Message from Chancellor Fox: One of UCSD’s greatest institutional strengths is the breadth and depth of faculty research on a range of important topics. Each month, Chancellor’s Corner will showcase cross-disciplinary faculty expertise in a specific area. I invite you to learn more about the work of these scholars, and I hope you share my pride in their achievements and their contributions to society

MIDDLE EAST STUDIES

Guillermo Algaze, Professor, Department of Anthropology
A MacArthur Fellowship recipient in 2003, Guillermo Algaze is an expert in Near Eastern, Anatolian, and Mesopotamian archaeology, comparative archaeology of early civilizations, and complex societies. His principal archaeological work has been done in Turkey. More…

Eli Berman, Associate Professor of Economics and Affiliated Faculty of IR/PS, Research Director for International Security Studies at the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC)
His research interests include labor economics, the economics of religion, labor markets and technological change, economic demography, applied econometrics, economic growth and development, and environmental economics. His work on the Economics of Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2000. More…

Gary Fields, Associate Professor of Communications
Fields' research focuses on the political economy of territorial development in both historical and contemporary settings with an emphasis on the role of communications systems in the process of territorial formation and change. I am particularly interested in comparative research across historical time periods in the belief that the contemporary world is intelligible through historical analogy. More…

Hasan Kayali, Professor, Middle Eastern History
Hasan Kayali teaches the history of the Middle East in the Islamic period. He studied at Harvard University, where he received his doctorate in History and Middle Eastern Studies in 1988. His research focus is political history of the Middle East in the early twentieth century. He has written on the administration of Arab provinces in the late Ottoman Empire and nationalism and rival ideologies during the transition from empire to nation-states. More…

Michael Provence, Assistant Professor of History
A specialist in modern Middle East history and politics, Michael Provence has an emphasis on the colonial and post-colonial Arab world, including Arab politics and society, Arab/American relations, the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and contemporary Middle East conflicts. More…

Thomas Levy, Professor, Department of Anthropology
Thomas Levy is interested in the areas of social evolution, Pastoral-Nomadic societies, biblical archaeology, and Middle Eastern archaeology, with emphasis on Israel, Palestine and Jordan. He has published scholarly articles in journals such as Antiquity, Archaeometry, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology (JMA), World Archaeology, and others. Recently, he founded two new book series, New Approaches to Anthropological Archaeology and New Handbooks in Anthropological Archaeology. More…

Babak Rahimi, Assistant Professor of Iranian and Islamic Studies
Babak Rahimi, who earned his BA at UCSD, received a Ph.D from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, in October 2004. Rahimi has also studied at the University of Nottingham, where he obtained a M.A. in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, and London School of Economics and Political Science, where he was a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, 2000-2001. Rahimi was recently a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, Washington DC, where he conducted research on the institutional contribution of Shi’i political organizations in the creation of a vibrant civil society in Iraq. He has published articles on culture, religion and politics in Iranian Studies and Critical Theory and Historical Sociology. More…

Gershon Shafir, Professor, Department of Sociology,
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Peace Process
Gershon Shafir is an expert in the areas of Middle Eastern politics and ethnicity, especially in Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His current research projects include: Decolonization and Peacemaking in South Africa and Israel/Palestine and Was the Yom Kippur War Unavoidable? His major area of interest is comparative-historical sociology, with emphases on nationalism, ethnicity, and citizenship rights. More…

** To learn more about other campus faculty scholars and areas of expertise, please visit the searchable UCSD Faculty Experts Database at: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/facultyExperts/