Graduate Students

Gehad Abaza’s research interests include forced migration and refugee studies, the anthropology of the state, processes of racialization, the anthropology of war, and memory. Her doctoral research focuses on the “return” migration of Syrians of Circassian descent to the unrecognized state, Abkhazia, and the active role they play as agents in its state formation. The working title of her dissertation is, “Building a House, Crafting a State: Syrian-Circassian Wartime Migration in Abkhazia.” She has an MA in Sociology-Anthropology and a BA in Political Science from the American University in Cairo. Before pursuing her PhD in the Anthropology Department at UCSB, she was a journalist and photographer in Egypt, covering stories related to refugee, worker, and detainee rights. Her work has been published in various local and regional outlets.

Deena Al-halabieh is an MA/PhD student in the Department of English at UCSB. She also holds an MA in Comparative Literature from the Pennsylvania State University and studies eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Arabic and Anglophone slave narratives as well as the relationships between Palestinian and Black communities in the twentieth- and twenty-first century. Her fields of study include Black Studies, Islamic Studies, and Translation Studies with a focus on translation and reader-response theories to consider how the introduction of Arabic literary and cultural traditions in enslaved African Muslim writings expand and redefine the slave narrative genre in the Anglophone tradition. Her provisional dissertation title is: “Princes Among Slaves: Orientalism, Race, and Religion in 18th-19th Century US Arabic Slave Narratives.”

Gokh Amin Alshaif is a PhD student in the Department of History at UCSB. Her research focuses on gender, race, and racialization in the Arabian Peninsula and the broader Middle East. Gokh’s dissertation “Native Outsiders: Black Yemenis in 19th and 20th Century Yemen” is a social history of Yemen’s marginalized Black Muhamasheen community. It draws on Middle East Studies, Indian Ocean Studies, and Black Studies to recenter Yemen as a global anchor of East Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. She holds an MA in Global & International Studies and BAs in Political Science and Religious Studies.

Ali Derafshi is a Ph.D. candidate in UCSB’s Department of History of Art and Architecture. Ali’s research focuses on the architectural exchange between the United States and Iran, which has been facilitated and mediated through travel, migration, and exile during the twentieth century. It  addresses the significance and popularity of Iranian and Persian-inspired architecture in California, which has been understudied or overlooked in three fields: California architectural history; Iranian architectural historiography; and the Iranian migration, exile, and diaspora studies. His dissertation is tentatively titled “Iranian and Persian-inspired Architecture in California: Memāri-e Irāni in the Land of Sunshine.” He has an MA in Architecture from McGill University, a MA in Landscape Architecture, and a BA Architecture from Iran.

Camilla Falanesca is a PhD student in the Department of History at UCSB. She studies the modern Middle East, with a focus on North Africa. Her research centers on the intersection between political economy and memory studies. She holds a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Leiden University, and a BA in Languages, Culture and Society of Asia and Mediterranean Africa from Ca’Foscari University of Venice.

Amy Fallas is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at UCSB. She received her MA in History from Yale University and is currently an Assistant Editor at the Arab Studies Journal. Her research explores ethnic and religious minorities, the development of sectarianism, and the formation of charitable networks in modern Egypt at the intersection of Middle East history, archival studies, and religious studies. She is currently a Research Fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) for the 2021-2022 year working on her dissertation “The Gospel of Wealth: Charity and the Making of Modern Egypt, 1879-1939.” She also writes public-facing scholarship which appears in the Washington Post, Jadaliyya, Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, Contingent Magazine, The Revealer, and more.

Anthony Greco is a PhD candidate specializing in modern Middle East history. His research on engineers and engineering in Egypt explores the intertwined histories of colonialism, science, and environment during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By detailing Egypt’s long tradition of scientific knowledge production and pedagogy, this project dismantles Eurocentric assumptions about the origins and practices of science. His teaching focuses on the history of expertise in global perspective in order to revisit and rethink critical science studies in light of the contemporary rise of science skepticism.

Eliz Hale is a MA/PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies. Her research interests include the Arabic language, Islam in the US, the psychology of religious experiences, jinn, aliens, and everything weird. Her prospective thesis title is “Sometimes the Cure is as Non-Material as the Disease: Abduction, Possession, and Treatment Modalities of the Spiritual.” She received her BA in International Studies with a concentration in Middle Eastern and North African Studies from Colorado State University.

Sebaah Hamad is a PhD student in the Comparative Literature program at UCSB. Sebaah works on trauma, memory, and spatial studies, particularly as they relate to gender and race. Her three fields are Modern Arabic Literature, Afro-Diasporic Women’s Literature, and the intersectionalities of Media + Environment + Injustice. Sebaah’s MA thesis was titled, “Poetics of Memory and Space in Palestinian Women’s Life Writings” and her prospective dissertation is titled, “Mapping Saris from Site of Memory to Imagined Future.” She has an MA in Comparative Literature from UCSB and a BA in English Literature from Le Moyne College.

Kareem M. Abdelbary is a PhD student in the department of history at UCSB. He studies the political economy and social history of the modern Middle East, with a focus on economic nationalism and subaltern movements in 20th century Egypt. He holds a MA in political economy from the University of Manchester and BA in Political Science and History from the American University in Cairo.

bridge mcwaid is a PhD student in the Department of History at the UCSB specializing in the history of modern Palestine. Her project explores the history of the Nakba through the prism of food. By tracing the various circuits of making, preparing, and distributing food, it sheds new light on the environment, land, indigeneity, and settler colonialism. She holds an MA in Environmental History from the University of Chicago and a BA in Global Studies from UCSB.

