Faculty
The following is a partial list of current MAMES instructors:
Meir Litvak
Research: Modern Iranian and Shi'i history; Palestinian politics and Arab discourses.
Meir Litvak (Ph.D., Harvard 1991). Head of MA in Middle Eastern Studies Program at Tel Aviv University International; Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern History, Director of the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University. Author of Shi`i Scholars of Nineteenth Century Iraq: The `Ulama’ of Najaf and Karbala’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Co-author with Moshe Aharonov, Iran: From a Persian Empire to an Islamic Revolution (Ra'anana: Open University of Israel, 2014, in Hebrew).
His most recent book, coauthored with Esther Webman, From Empathy to Denial: Arabic Responses to the Holocaust (London: Hurst Publishers Co and New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) won the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy Book Award for 2010.
He has also edited eight books and published articles on modern Shi`i and Iranian history as well as on Islamist movements and Palestinian nationalism.
Miri Shefer-Mossensohn
Research: Early modern Ottoman Empire; Islamic medicine, health and illness; Muslim environmental history.
Miri Shefer-Mossensohn is an Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern & African History at Tel Aviv University, and heads Zvi Yazetz School of Historical Studies in the same institution. She is a historian of the Ottoman Empire, focusing on medicine, health and wellbeing in the Arabic- and Turkish regions of the Middle East. Her academic monographs include Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions 1500-1700 (State University of New York Press, 2009; Turkish edition in 2014) and Science among the Ottomans: The Cultural Creation and Exchange of Knowledge (the University of Texas Press, 2015; Turkish and Arabic editions in 2018). She also published one textbook in Hebrew (Science & Technology in the Ottoman Empire, the Open University of Israel, 2015) and one book for the general public (Islam: A Short Introduction, Tel Aviv University Press, 2006). She loves to teach and tries to be a conscientious instructor.
Bruce Maddy-Weitzman
Research: Contemporary Middle Eastern history; inter-Arab relations; the modern Maghreb.
Professor Bruce Maddy-Weitzman (Ph.D, Tel Aviv University, 1988), is a Senior Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center, teaches in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, an Associate Scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia, PA, and a contributor of a monthly column, "Mideast Monitor", to The Jerusalem Report.
His latest book, A Century of Arab Politics: From the Arab Revolt to the Arab Spring, was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2016.
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His book, The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States (University of Texas Press, 2011), was awarded the “L. Carl Brown Book Prize” for outstanding new book in the field of North African Studies, by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, in October 2013.
Recent Publications:
- "Berbers", The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, December 2015.
- “On the Backroads of Morocco,” The American Interest, August 31, 2015.
- “A Turning Point? The 'Arab Spring' and the Amazigh Movement,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol 38, Issue 14 (November 2015), pp. 2499-2515.
Recent Book Reviews:
- Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew: Entangled Lives in Morocco," Lawrence Rozen, (University of Chicago Press, 2015), for The American Interest (April 2016).
- "Operation Mural: An Englishman and the Mossad in Casablanca," David G, Littman, Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs (2016).
- "We Are Imazighen: The Development of Algerian Berber Identity in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture," Fazia Aïtel, Middle East Quarterly, Vol. 23, No.1 (Winter 2016).
Recent Conference Papers:
- “To Be or Not to Be? The Arab Regional Order and the Arab Spring,” at International Conference, ‘The Relevance of Regions and Area Studies in a Globalized World’, December 14-16, 2015, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
- “Insecurity on the Periphery: Socio-Economic Grievances and the Amazigh Movement in Morocco,” panel on ‘Human (In)security in the Maghrib’, at the Middle East Studies Association, Washington, D.C., November 25, 2014.
Brandon Friedman
Research: Arab-Iranian relations; contemporary political history of the Persian/Arabian Gulf; political biography.
