Anthony Alessandrini is Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, and of Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is also a member of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change. He is the author of Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics (Lexington Books, 2016); the editor of Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives; and the co-editor of “Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey (Tadween Publishing, 2014). His poetry chapbook, Children Imitating Cormorants appeared with Yavanika Press in 2018. Alessandrini is on the faculty of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, a co-organizer of the International Solidarity Action Research Network (ISARN), and a co-editor of Jadaliyya E-Zine. His book Decolonize Multiculturalism is forthcoming with OR Books in 2021.
Moustafa Bayoumi is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His critically acclaimed How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin, YEAR) won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. He is the also the author of This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (PRESS) which was chosen as a Best Book of 2015 by The Progressive and was also awarded the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. A frequent contributor to The Guardian, Bayoumi has also written for The New York Times Magazine, New York, The Nation, CNN.com, The London Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other periodicals.
Aslı Iğsız is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Her work examines cultural politics in relation to and within the Middle East, with a focus on Turkey. Her research interests are situated at the intersections of political violence, cultural policy, and politics of representation, with a critical eye on the implications of the past in the present. Her first book Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange (Stanford University Press, 2018) sought to offer a critique of liberalism from the angle of the management of difference, and explored the underlying racialized logics of population transfers, partitions, segregation, apartheid, and border walls. Currently she is working on two new book projects: one on the notion of fascist utopias in the contemporary world context, and another one on international cultural politics and education reforms to refute fascism after the Second World War.
Taylor M. Moore is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department at UC Santa Barbara. Her research lies at the intersections of critical race studies, decolonial/postcolonial histories of science, and decolonial materiality studies. Her manuscript-in-preparation, Superstitious Women: Race, Magic, and Medicine in Egypt, uses modern Egyptian amulets as an archive to reconstruct the magical and vernacular medical life-worlds of peasant women healers, and their critical role developing medico-anthropological expertise in Egypt from 1880-1950. Taylor’s work is invested in illuminating the occult(ed) networks, economies, and actors whose bodies and labor are generally rendered invisible in Eurocentric histories of global science.
Kristina Richardson is Associate Professor of History at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World: Blighted Bodies (Edinburgh, 2012) and studies on peoples on the margins of premodern Middle Eastern society. In Spring and Fall 2020 she held an NEH grant for her project “Stranger Studies: ‘Gypsies’ and Race-Making in the Premodern Middle East.” An edition and study, co-written with Boris Liebrenz, of a 16th-century Aleppine weaver’s notebook will appear soon with Orient-Institut Beirut. She has held research fellowships at the CUNY Graduate Center and the Universities of Bonn, Münster, and Munich.
Eve M. Troutt Powell is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an historian of the modern Middle East, focusing on Egypt, Sudan and the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, whose works illuminate questions of race and slavery at the juncture of Arab and African societies. Her book, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (University of California, 2003), casts light on the region’s multiple sources of racial thought, bypassing the usual European-inspired categories. Her most recent work, Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement in Egypt, Sudan, and the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2012), uses memoirs by slave masters and former slaves to mount an argument about the differing impact and memory of slavery in these different contexts. The author of many essays and articles, Troutt Powell co-edited, with John Hunwick, The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton Series on the Middle East, Markus Wiener Press, 2002). One of the pioneers of the history of African and Middle Eastern slavery, Troutt Powell has received fellowships from the American Research Center in Egypt, the Social Science Research Council, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2003 and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2020. Troutt Powell is the President-Elect of the Middle East Studies Association.
