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Home > Graduate Studies > Areas of Graduate Study : Middle East and Islamic World

Middle East and Islamic World

Michael Gold: The faculty who specialize in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota combine deep and first-hand knowledge of Middle Eastern history, its people, and its archives with a love for teaching and mentoring. Our professors go to great lengths to seek out funding, research opportunities, and faculty contacts for all our students. These well-known professors have created a collegial yet rigorous program that prepares each student for a career in academics and imparts the necessary tools required to embark on original research projects.

Although the program in the Middle East and the Islamic World is the history department’s newest area of graduate study, its faculty is already among the largest and most comprehensive of any comparable history program in the United States. Outside of the department, students are also encouraged to work with a list of more than a dozen scholars in related fields of both the humanities and social sciences. In addition, the University of Minnesota has begun an aggressive expansion of its related language offerings, which now include regular instruction in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Swahili, Turkish and Urdu.

Departmental Faculty:

Iraj Bashiri is a scholar of the history, religion, literature and intellectual traditions of Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, with a particular focus on the medieval and early modern periods. He has also published widely in the fields of linguistics and Persian syntax, and is the author of several translations and critical editions of Persian literary works, as well as an introductory Persian grammar.  

Giancarlo Casale’s main area of specialization is the early modern Ottoman Empire, but he also has interests in historical geography, cartography, overseas exploration, and comparative early modern empires. His first book, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (forthcoming from Oxford University Press), is a study of Ottoman imperial expansion in the Indian Ocean during the sixteenth century.

Carol Hakim’s teaching profile covers a wide range of topics on the modern Middle East, including the political, socio-economic and intellectual history of the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Middle East and the West, colonialism, and nationalism. Her research interests focus on nationalism in the Middle East, state formation, and state-society relations in the Arab world.  Her first scholarly monograph, The Origins of the Lebanese National Idea, 1840-1920 is forthcoming from the University of California Press in 2009.

Patricia Lorcin’s research interests include French imperialism and colonialism, women and gender in the colonies, and the colonial Maghreb. She is the author of Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (I.B. Tauris, 1995) as well as numerous articles and edited volumes, including Algeria and France, 1800-2000: Identity-Memory-Nostalgia (Syracuse, 2006). She is currently finishing a book-length comparative study of colonial women’s memoirs from Algeria and Kenya.

Michael Lower specializes in the history of the crusades and, more generally, the history of relations between Muslims, Christians and Jews in the medieval Mediterranean.  He is the author of The Barons' Crusade: A Call to Arms and Its Consequences (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) and is currently at work on his second major project, a study of Christian mercenaries in medieval North Africa.

Nabil Matar teaches in both the History department and in the department of English, where he has his tenure home. His many publications include a trilogy of books on Britain and the Islamic Mediterranean: Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 (Cambridge, 1998), Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (Columbia, 2001) and Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689 (University of Florida, 2005). His forthcoming publications include Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578-1727 (Columbia, 2008) and, with Professor Gerald MacLean of Exeter University, Britain and the Muslim World, 1558-1713 (Oxford, 2009).

Daniel Schroeter studies the history of Jews and Muslims in the Mediterranean world, with a particular focus on Morocco. He is the author of numerous articles and two scholarly monographs, The Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco 1884-1886 (Cambridge, 1988) and The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World (Stanford, 2002).  His current research focuses more broadly on the Jews of the Maghreb from the 15th through the 20th centuries, and examines how Jewish cultures and identities were constituted and transformed through the continuous interaction between different parts of the Jewish Mediterranean diaspora.

Affiliated faculty in other departments:

Hakim Abderrezak, Dept. of French and Italian
Maghrebi Literature and Film

Ragui Assaad, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
Labor, poverty and development in the Middle East

Catherine Asher, Dept. of Art History
Islamic Art, Mughal Art and Architecture

Michael Barnett, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
Humanitarianism, Middle Eastern politics

William Beeman, Dept. of Anthropology
Iran, nomadic and settled societies, cultures of the Middle East

Hisham Bizri, Dept. of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
Arabic Cinema, Film Studies

Kathleen Collins, Dept. of Political Science
Islam and Politics, civil society in Central Asia and the Caucasus

Trica Danielle Keaton, American Studies and Global Studies
Muslims in Europe, comparative theories of race and racialization

Bali Sahota, Dept. of Asian Languages and Literatures
Modern Indian Intellectual History, Urdu Literature

Abdi Samatar, Dept. of Geography
Islam in Africa, Ethnic politics

Rosemary Stanfield-Johnson, Dept. of History (Duluth Campus)
Late medieval and early modern Iran

Martin Sampson, Dept. of Political Science
Middle East Politics, U.S. Foreign Policy         

Shaden Tageldin, Dept. of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
Colonial and post-colonial Egypt, Translation studies

Contacts for information about field-related language instruction at the U of M:

Arabic: Hisham Khalek (Dept. of African and African American Studies)

Hebrew: Renana S. Schneller (Dept. of Classical and Near Eastern Studies)

Persian: Mahmoud Sadrai (Institute of Linguistics)

Swahili: Angaluki Muaka (Dept. of African and African American Studies)

Turkish: Zuleyha Çolak (Institute of Linguistics)

Urdu: Riyaz Latif (Dept. of Art History)

Graduate Features

Graduate Studies
Rachel Ayers
1130 Heller Hall
271 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Phone: 612-624-5840
Email: histdgs@umn.edu

  • 'Best Dissertation' Arts and Humanities

    Congratulations to Nicole Phelps for winning this year's 'Best Dissertation" Award in the Arts and Humanities for her dissertation, "Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the New Liberal Order: US-Habsburg Relations and the Transformation of International Politics, 1880-1924."

    Nicole will receive an honorarium of $1,000 and a special certificate. She will also be honored during a luncheon and ceremony at the Campus Club in early June.

     May 14th, 2008

  • 2007-08 Fulbright Scholarships

    Tovah Bender (Italy), Aeleah Soine (Germany), and Elizabeth Swedo (Iceland) were awarded Fulbright scholarships to support their dissertation research abroad during this academic year. Congratulations!

    To read more, visit the Graduate School Announcement.

     January 25th, 2008

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