The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Levant Foundation are pleased to feature the 2013-2014 Jamal Daniel post-doctoral fellowship and scholarship recipients. In 2011, The Levant Foundation established the Jamal Daniel Fund for the Study of the Levant at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. The program supports students and scholars in their studies of the Levant Region (its culture, history, society, religion and current political context), and it provides a platform for policymakers to discuss issues as they pertain to the Levant Region.
The Levant Foundation
With increasing global focus on the developments in the Levant, scholars and fellows such as Dr. Anderson, Dr. Baumann, Mr. Cuyler, Ms. Harvey, and Mr. Hendrix are playing a critical role on enhancing the understanding of the Levant region and Levantine identity, said Mr. Daniel.
The recipients for this year’s post-doctoral fellows include:
Dr. Charles Anderson
Trained at New York University in the joint Ph.D. program in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Dr. Charles Anderson has taught at NYU, Rutgers University, and Bard College. His research and teaching have focused on imperialism and colonialism, nationalism and anti-colonialism, political economy and capitalist transformation, social movements, youth, peasants and peasant politics, the history of Palestine/Israel (especially the British Mandate period), U.S. foreign policy, neoliberalism, and neoconservatism. During his year at Georgetown, Anderson will be revising his dissertation, a history from below of the Great Revolt in Palestine (1936-39) and its social roots, into a book manuscript. The project narrates the emergence of mass politics among the Palestinians after 1929 and examines the political practices, organizing, self-understanding, and leadership capacities of youth, peasants, and workers throughout the ensuing decade. Anderson’s current research concerns territorial partition as a model for solving the Palestine problem. Specifically, it seeks to explore U.S. government interest in partition, the invisibility of the Palestinian Arabs and their national struggle within the U.S., and Palestinian responses to the advancing Americanization of the Palestine question from the Peel Commission (1936-37) through the 1948 war. He has a brief article forthcoming on youth as a socio-political category in the Review of Middle East Studies and reviews published or forthcoming in the Arab Studies Journal and International Journal of Middle East Studies. He is also a member of the editorial team of the Arab Studies Journal.
Dr. Hannes Baumann
Dr. Hannes Baumann’s main research interests are in the political economy of development and the politics of ethnicity and nationalism. He is currently composing a book manuscript with the working title ”Citizen Hariri: Conflict and reconstruction in Lebanon.” It is based on his PhD thesis, which he completed at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. In this political biography of Rafiq Hariri (1944-2005), the businessman’s rise to political office is placed within the specific historical sociology of Lebanon: the production and reproduction of classes, elites, and the culture of sectarianism. By doing this, Baumann explains the failure to produce sustained economic growth in post-civil war Lebanon, the reproduction of sectarianism by Hariri’s philanthropy, and the return to political crisis in a turbulent regional environment after 2000. Baumann has contributed chapters to two edited volumes: Franck Mermier and Sabrina Mervin’s Leaders et partisans au Liban and a volume edited by Are Knudsen and Michael Kerr with the title Lebanon: After the Cedar Revolution. He is also a features editor for the journal Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. He has previously worked at SOAS, King’s College London, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). At CCAS, he is using his research background to teach a course on business and politics in the Arab world.
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Jamal Daniel scholarship recipients are receiving scholarship and stipend support as well as serving as research assistants to professors whose disciplines are related to the students’ own research interests. The recipients of this year’s scholarship include:
Zachary Cuyler
Zachary Cuyler is originally from Houston, Texas. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a major in History and a minor in Arabic, honors in History and Liberal Arts, and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He studied Arabic for one semester in Amman, Jordan, and one year with the Arabic Flagship program in Alexandria, Egypt, and is now studying Farsi. Cuyler is currently Circulation Manager for the Arab Studies Journal, worked as a research assistant for the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and was an instructional assistant for a first-year Arabic course with the University of Texas Arabic Summer Institute. He is currently interested in Levantine and Iranian political history, and in transnational approaches to historical writing. Cuyler is writing a thesis on the impact of the TAPLINE oil pipeline on Syrian and Lebanese politics in the 1950s, and he performed archival research for this project in Beirut in the summer of 2013.
Sarah Harvey
Originally from South Carolina, Sarah Harvey focused on the Middle East while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Political Science at the College of Charleston’s Honors College. During her sophomore year, Harvey was awarded a Fellowship to intern full-time in Washington, D.C. for then Democratic House Whip Jim Clyburn. Later, she studied in the West Bank (her first trip to the Middle East) at Birzeit University’s Palestine and Arab Studies Program. After graduating in 2008, she worked on Capitol Hill for U.S. Congressman Jerry McNerney until she found a way to return to the Middle East. After interning in Beirut for several months, Harvey was hired as a Program Assistant to the State Department’s Access Microscholarship Program, which is administered by AMIDEAST. In August 2010, she moved to the Kurdish region of Iraq to become an English teacher at a public primary school in Erbil. While there, she met and married her husband Nabil, a native of Baghdad. Since beginning the Master of Arts in Arab Studies (MAAS) program at Georgetown in the fall of 2012, Harvey has focused on the politics and history of Syrian and Iraq, including refugee and minority issues. She worked for several months in the spring of 2013 as an intern for the Washington, D.C. office of UNHCR. For the remainder of her tenure in the MAAS program, Harvey will continue to research political themes relevant to the Levant, particularly the impact of the refugee crisis, Palestinian refugees in Syria, and comparisons between Iraq and Syria.
Michael Hendrix
Michael Hendrix graduated from the University of Chicago with honors in political science. In addition to studying abroad in Jerusalem and Morocco, he was awarded a Boren Scholarship to study in Jordan, where he also taught English and volunteered at the International Youth Foundation. Hendrix has interned at the British-Consulate General in Chicago, The Wilson Quarterly, and the Aspen Institute’s Middle East Group. He is currently working as an intern at IREX contributing to the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre. Hendrix’s research interests include issues of development, political economy, and economic discourses in the Levant.