Noah Salomon is Associate Professor of Religion at Carleton College. His first book, For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2016) examines the inner-workings of an Islamic political project and its refractions as it sought to reform state and society, and was in turn reformed by them. It won the 2017 Albert Hourani Prize from the Middle East Studies Association and a 2017 Excellence in the Study of Religion Award from the American Academy of Religion. A recent recipient of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, Salomon is currently based in Beirut, Lebanon, working on a transregional project on the ethics of Islamic unity in the context of popular revolution and in its aftermath.
Elizabeth DeLoughrey is a Professor in English and at the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is co-editor of Caribbean Literature and the Environment (U of Virginia Press, 2005), Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (Routledge, 2015). She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (University of Hawai`i Press, 2007), and a recent book about climate change and the literary and visual arts entitled Allegories of the Anthropocene (Duke UP, 2019). With Thom Van Dooren, she is co-editor of the international, open-access journal Environmental Humanities.
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a media anthropologist and As-sociate Professor in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University and a 2018 NOMIS Fellow at eikones Center for the Theory and History of the Image in Basel, Switzerland. She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualiz-ing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (University of California Press, 2016), an ethnography of the international photojournalism industry during its digitalization at the beginning of the 21st century, based on fieldwork con-ducted in the United States, France and Turkey. Currently she is researching photography as a tool of governmental-ity in the late Ottoman period. Specifically, she is investi-gating photography during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamit (1876-1909) from medical imagery to prison portraiture to understand emerging forms of the state and the changing contours of Ottoman subjecthood. David Low was awarded his PhD in 2015 by the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, for a thesis on the role of photography in Armenian lives in the late Ottoman Empire. He was subsequently a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently a visiting scholar at the AGBU Nubar Library, Paris, working on his book, Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World: Photography in Erzurum, Kharpert, Van and Beyond (I.B.Tauris, 2021).
Nora Lafi is specializing in Ottoman and Colo-nial history of North-Africa and the Middle East. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the LeibnizZentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. She also teaches at the Institute of Islamic Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin. Her publications include Understanding the City Through its Margins (co-ed.) (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018); Urban Violence in the Middle East (co-ed) (London: Berghahn, 2015); Esprit civique et organ-isation citadine dans l’empire ottoman (XVe-XXe s.) (Leiden, Brill, 2019) and “Building and Deconstructing Authenticity in Aleppo”, (in Chr. Bernhardt et al. (ed.), Gebaute Geschichte, Göttingen 2017) as well as “The ‘Arab Spring‘ in Global Perspective“ (in S. Berger and H. Neh-ring (eds.), The History of Social Movements, New-York, Palgrave, 2017).
Jeremy F. Walton is the leader of the Max Planck Research Group, “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities,” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI-MMG) in Göttingen, Germany. Prior to his current position, he held research and teaching fellowships at the Center for Advanced Studies of Southeastern Europe at the University of Rijeka, the CETREN Transregional Research Network at Georg August University of Göttingen, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and New York University’s Religious Studies Program. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2009. Dr. Walton’s first book, Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2017), is an ethnographic exploration of the relationship among Muslim civil society organizations, state institutions, and secularism in contemporary Turkey. He has published his research in a wide selection of scholarly journals, including American Ethnologist, Sociology of Islam, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, and Die Welt des Islams. “Empires of Memory,” which Dr. Walton designed, is an interdisciplinary, multi-sited project on the cultural politics of post-imperial memory and history in eight former Habsburg and Ottoman cities: Vienna, Istanbul, Budapest, Sarajevo, Trieste, Thessaloniki, Zagreb, and Belgrade. His research in the context of “Empires of Memory” examines the ambivalent legacies and modes of amnesia that emerge from specific sites of memory in each of these cities.
