Interviewees
We invited the best scholars in the field to participate in the course to share their knowledge, expertise, and passion about the Middle and the Muslim World. Below you will find a brief description of our guests and their slot in the course. Click on the links to navigate to their respective contribution.
Dr. Leah Kinberg
Dr. Leah Kinberg is an expert in classical Islam who focuses on the Qur'an and its commentaries, on the hadith (the literature that holds the prophetic traditions), and on ethical issues. In her research she has been dealing with the function of dreams in classical Islam, the interaction between this world and the hereafter, Qur'an and hadith as a means of legitimation, the question of Jerusalem in Islam, Islam and gender, and with classical Islamic literature in the service of contemporary rhetoric.
Prof. Gideon Avni
Prof. Gideon Avni (PhD – 1997) is the Head of the Archaeological Division in the Israel Antiquities Authority and a professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His academic interests focus on various aspects of Classical, Late Antique and Early Islamic archaeology, the cultural and religious transformation of the Near East from Byzantine to Islamic rule, and the archaeology of desert societies in the Levant.
Dr. Raquel Ukeles
Raquel Ukeles, PhD, is the Curator of the Islam and Middle East collection at the National Library of Israel. Ukeles received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2006 in comparative Islamic and Jewish studies, with a focus on medieval Islamic devotional law. She also studied Islamic law and Arabic in Egypt, Morocco and the Netherlands. From 2005-2008, Ukeles was Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Fairfield University in Connecticut. From 2008-2010, she was a Golda Meir Postdoctoral Fellow of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her publications include several articles on Muslim jurists' responses to religious innovations, and a monograph on Islam in America post-9/11.
Prof. Amira Bennison
Amira K. Bennison became interested in the Middle East and North Africa while studying for her BA Hons in History and Arabic at Cambridge. After graduating, she went to live in Cairo for a year before studying for a Masters at Harvard University and a PhD at SOAS. Her PhD, based on a year’s archival research in Morocco, looked at the impact of the French conquest of Algiers in 1830 on notions of political legitimacy in neighbouring Morocco and the importance of jihad in the western Maghrib. She went on to the University of Manchester as a Leverhulme Research Fellow before moving to the University of Cambridge in 1997 where she is now a Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies. Her work has continued to explore political legitimacy but has expanded to encompass Islamic Spain and the medieval Maghrib, and to consider urban planning, ceremonial and rhetoric alongside jihad. Professor Bennison has appeared in several TV programmes about the history of the Middle East and North Africa including ‘Europe’s Lost Civilisation’; ‘The Thirties in Colour’, ‘Islamic Science’; and 'The Ottomans'. She is also a regular contributor to Radio 4’s ‘In Our Time’ with Melvyn Bragg and other radio programmes on Islamic history.
Dr. Daniella Talmon-Heller
Daniella Talmon-Heller received her PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, then spent two years as a post-doc at Princeton University. Since 2001 she is on the faculty of the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her interests are social history, religious thought and practice, comparative religion and historiography of the pre-Ottoman Middle East. She participated in a research group on the formation of Muslim society in Palestine (ca. C.E. 600-1500), funded by the Israel Science Foundation, and is now completing a book entitled "Sacred Place, Sacred Time, Sacred Object – A History of Religious Life in the Medieval Middle East" (also supported by an ISF grant).
Prof. Nükhet Varlık
Nükhet Varlık (PhD, University of Chicago) is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University–Newark. She is a historian of the Ottoman Empire interested in disease, medicine, and public health. Her first book, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (Cambridge University Press, 2015; paperback 2017; Turkish translation: Akdeniz Dünyasında ve Osmanlılarda Veba, 1347-1600 (2017)), is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. It received the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award, the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association’s M. Fuat Köprülü Book Prize, and the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean’s Dionysius A. Agius Prize. Her recently published edited volume, Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean (Arc Humanities Press, 2017), is a collection of articles on the social, cultural, and political responses to epidemics in the post-Black Death Islamic Mediterranean.
Prof. Michal Biran
Michal Biran (PhD HUJI 2000) is a historian of Inner Asia and a member of the Israeli Academy of Science and Humanities. She is the Max and Sophie Mydans Foundation Professor in the Humanities, and currently (2017) the director of the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also leads the ERC-funded project “Mobility, Empire and Cross-Cultural Contacts in Mongol Eurasia.”. Together with Hodong Kim she is now editing The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire (2 volumes) for Cambridge University Press.
She has published extensively on Mongol and Pre-Mongol Central Asia (10th-14th centuries); the Mongol Empire; nomadism; and cross-cultural contacts between China and the Islamic world. Her books include Qaidu and the Rise of the Independent Mongol State in Central Asia (Curzon, 1997), The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History: Between China and the Islamic World (Cambridge University Press, 2005, 2008) and Chinggis Khan (Oxford: OneWorld Publications, 2007). She has co-edited, with Reuven Amitai, Mongols, Turks and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World (Leiden: Brill, 2005) and Nomads As Agents of Cultural Change (Hawaii University Press, 2015), and is also the editor of a special issue of Asiatische Studien (2017/4) titled In the Service of the Khans: Elites in Transition in Mongol Eurasia.
Prof. Nasir Basel
Nasir Basal is a professor at Tel Aviv University for mediaeval Judaeo-Arabic culture and philology of biblical Hebrew. He has written in these two fields three books and dozens of articles in three languages: English, Hebrew and Arabic. He also dealt with other topics, such as the Judaeo-Arabic interpretation of Sephardic Hebrew poetry and the Jewish Hebrew translations of the Quran, which were written in Europe in the seventeenth century. Professor Basal is the laureate of the Ben Zvi Institute Prize for the Study of Jewish Communities of the East (2013) and has won numerous research awards such as the Memorial foundation for Jewish-Culture and the Israeli Scientific foundation.
Thanks
Production, Instructional Design and Video Editing
Tau Online – Tel Aviv University
Teaching Assistant and a significant contributor to course development
Ronnie Agassi
Additional Video Editors
Noga Goldreich
Nadav Porat-Chomsky
On-Camera Presentation Training
Eran Hadass
English Language Mentors
Hadar Shemesh
Dr. Lisa Amdur
English Language Editor
Dr. Keren Abbou-Hershkovits
Interviewees
Dr. Leah Kinberg
Prof. Gideon Avni
Dr. Raquel Ukeles
Prof. Amira K. Bennison
Dr. Daniella Talmon-Heller
Prof. Nükhet Varlık
Prof. Michal Biran
Prof. Nasir Basal
Locations
The Sourasky Central Library, special collection floor
Dr. Naama Scheftelowitz
Pinchas Battat
Iman Mansour
Michael Vaknin
Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern & African Studies Library, Tel Aviv University
Marion Gliksberg
Austrian Hospice of the Holy Family in Jerusalem
MMag. Markus Stephan Bugnyar
Felix Michler
The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem
Dr. Raquel Ukeles
Tsiyona Barukh Getahun
Yaara Halevy
Timna Elper
Denis Shorr
Ayelet Rubin
Archaeological Park Davidson Center, Jerusalem
Aviad Yekutiel
Hannah Presburger
Hisham's Palace, Jericho
Maral Quttieneh
Afif Hanna Amireh
Footage Archive
The Pool of Arches - Ramla
Ron Peled
The Negev Museum of Art, Be'er Sheva
Dr. Sharon Laor-Sirak
Special Thanks
Gad Sobol
Dr. Ron Lubell - The Barzilai Medical Center
Prof. Hana Taragan of Tel Aviv University