program Officer in Peacebuilding/Reconstruction and Gender at the International Development Research Center in Ottawa (www.idrc.ca). As of January, she will be relocating for this position (with husband Jim and baby Tessa) to Cairo for two years.
After enjoying the Italian lifestyle in Lugano, Switzerland, as Research and Outreach Officer at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies for a year, Elke Kaschl Mohni (1996) is now working for the German Goethe Institute in their Trainee Program for Executives. She will be staying four months in headquarters in Germany, and go abroad at the beginning of January for six months as part of the trainee program, with her first full posting to come next summer.
Aryah Somers (1999) continues her work in Egypt with the Refugee Legal Aid Project and writes: “All is well here; I am still faring well in the battle with the streets of Cairo! My work is truly fantastic and I cannot imagine doing anything else right now. I hope to continue in this area of work (refugee and asylum law/human rights) when I return to the US sometime next year.”
In mid-August, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) announced the promotion of Laila Al-Qatami (2000) to the position of Communications Director. ADC President Mary Rose Oakar described Laila as “an invaluable part of the ADC team” and “enormously skillful.” Outgoing Communications Director Hussein Ibish added, “Laila Al-Qatami is exceptionally well-qualified for this position, and I know she will be a fantastic Communications Director. ... I am gratified to know that the organization’s all-important communications work will be in such good and capable hands.”
Scott Bolz (2000), Alistair Baskey (2001) and Julie Eadeh (2002) were sworn in to the Foreign Service by the Secretary of State in April. Scott will be spending the next few years in Kuwait. Julie is at the Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where she will focus on Saudi women’s organizations. Alistair will be on the Lebanon Desk at the State Department for a year, and then will go to Cairo for a two-year consular tour starting June 2005.
Frederik Sladden (2002) writes: “I am still in Brussels working in the Sumitomo Japanese bank as a Credit Analyst since October 2003. The job is very challenging, and I’ve been very busy, as I still need to learn a lot to catch up in the financial field. I still manage to touch a little bit of the Arab World by writing quarterly business reports on North African countries.”
Sophia Ansari (2003) has moved within the Department of State to the US National Commission for UNESCO in the Bureau of International Organizations.
Julia Voelker (2003) recently took a short leave from her position as assistant editor at the Middle East Journal, and traveled to Morocco with a team of four experts from International Foundation for Election Systems to conduct an assessment of the Moroccan electoral system. While there, she met with political leaders, civil society actors, and government officials. The trip was part of a project also underway in seven other Arab countries.
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