CCAS welcomes Dr. Tamim Al-Barghouti, Dr. Juan Romero, and Dr. Manal Jamal for the 2008-2009 academic year. Dr. Al-Barghouti, a Palestinian political scientist and poet, is a visiting professor, and will teach two courses: Comparative Politics of the Middle East and Islamic Political Thought. Dr. Juan Romero has been named the 2008-2009 Qatar Post-Doctoral Fellow, and will teach a graduate seminar in the fall entitled The Great Powers and the Middle East. In the spring, Dr. Romero will teach a seminar on the history of Iraq. Dr. Manal Jamal comes to CCAS as a visiting scholar from James Madison University, where she is an assistant professor of political science. Please see below for these scholars’ full bios.
Tamim Al-Barghouti
Tamim Al-Barghouti, born in Cairo in 1977, studied politics at Cairo University, the American University in Cairo, and Boston University, where he received his Ph.D. in political science in 2004. He has worked for the United Nations in various capacities, including involvement in its Division of Palestinian Rights as well as the Department of Political Affairs and its Mission in Sudan. In 2005 he was appointed an assistant professor of political science at the American University in Cairo. In 2007 Dr. Al-Barghouti became a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author of Benign Nationalism: State Building Under Occupation (The Egyptian National Library, 2007) and The Umma and the Dawla: Nation State and the Arab Middle East (Pluto Press, 2008).
Dr. Al-Barghouti has also published five poetry collections in Arabic. Through his poems—which express Palestinian concerns in both classical Arabic and the local dialect—as well as public performances and television appearances, he has become one of Palestine’s most celebrated contemporary poets.
Juan Romero
Juan Romero received his Master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Texas at Austin (UT) in 2001. His thesis was entitled “Emerging Military Alliances in the Middle East: Security or Pandora’s Box?” He received his doctoral degree in history from UT in 2008. His dissertation is entitled “The Iraqi Revolution of 1958 and the Search for Security in the Middle East.” Dr. Romero’s research interests focus on European imperialism and the Cold War in the Middle East.
Prior to his graduate studies, Dr. Romero traveled extensively, including to Egypt, and lived for many years in Russia, Taiwan, India, and Japan. His professional career includes working as a guide, translator, interpreter, and language and yoga instructor. He has studied Arabic in Egypt and meditation in Taiwan, India, and Japan.
Manal Jamal
Manal Jamal received her Ph.D. from McGill University in 2006, specializing in comparative politics of developing areas. She also holds a B.A. and an M.A. in international relations from the University of California, Davis, and San Francisco State University, respectively. Prior to joining the faculty of James Madison University Dr. Jamal was a Sultan Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, a research fellow at the Dubai School of Government, and a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Dubai Initiative at the Belfer Center.
Her research and teaching interests include democratization, war-to-peace transitions, and the politics of the Middle East, including the Arab-Israeli conflict. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Democracy Promotion in Troubled Times: the Limits of Western Donor Assistance to Civil Society, which examines the impact of donor assistance to civil society in the Palestinian territories and El Salvador. This manuscript draws from fieldwork for which the author was a winner of the best fieldwork award of the Comparative Democratization section of the American Political Science Association.