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. Mayada Madbouly is a sociologist specialized in the making of memories and heritage work in the Middle East and North Africa. Her research interests analyze memorial practices, social movements, and racialization in the Modern MENA region. She lectures on political sociology, cultures studies, and sociology of international relations.
See: https://www.rug.nl/staff/m.m.s.madbouly/

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. 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/

Dr Karim El Taki is an International Relations scholar focusing on the modern Middle East. His research takes sociological and historical approaches to the politics of the region. Theoretically, his research interests include social (mis)recognition in domestic and international politics, sovereignty, and regional and global ordering. Empirically, he studies Arab regimes’ quests for recognition as expressed in their military politics, media discourse, and lobbying activities in the United States. He lectures on the politics and international relations of the Middle East, international organisations, and Islam and modernity.
See: https://www.rug.nl/staff/k.el.taki/

Dr. Elizabeth Marteijn is a historian specialized in religion and culture in the Middle East. Her primary interests include the social, cultural, and intellectual history of Palestinian Christianity, contextual theology, and (forced) displacement in the Middle East. She lectures on the history of the modern Middle East, (religious) minorities in the Middle East, and on migration and diaspora communities in and from the Middle East. See: https://www.rug.nl/staff/e.s.marteijn/

Dr. Gretchen Head is a literary scholar specializing in Arabic narrative from the early modern to modern periods (14th-21st centuries). Her research focuses on the tensions between secular and religiously grounded modes of reading and how Arabic literary practices changed in the move from manuscript to print.  

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/

Aisja Hamed is a lecturer with a Middle Eastern Studies and International Relations background. She is a former diplomat for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and co-founder of Fikra, a Palestinian literary magazine based in Ramallah. In the department, she teaches 'Foodways in the Middle East'.
See: https://www.rug.nl/staff/a.l.hamed/

José Rafael Medeiros Coelho is a PhD student with an academic journey rooted in sociology, anthropology, history, and cultural studies. His PhD research, titled "Ottoman Arab Migrations to Latin America (Antioch-São Paulo): Mapping Transnational Hubs, Networks, and Cultural Heritage," investigates the migration history of Ottoman Arab Christians to Latin America (19th-20th century). By critically examining the complex interplay of migration, identity, and heritage, his research aims to deepen the comprehension of transnational connections between the Middle East and Latin America, all the while questioning prevailing historical narratives. Amidst the urgency of potential heritage loss caused by the 2023 earthquakes in Antioch, coupled with the politicization of cultural identity in Türkiye, his research is committed to the preservation and documentation of the cultural heritage linked to Antiochian Arab Christians.
See: https://www.rug.nl/staff/j.r.medeiros.coelho/research

Eline van Erdewijk is a PhD candidate at RUG and a lecturer at Sorbonne University. In her PhD, Eline investigates the emergence of racial antisemitism among the European population in French Algeria from the post-war period (1943) until Algeria's independence (1962) by critically investigating the popular press in French, Spanish, and Italian, and from a comparative perspective with previous periods of colonization in Algeria since the Crémieux Decree. Until now, there has been no analysis of how different ethnic origins contributed to antisemitism among Europeans in Algeria.  It is widely believed that antisemitism declined between 1943 and 1962  as a result of the Europeans' need to hold on to Algeria. However, her research explores how European antisemitism persisted, even though it was less publicly expressed and aims at deepening  the comprehension of popular antisemitic attitudes in a late colonial setting.

Brandon Johnson is a PhD candidate, researching to disentangle the complex interplay between American missionaries, Ottoman violence, and U.S. foreign policy in the late 19th century. While the history of missionary diplomacy in the Late Ottoman Empire has been more thoroughly explored during the last two decades, studies which reduce the scale of analysis and uncover what “actual people as well as abstract forces” did to shape events (Brown, “Microhistory and the Postmodern Challenge”, 2003) remain an important missing gap. Adopting new biographical as well as microhistorical approaches, Brandon’s research endeavors are to trace these broad, even unwieldy historical influences by unravelling the archived exchanges and negotiations of two influential individuals during one particularly volatile period of Ottoman violence, the Hamidian Massacres of 1894–1897. Fraught with the pressing concerns of the time and their often competing viewpoints, the correspondences between Henry Otis Dwight (an American missionary who mediated between the U.S. Embassy and the missionaries of the American Board in Turkey) and the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, Alexander Watkins Terrell, are a window into the influence of violence in the Late Ottoman Empire on the fledgling foreign policy of the United States.

Brandon is the author of The Makings of a Missionary Diplomat: The Correspondences of Henry Otis Dwight, 1867–1884 (Isis Press, Istanbul, 2023).

Gülnur Demirci is a Double Degree PhD student at the RUG and Malmö University. Her PhD project titled “Embodied Memory in Post-violence Contexts: Circassians - A Transnational Analysis” explores how contemporary Circassian communities in Türkiye, Russia, and Germany have developed and deployed embodied memory practices across the boundaries of nations, about the Russo-Caucasian War (1783-1864), their mass deportation from homeland (1864), and an ongoing sense of being ‘uprooted’.

In this interdisciplinary research drawing on studies in memory, culture, migration, and genocide, she focuses on the mnemonic capacity of corporeal practices in dealing with traumatic pasts and present-day contexts as well as how different socio-political contexts shape the bodily representations of cultural memory.

Elise Aghazarian is a PhD candidate researching the history of the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem. She specializes in the history, society, politics, and culture of the Middle East, with a particular focus on urban transformation, the Palestine-Israel conflict, Armenians in the Arab world, and the Arabic language. Previously, she taught Sociology, coordinated research programs, and provided editing and consultation for social and cultural projects related to the Arab world. In addition to her PhD research, she translates academic studies into Arabic and teaches Arabic language and intercultural communication at Dutch universities and institutes.

Yasin Sari is a PhD candidate researching the self-perception and identity formation of the Zaza, an Iranian-speaking ethnic group, in Turkey and the Netherlands. His work explores the religious (Sunni and Alevi) and political (socialist, nationalist, Islamist) dynamics within Zaza, using an emic approach based on fieldwork in Turkey and the Netherlands. His study engages with theories of cultural hegemony, (self-)orientalism, Third Space, and transnationalism to understand the complexities of Zaza identity and contributes to the broader discussion on the identity formation of ethnic groups in and from the Middle East.