Center for Global Islamic Studies Faculty-Core Committee
Saladin Malik Ambar
Saladin Malik Ambar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science where he teaches courses in American politics on the American presidency and governorship, race and American political development, and political parties and elections. He is a 2008 graduate of Rutgers University's PhD program in political science and a 2007 fellow of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Professor Ambar is the author of the forthcoming book How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). He is currently working on a manuscript on Malcolm X's participation in the 1964 Oxford Union debate, where he examines the role of race, religion, and identity politics in both the United States and United Kingdom. Since his arrival in 2009, Professor Ambar has been active in Lehigh's Africana Studies program where he has taught courses in Black Political Thought, along with a First Year Seminar on the Political Philosophy of Barack Obama.
Taïeb Berrada
Taïeb Berrada joined the Lehigh faculty in Fall 2009. Half Russian half Moroccan, he lived most of his life in Morocco before moving to France to study Foreign Languages. He received his BA in English and Russian at the University of Paul Valéry Montpellier III, his MA in French Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his PhD in French and Francophone Studies at Northwestern University. Before coming to Lehigh University, he was Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine.
His research and teaching interests are in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, more specifically, North African and Beur Literatures and Cultures, Film, Graphic Novels, Rap Music, Critical and Postcolonial Theory. Professor Berrada is particularly interested in analyzing the complex relationship between France and the Maghreb through the theoretical lenses of identity, space, traumatic memory, and displacement in view of a reassessment of contemporary claims to transnationalism. His current research focuses on clandestine narratives, namely stories of illegal immigrants crossing South-North borders in Contemporary Maghrebi novels and films.
Marie-Hélène Chabut
Marie-Hélène Chabut is Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century French literature, especially on Diderot and women novelists. She is the author of Denis Diderot: Extravagance et génialité (1998) as well as numerous essays and articles on female novelists, most notably Isabelle de Charrière. She is presently working on a study of the construction and representation of alternative models of masculinity in works by French women novelists of the Enlightenment.
At Lehigh she teaches courses on French literature and culture, and on women writers. A strong advocate of dialogue and mutual respect between people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, she has participated in the creation and implementation of such Lehigh programs as Global Citizenship and Global Studies. In the last three years, she has worked at making Islamic cultures and Arabic more visible at Lehigh by developing our program in Arabic language and by bringing speakers and a Fulbright scholar from Egypt to campus (AY 2008-09).
Nandini Deo
Nandini Deo is an Assistant Professor in Political Science who joined the Lehigh community in 2008 having completed doctoral and post-doctoral work at Yale University. Her research interests include the intersection of religion and politics, transnational social networks and South Asian politics.
Khurram Hussain
Khurram Hussain is an Assistant Professor in the Religion Studies Department. He joined the Lehigh Community in 2009 as a Pre-doctoral Research Fellow with CGIS and was hired to his current position beginning Fall 2012. Hussain's doctoral work focused on the life and work of the 19th century Muslim reformer Sayyid Ahmad Khan and he received his PhD. from Yale University in December 2011. His research interests include the comparative study of religious ethics, political religion, modern Islam, and the relationship between tradition and modernity in contemporary religious discourse.
Susan Kart
Susan Kart earned her doctorate and master’s degrees in African art history from Columbia University. Her bachelor’s degree in art history was awarded with high honors from Smith College. She also studied at the Paris IV-Sorbonne in Paris, France. Prior to joining Lehigh’s faculty, Kart served as a professor of African art history at Sarah Lawrence College and as curator for the Art Gallery at Yonkers Riverfront Library, where she has curated or overseen twelve exhibitions. She has published in journals such as Critical Interventions, African Studies Review, and African Arts, and is working on new articles and a book about her research, found object art in post-colonial Senegal and the work of Moustapha Dimé.
Rajan Menon (Core Committee member 2009-2010; 2011-2012)
Rajan Menon is Monroe J. Rathbone Professor and Chair, Department of International Relations. His most recent book is The End of Alliances (Oxford University, 2007). His research on the Islamic world covers Central Asia, the South and North Caucasus, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Turkey, and Indonesia. He has written articles on these parts of the world for such journals as Foreign Affairs, International Security, Survival, The National Interest, and the American Interest. He is frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek, and his ope-eds have also appeared in the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, washingtonpost.com, and the Chicago Tribune. He has been a commentator on National Public Radio, CNN, ABC News, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Michael Raposa
Michael L. Raposa is Chairperson and a Professor of Religion Studies and the E.W. Fairchild Professor of American Studies at Lehigh University. He joined the Lehigh faculty in 1985; from 2006-08, he served as associate dean for undergraduate programs in the College of Arts and Sciences. Raposa’s primary research and teaching interests are in the philosophy of religion.
Robert Rozehnal
Robert Rozehnal is an Associate Professor of Religion Studies and the founding director of Lehigh's Center for Global Islamic Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Duke University and an M.A. in South Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has traveled widely in the Muslim world, with extended periods of study and fieldwork research in India, Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Turkey and Malaysia. In addition to the history and practice of Sufism in South Asia, his research interests include ritual studies, postcolonial theory, religious nationalism, cyberspace religion, and globalization. At Lehigh, Rozehnal teaches a variety of classes on Islam and comparative South Asian religions. He is also active in numerous interdisciplinary programs, including Global Studies, Asian Studies and South Mountain College. Beyond campus, he has directed two Lehigh summer study abroad programs in India and Turkey that each focus on Islam. Rozehnal is the author of numerous articles and a recent monograph, Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in Twenty-First Century Pakistan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007/2009). He is currently working on a new book project, Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience (under contract with Oneworld Publications, Oxford, England, forthcoming).
Timothy Schwarz (Core Committee member 2009-2013)
Violinist Timothy Schwarz has been hailed by critics around the world for his exemplary technique and passionate musicianship. He made his debut as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the age of nine, and continues to solo extensively in the United States and abroad. The American Record Guide hailed his latest CD as “The one to have, if you can only have one”. In 1995, Schwarz was appointed an “Artistic Ambassador” by the United States State Department. As part of this appointment, he has performed All-American recitals in over a dozen countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. He has commissioned numerous works, which combine Arab and American melodies. These commissions brought him special recognition by Ambassador Ryan Crocker and an invitation to perform at the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, DC.
Bruce Whitehouse
Bruce Whitehouse joined Lehigh's faculty as Assistant Professor of Anthropology in 2008 following graduate work at Brown University. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Nigeria, Mali, and the Republic of Congo. His research focuses on transnationalism, Islamic identity and social change, particularly among populations living in or originating from Africa's western Sahel region.
Aladdin M. Yaqub (Core Committee member 2009-2011)
Aladdin Yaqub did his undergraduate studies in mathematics at the University of Baghdad, Iraq, and his graduate studies in mathematics and philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1991. His areas of research interest are logic, philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, and medieval Islamic philosophy. He has published works in ISIS, The Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, The Philosophical Review, Synthese, The Arab Journal for the Humanities, and Arabic Sciences and Philosophy. His book, The Liar Speaks the Truth: A Defense of the Revision Theory of Truth, was published by Oxford University Press in 1993. He is currently working on an annotated translation of al-Ghazali’s al-Iqtisad fi al-I‘tiqad (Moderation in Belief). His next project is a book on symbolic logic. Before joining the philosophy faculty at Lehigh University, he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Florida State University, Luther College and the University of New Mexico.