New GMES Faculty
Department: Global Middle East Studies
Post Date: October 2, 2017News Details
The Global Middle East Studies program is proud to announce several wonderful additions to our faculty.
Professor Sherine Hamdy has joined the UCI Department of Anthropology. Prof. Hamdy studies medical anthropology and science and technology in the Middle East. She’s an experimental ethnographer who uses graphic novels and comics to bring her research to a wider audience. She previously published Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggles for Human Dignity in Egypt, which received the Clifford Geertz Honorable Mention Book Prize. Her anthropological studies have been published in Medical Anthropology; Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry; the Journal of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics; and American Ethnologist. Prof. Hamdy will begin teaching courses specifically related to the GMES program next year.
We also would like to welcome Professor Ian Straughn, who has also joined the Department of Anthropology with specialties in archaeology, cultural heritage, space and landscape, and material culture. He is interested in the stories behind different cultures as they can be explored through archaeology of the Middle East – particularly the Islamic periods. He’s conducted research in Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Armenia, studying regional cultural heritage and material culture.
Prof. Straughn will be teaching courses including, in Winter 2018, "Cultures of the Middle East," which offers a survey of the diverse cultures of the contemporary Middle East through the lens of anthropology, and "Egyptomania," which examines the fascination with all things ancient Egyptian and particularly how the discovery of King Tut's tomb changed both archaeology and Egypt in myriad ways. In the Spring quarter he will teach "Archaeology of the Islamic World," which explore the sites, artifacts, methods and conceptual issues that form the archaeology of the Muslim world, and the ability of archaeology to produce knowledge about the varied social worlds that have been shaped by an engagement with Muslims and the Islamic tradition.