Advisory Board

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The role of the advisory board is to invite new Members, offer direction from the various disciplines and fields, and moderate the site for inappropriate behavior.
Osama Abi-Mershed, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University. His research interests include colonial Algeria, colonial education, modern France, and Franco-Maghribi relations. He teaches courses on the history of North Africa and the Western Mediterranean (medieval and modern); of Muslim Spain; of the Muslim and Arab worlds; and of the modern Middle East.
current location
Washington, D.C.
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Brenda E. Bickett is the Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies Bibliographer at Georgetown University Library. Educated at the University of Texas-Austin & the University of Michigan, where she earned master’s degrees in Middle Eastern Studies and Library/Information Science, her languages include Arabic, French, Italian, Persian and Turkish and she has traveled /studied/worked in Egypt, France, Sultanate of Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Her research interests are all over the maps of the region, by discipline and geography. She is active in the Middle East Librarians and the Middle East Studies associations where she has worked on digital initiatives for preservation and creation of new media.
current location
Washington, D.C.
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Shahid Buttar is a civil rights lawyer, hip-hop MC, independent columnist, grassroots community organizer, singer and poet. Professionally, he assumed leadership of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee as Executive Director in May 2009. He also resistance at the 2005 Counter-Inaugural and the 2004 Republican National Convention— where Democracy Now! named one of his public addresses among "The Best of 2004." Shahid graduated in 2003 from Stanford Law School.  As a musician, Shahid has performed around the world for audiences as large as 50,000. His debut CD, Get Outta Your Chair, was released in 2008 and features music from the funk, blues, hip-hop, house, drum 'n bass, and South Asian fusion traditions, including Bumpin’ in My SUV and the Baghdad Blues.  He also writes a column on politics and constitutional law on Huffington Post.
current location
Washington, D.C.
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Carol N. Fadda- Conrey is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University. Her research and teaching interests include the study of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, war, trauma, and transnational identities in Arab and Arab-American literary texts. Her essays on Middle Eastern and Arab American literature have appeared in Studies in the Humanities, MELUS, and Al- Raida, as well as in the edited collections Arabs in America: Interdisciplinary Essays on the Arab Diaspora (2006) and Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity through Writing (2007).
current location
Syracuse, New York
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Nihad Dukhan was born in Gaza, Palestine, and is currently an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Detroit Mercy. His interest in Arabic calligraphy began when he was in the sixth grade. His modern designs are highly stylized, but remain legible with tremendous simplicity. Dukhan started pursuing, and refining his form of the art around 1989. His work has been exhibited in major US cities, and sold in the US, Europe, the Middle East and Japan. His commissioned designs include wedding invitations, book covers, CD jackets, company logos and others. Dukhan is active in promoting Arabic calligraphy and increasing people’s awareness of it through exhibits, lectures and workshops. His intent is not only to attract the Arabic speaking audience, but to cross barriers and touch other languages and cultures. He invites you to his web site at www.ndukhan.com.
current location
Detroit, Michigan
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Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East Studies Program at George Mason University and Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal, a peer-reviewed research publication, co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of a film series on “Arabs and Terrorism”. He is currently working on his book on Syria’s political economy, provisionally titled “The Political Economy of Regime Security: State-Business Networks in Syria.” Bassam recently directed a new film series on Arab/Muslim immigrants in Europe, titled The “Other” Threat. He also serves on the Editorial Committee of Middle East Report.
current location
Washington, D.C.