Mary Michael is a PhD candidate in the Film and Media Studies department at UCSB. She works on smart city projects in the Middle East, with particular focus on anti-migrant technologies in the Arabian Peninsula. Her fields of study include migration and labor in the Middle East, histories of media and technology, critical data studies, and bio/necropolitics. Mary is also a self-taught media practitioner who experiments with arts praxis methodologies including 3D model building, game design, and hyperlink narrative writing. Her dissertation is tentatively titled Media that Matters: Histories of Data Materialization in the Arabian Peninsula. She has a B.S. in Sociology/Law and Society from the UC, Riverside, and an M.A. in Cinema and Media Studies from USC.

Isaac Paul Miller is a PhD student in the Department of History at UCSB. He has an MA in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo. Isaac studies 20th century Egypt, focusing political economy, monetary and financial history, and state formation. He hopes to write his dissertation on financial and monetary regulation in Egypt through the first half of the 20th century culminating in the formation of Egypt’s central bank in the early 1960’s.

Richard Nedjat-Haiem is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCSB. Richard works on the intersectionalities of socio-lingustics, performance, gender, ethnomusicological, and anthropological studies of Middle Eastern popular culture. His three fields include Mizrahi Studies (the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa), Persian performance studies with a focus on the Tehrangeles diaspora and Gulf Studies with a focus on the socio-linguistics of the Gulf in Popular culture. His prospective dissertation is titled “The Dubai Effect: The Transnational Diva, The White Dialect and the Multi-Dialectical song.” He has an MA in Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic from the University of Chicago.

Eugene Riordan Jr (he/him/his) is a PhD student in the Global Studies Department at UCSB. He has a BA in Peace and Conflict Studies and International Relations from Colgate University. Eugene works at the intersection of sex work, pornography, and trafficking with security technologies globally. He focuses on queer and trans individuals in Palestine and Thailand. His perspective dissertation is titled “Bodies, Affects, Freedoms: Detangling Security Apparatuses in Trafficking Discourses.”

Soha Saghazadeh is a PhD student in the Department of Film and Media Studies at UCSB from where they have received their master’s degree. Soha also has an MFA in Media Arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Their work examines the ways in which Iran as a nation-state enacts itself through contemporary media practices that air Iran from intersecting national, regional, and global terrains. These media practices include social media and diasporic publics; a popular film festival and imperial screenings; indigenous drone industry and piratical reverse-engineering; exilic satellite television and risky jamming; missile killing and transnational mourning. Soha’s main areas of study are the nation(s) and media: the case of Iran; media and mediation: global south perspectives; the state and global public sphere. Their dissertation is tentatively titled: “Airing Iran: Spinning the Nation-State Off the Axis of Evil.”

Salma Shash is a PhD student in the department of history at UCSB. She studies the modern Middle East, with a focus on gender and criminality in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt. Before coming to UCSB, she worked at Nazra for Feminist Studies, a feminist Egyptian collective, between 2016-2019. She holds a master’s degree in Middle East Politics from SOAS, University of London. She is among the founding members of the “bread and freedom” party in Egypt.

Reem holds an MA in English literature with a collaborative degree in Book History and Print Culture from the University of Toronto. In her doctoral work, she specializes in Mediterranean Studies, Andalusi Studies, Travel writing and Memory Studies, and is completing doctoral emphases in Medieval Studies and Translation Studies. Her research focuses on the fifteenth- to seventeenth-century Ibero-African Mediterranean frontier, outlining a comparative and interdisciplinary study of the Moriscos (Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism in early modern Iberia). She studies the role that Moriscos played in the translation and transmission of texts between Arabic and European languages, as well as their resonance in early modern Spanish and English literatures. 

Noosha Uddin is a political science Ph.D student at UCSB, focusing on citizenship, labor migration, and energy transitions in the Middle East and North Africa. Her dissertation research, Labor Migration in a Low-Carbon Future, examines labor migration trends of working-class laborers in the Persian Gulf, primarily on the mechanisms of the kafala system within petroleum revenue-dependent states and their shift to clean energy practices, and transactional relationships between migrant-sending and migrant-receiving states. She earned B.As in Political Science and in Economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Giovanni Vimercati is a PhD student in the Department of Film & Media Studies at UCSB. His research focuses on the political economy of film and media, and the cinema of Arab Jews. His work, often under the pseudonym Celluloid Liberation Front, has appeared in Cinema Scope, The New Arab, Los Angeles Review of Books, Variety, The Guardian, Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, and other international publications. He has published a chapter on Jocelyne Saab’s “Beirut Trilogy” (From Class Struggle to Sectarian Warfare) in an edited collection published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021 and is currently working on a book about the political economy of Lebanon’s film industry (1919-1989) that will be published by Bloomsbury. He received a BA in Film Studies from the London Metropolitan University and an MA in Media Studies from the American University of Beirut.

Keira Weiss is a Ph.D. student in Ethnomusicology at UCSB. Focusing on the history of the cello in eastern Arab music, her research brings together issues of heritagization, nationalism, and cultural policy. Kira’s research is historical, ethnographic, and practice-based. Having worked as a semi-professional cellist, she approaches her work as a musician and studies with several prominent cellists in Arab music. Kira uses the history of the cello in Arab music as a case study to develop the concept of “cultural security,” the articulation between cultural policy and national security discourse. Initially perceived as a threat to the affective and aesthetic authenticity of Arab music in the immediate post-colonial period, the cello has become a standard instrument in Arab music ensembles. Focusing on Egyptian Arab music, Kira uses the cello as a case study to analyze shifts in Egyptian cultural policy and national narratives over the last century.