Maura Hametz is a Professor of History at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, USA, specializing in the history of Italy and the late Habsburg empire since the late nineteenth century. Her research explores the intersections of politics, culture, memory, law, religion, gender, and ethnic and national identity. She is the author of In the Name of Italy (Fordham U. Press, 2012) and Making Trieste Italian, 1918-1954 (Boydell and Brewer [Royal Historical Association new series], 2005) and co-editor of Jewish Intellectual Women in Central Europe, 1860-2000 (Mellen, 2012), and Sissi’s World:The Empress Elisabeth in Myth and Memory (Bloomsbury Press, 2018 [forthcoming July]). In addition to further work on monuments, memory and Sissi in Trieste, she is currently working on projects that explore the contours of citizenship in the northern Adriatic post-Habsburg states, Virginian (American) World War I veterans ideas on war and faith, and notions of violence, intimidation, and justice in Fascist Italy articulated in the context of the Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State.
Alice von Bieberstein is a social anthropologist and EURIAS-fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany. Her research has focused on the politics of history and citizenship in relation to minority subjectivity in Germany and Turkey. Her more recent project is on local engagements with and value extraction from the material remains of Armenian heritage in far-Eastern Turkey. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Subjectivity, Social Research, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Cathie Carmichael is Professor of European History at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where she is Head of the School of History. She studied at the London School of Economics and the University of Ljubljana before completing a Ph.D at Bradford University. She has supervised over a dozen PhDs on the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean and established a number of courses at BA and MA level. Her books include Slovenia and the Slovenes (co-authored with James Gow) (2000), Language and Nationalism in Europe (co-edited with Stephen Barbour) (2000), Genocide before the Holocaust (2009) and most recently Bosnia e Erzegovina. Alba e tramonto del secolo breve (2016). She is an editor of the Journal of Genocide Research.
Laurent Dissard is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London. After completing his PhD in Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley, he held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum. He is currently working on two book manuscripts. Submerged Stories (forthcoming at IB Tauris) discusses the politics of the past in Eastern Turkey and asks whose past is worth rescuing and whose history remains submerged? A Nation Under Construction (under consideration with MIT Press) takes the mega-dam built at Keban in the 1960s to examine the politics and poetics of infrastructural development in Turkey. It tells the interconnected stories of US scientists and European engineers, newly trained Turkish politicians and technical experts, anti-dam activists and human-rights NGOs Kurdish and Alevi internally displaced families, who together construct and contest Turkey as a nation during and after the Cold War.
Monika Palmberger is Visiting Professor at the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre at the University of Leuven and Hertha Firnberg Research Fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. She earned her PhD at the University of Oxford in 2011 and thereafter has pursued postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen and at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. Her central research interests are memory, generation and the life course in contexts of war/migration. She is author/editor of three books: How Generations Remember: Conflicting Histories and Shared Memories in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina (Palgrave 2016), Memories on the Move: Experiencing Mobility, Rethinking the Past (with Jelena Tosic, Palgrave 2016), Caring on the Move: Ethnographic Explorations of Aging and Migration Across Societies (with Azra Hromadzic, Berghahn, forthcoming 2017).
Jeremy F. Walton is the leader of the Max Planck Research Group, “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities,” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany, a position that he began in March 2016. Since graduating from the University of Chicago with Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2009, Dr. Walton has had the good fortune to pursue a variety of teaching and research positions. From 2009 to 2012, he was an Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow in New York University’s Religious Studies Program; from 2012 to 2013, he was a Jamal Daniel Levant Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS); from 2013 to 2015, he was a member of the CETREN Transregional Research Network at Georg August University of Göttingen; and, from 2015 to 2016, he was a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies of South Eastern Europe at the University of Rijeka.
Kimberly Hart is an Associate Professor at the State University of New York, Buffalo State. Having conducted over a decade of fieldwork in the Yuntdağ, north of Manisa, her work focused on a women’s carpet weaving cooperative, love and marriage, and Islamic practice. Her book, And Then We Work for God: Rural Sunni Islam in Western Turkey, published by Stanford University Press in 2013, was written while a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. This year she has a Senior Scholar Fulbright Fellowship to study the street animals of Istanbul. Her new fieldwork considers urban transformation and the secular and Sunni-based configurations of meaning surrounding feline and canine lives in a rapidly changing urban landscape. Much of her work is visually-based and includes photography exhibits, the most recent, “Josephine’s Fragments,” is currently on view at the Erimtan Museum in Ankara.