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Steven Keller has served since January 2006 as country director in the West Bank and Gaza for America-Mideast Educational and Training Services (AMIDEAST), a private, nonprofit organization that strengthens mutual understanding and cooperation between Americans and the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa. Prior to his current post, Steven worked at AMIDEAST's headquarters for more than three years heading up the organization's new business and program development. His interest in and focus on education and development in the Arab World began in Tunisia, where he served during the early nineties as a volunteer in the United States Peace Corps. His experience also includes working as an independent contractor for USAID in Washington, DC as well as a year-long graduate internship at the Galilee Society − The Arab National Society for Health Research and Services − which strives to achieve equitable health, environmental and socio-economic conditions for Palestinian Arabs in Israel. Steven holds a Master's degree from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, part of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, as well as a Bachelor's degree from the College of Architecture and Urban Studies at Virginia Tech. He currently lives on the West Bank in Ramallah, Palestine. 
current location
Ramallah, Palestine
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Laurie King holds a PhD in social anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Indiana University Bloomington. She has done anthropological field research among Palestinian citizens of Isarel, and in post-war Beirut. King is currently managing editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, the quarterly journal of the Institute of Palestine Studies (published by the University of California Press), and was editor in chief of Middle East Report (MERIP) from 1998-2000. King is co-founder of the Electronic Intifada, Electronic Iraq, and Electronic Lebanon. She is also currently an adjunct faculty member in the
Master of Arts in Arab Studies Program at Georgetown University.
current location
Washington, D.C.

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Kathryn M. Coughlin is President of the Global Research Group, a non-profit organization that produces scholarly research on and engages in public diplomacy in the wider Islamic world. She completed her doctoral exams (with distinction) in Islamic History at Georgetown University specializing in Islamic law, but abandoned her dissertation for active public service. Ms. Coughlin has taught, lectured and/or delivered papers in the Middle East, North America, Europe and Asia on a wide range of subjects including religion and gender; Islamic law; religion and modernity; and US foreign policy and the Middle East. Ms. Coughlin’s research has been supported by American and international foundations including the U.S. Social Science Research Council and the Arbeitskreis Moderne Und Islam (Germany). Her publications include a reference work on Muslim cultures in sixteen countries (Muslim Cultures Today: A Reference Guide, Greenwood Press, 2006), a biographical dictionary on post-Saddam Iraq (forthcoming late 2009). On sabbatical from GRG in 2008-2009, Ms. Coughlin is a Research Fellow with the Islam in the West Program at Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies.
current location
Boston, Massachusetts
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Lynn Maalouf manages the Lebanon program of the International Center for Transitional Justice, a New-York based human rights ngo, focusing on such issues as the missing and enforced disappearances, political initiatives dealing with postwar reconciliation, and archiving. She is the Beirut correspondent for the English-language service of Radio France Internationale and was formerly a correspondent for The Washington Post. She is a board member and contributor to the Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World’s publication Al Raida, affiliated with the Lebanese American University. Prior to that, she was editor of the English-language website of the pan-Arab publication Al Hayat between 2002 and 2004, and then became correspondent of Radio France Internationale, covering the assassination of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri and the ensuing political developments until 2006. She has written a script for a short film that is currently in production, and co-written a script for a feature film, selected at the Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab in November 2006.
current location
Beirut, Lebanon
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Marcy Newman joined the faculty of Al Najeh University in Nablus, Palestine in the fall of 2008. She has taught at Boise State University, American University of Beirut, the University of Jordan, and Al Quds University. She is a scholar, teacher and activist invested in human rights. She is especially committed to al awda, the right of return for Palestinian refugees under UN Resolution 194. She teaches comparative American/Middle East literature courses. She is the editor of Jessie Redmon Fauset's The Chinaberry Tree & Selected Writings, The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women and the author of Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison: Transforming Breast Cancer Stories into Action.
current location
Nablus, Palestine
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Sherene Seikaly is Assistant Professor of History at the American University in Cairo and Fellow at the Europe in the Middle East-Middle East in Europe Program at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2008-2009). She is Co-Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and is presently working on her manuscript, “Meatless Days: Consumption and Capitalism in Wartime Palestine 1939-1948.” Situated at the intersections of studies of consumption, political economy, and colonialism, her research traces the formation of a Palestinian Arab middle class before the defining rupture of 1948. Seikaly’s interests range from social and cultural history of daily practices to the trajectories of colonial and post-colonial development. Seikaly has taught courses on the history of the modern Middle East, and the Arab-Israeli conflict, and has developed graduate seminars that wed material and cultural approaches to the history of the modern Middle East.
current location
Berlin, Germany