Brandon Friedman, Ph.D, is the Director of Research at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. Brandon is also the Managing Editor of the Dayan Center’s journal Bustan: The Middle East Book Review. His research during the past three years has focused on three primary areas. First, he continues to investigate the social origins of political reform in Saudi Arabia, in historical perspective. He has also written about regional politics since the Arab Spring, focusing on identifying the social and political processes driving the breakdown of the state order across the region, with a particular emphasis on the Saudi perception of developments in Iraq and Syria. Third, in line with a new research program he has been working on with the Department of East Asian Studies, he has researched China’s increasing engagement in the Middle East since the early 1990s. Brandon has been active in "Track II" initiatives on regional security issues since 2007. Brandon’s PhD research focused on the political relations between the rulers of the Persian Gulf littoral during the period of British military withdrawal from the region (1968 to 1971). He reads Arabic and Persian.
Rachel Kantz Feder
Research: Modern Shi'i thought, history, and politics; Iraqi history and politics; political Islam; intellectual history.
Rachel Kantz Feder, MA (Tel Aviv University), is a doctoral candidate at Tel Aviv University's Graduate School of History in Middle Eastern and African Studies.
Rachel Kantz Feder delivered a lecture, “Shi‘is as a Factor in the Construction of Peace and State-building in post-Saddam Iraq: Stabilizing and Destabilizing Trends and Forces,” in November 2010 at an international conference, Peace Operations and State Building: International Initiatives and Local Perceptions and Responses,convened by Sciences-Po and Tel Aviv University. Throughout 2010 she presented papers on various aspects of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr’s intellectual and political activism in Iraq. She delivered lectures at the international conference, Where
are
the
Intellectuals? Culture,
Identity
and
Community
in
the
Modern
Middle
East, convened by the Center for Advanced Studies of the Arab World, the University of Edinburgh, Scotland; at the international conference, The Shi‘a: Theology, Law and Culture, convened by the Center for Iranian Studies of Tel Aviv University and The Nehemia Levtzion Center for Islamic Studies of Hebrew University, and at the 34th annual conference of Middle East & Islamic Studies Association of Israel.
Uriya Shavit
Research: Arab discourses on democracy; modern Islamic theology and law; the sociology of Muslim minorities in the West.
An Associate Professor at the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies and the Program for Religious Studies. Shavit is the author, most recently, of Islamism and the West (Routledge, 2014), Shari'a and Muslim Minorities (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Zionism in Arab Discourses (Manchester University Press, 2016, with Ofir Winter).
Elisheva Machlis
Research: Iraq; Shi'i reformism; modern Shi'i trends; Sunni-Shi'i relations; state and society in Iraq and Iran; new media and social networks in the Middle East.
Dr. Elisheva Machlis has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and an MA from Tel Aviv University. She holds a two-year post-doctoral fellowship from the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University and is currently completing a fellowship at the Truman Center for Peace Studies at Hebrew University.
Dr. Machlis's publications include:
- Shi‘i Sectarianism in the Middle East: Modernisation and the Quest for Islamic Universalism, I.B Tauris, London (2014).
- "The Arab State between Sectarianism, Nationalism and Islamism" in Inglorious Revolution (Dayan Center, 2014)
- Bustan: Te Middle East Book Review 4 (2013) 17–32 Shiʿism, Culture and Group Membership Amidst Social Change (2013).
- ʿAlī Sharīʿatī and the Notion of tawḥīd : Re-exploring the Question of God’s Unity, Die Welt Des Islams 54 (2014).
- The Cross-Sectarian Call for Islam: A Sample of Shi'a Reformist Thought”, Journal of Shi‘a Islamic Studies, 2:2 (2009), 195-219.
- “A Shi'a Debate on Arabism: The Emergence of a Multiple Communal Membership”, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, forthcoming.
- "השיעה בעולם המודרני: בין זהות כיתתית לאידאל של אסלאם אוניברסלי ונאור", היסטוריה 27 (כסלו, תשע"ב), 29-60
For further details visit: https://international.tau.ac.il/Middle_Eastern_Studies
