People

Dimiter Angelov

dangelov@fas.harvard.edu

Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine History

Dimiter Angelov is Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine History at Harvard University. His research and teaching focus on the intellectual, political, and institutional history of the Byzantine Empire. His diverse scholarly interests include empire and...

Francesco Anselmetti

fanselmetti@g.harvard.edu

PhD Candidate in History and Middle East Studies

Francesco entered Harvard’s Joint PhD Program in History and Middle Eastern Studies in 2021. His doctoral research examines the formation of social classes and modern states in the Eastern Mediterranean over the course of the 18th and early 19th centuries...

Jesse Arlen

jarlen@fas.harvard.edu

Lecturer in Armenian Studies, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Jesse S. Arlen is Lecturer in Armenian Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of many articles and book chapters relating to medieval religious literature and intellectual history, with particular attention to asceticism and mysticism. He is the...

Ali Asani

aliasani@fas.harvard.edu

Associate, Committee on the Study of Religion

On leave Ali Asani is Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures. After completing his high school education in Kenya, he attended Harvard College, with a concentration in the...

Gayane Ayvazyan

gayvazyan@g.harvard.edu

PhD Candidate in History and Middle East Studies

Gayane Ayvazyan entered the Joint PhD Program in History and Middle Eastern Studies in 2021. At Harvard, her aim is to analyze and explain the transformations of the interconnected networks and organization of Armenians within the Ottoman Empire, Safavid...

Elif Irem Az

elifiremaz@fas.harvard.edu

Postdoctoral Fellow

Elif Irem Az is a medical and political-economic anthropologist, poet, and Disaster Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. She received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Columbia University in...

Don Babai

babai@fas.harvard.edu

Associate of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies

Don Babai (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) specializes in the political economy of the Gulf countries. He is currently working on a book on business-state relations in Saudi Arabia and is also finishing editing a festschrift, consisting of twelve...

Mitch Bacci

mbacci@g.harvard.edu

PhD Candidate in History and Middle East Studies

Mitch began the joint History and Middle Eastern Studies PhD program in 2017. His research focuses broadly on the social and economic history of the late modern Eastern Mediterranean. He is particularly interested in informal political economy, the...

Efe Murat Balıkçıoğlu

ebalikcioglu@fas.harvard.edu

Associate of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies

Balıkçıoğlu is a textual scholar and an intellectual historian whose research focuses on the intersection of philosophy, theology, and Sufism in the early modern Ottoman Empire. He is particularly interested in the Ottoman synthesis of Graeco-Arabic...

Saaleh Baseer

saalehbaseer@g.harvard.edu

PhD Candidate in History and Middle East Studies

Abdul Bhat

abhat@fas.harvard.edu

Preceptor in Urdu and Indo-Persian, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Abdul Manan Bhat is a scholar of Islam, devotional literature, and material religion, specializing in Islamic discourses on poetry with a focus on the Persianate world. Urdu and Persian literature is at the heart of his teaching and research interests. At...

L. M. Bondioli

Assistant Professor of History

L. M. Bondioli's work investigates the political economy of medieval Islamic empires, aiming to lay bare the antagonistic symbiosis between the merchant and ruling classes, and the ever-embattled entanglement of subaltern and elite groups. His research...