Teaching & Research Staff

Prof. dr. Karène Sanchez Summerer is a historian of the Modern Middle East. Her research and teaching interests include a relational cultural and social history of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine, Christian Arab communities in / from the Middle East, minorities communities in the Middle East, and Arab Christian diaspora in Europe (19th-20th century). She is particularly interested in engaging with multilateral and multi-scale connections. She lectures on language and identity; Arab Christian communities; conflicts, coexistence, migrations; and cultural diplomacy.
See: https://www.rug.nl/staff/karene.sanchez/

Dr. Lucia Admiraal is a historian, specialized in the cultural and intellectual history of the modern Middle East, the history of the Nahda movement, historiography and Arabic literature. She lectures on the history of the modern Middle East, islam, and cities in the Middle East.
See: https://www.rug.nl/staff/l.e.admiraal/

Dr. Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah is a historian specialised in the modern history of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. Her research interests include religious responses to modernity, questions of citizenship within imperial networks, and pluralistic identity constructions. Her current research focuses on transnational Jewish networks in the nineteenth and twentieth century. She lectures on Religion and Politics in the Middle East, Jewish-Muslim Relations, the History of Jews in the Arab World, and Foodways in the Middle East.
See: https://www.rug.nl/staff/s.r.goldstein/

Dr. Pieter Nanninga is a historian and religious studies scholar, specialised in the modern Middle East. His research interests include conflicts in the Middle East,  religion and violence, the cultural history of jihadism, propaganda and terrorism. His recent research has mainly focused on the conflicts in Syria and Iraq and the case of the Islamic State. He teaches on Islam and Muslims in the modern Middle East, religion and politics, and conflicts in the Middle East.
See: http://www.rug.nl/staff/p.g.t.nanninga/

Dr. Ronit Nikolsky lectures on language proficiency Hebrew and on culture and identity in the Middle East. Her research is in the field on Midrash, culture and emotions, and ancient narratives, from a cultural-cognitive perspective."
See: https://www.rug.nl/staff/r.nikolsky/

Dr. Kiki Santing is an Arabist and specialised in the modern Middle East. Her research mainly focuses on the relation between Islam and politics, and on Islamist movements, particularly (Egyptian) Muslim Brotherhood. She mostly lectures on contemperary developments in the Middle East.
See: http://www.rug.nl/staff/k.m.santing/

Jacobijn van den Berg makes use of both her background in International Relations and in Middle Eastern Studies by focusing on Shi’a communities and, more specifically, the interplay between Shi’a faith and political developments, parties and organisations throughout the region of the Middle East, and Iraq and the Levant in particular. At the department of Middle Eastern Studies, she teaches Academic skills, Islam, Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian colloquial Arabic.
See: https://www.rug.nl/staff/j.van.den.berg/

Hisham Hamad, MA, is a Lecturer and a PhD candidate with a background in Languages and Cultures of the Middle East (Arabic) and Tranlation Studies. He teaches Arabic Language acquisition and uses innovative and student-centred methods. In his PhD research, he studies the history of translations into Arabic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mapping out the the transnational field of translation in the Arab world using digital humanities tools.
See: https://www.rug.nl/staff/h.hamad/