Meet the Faculty
Amal Amireh
Associate Professor
Middle Eastern Literature; World Literature; Postcolonial Studies; Gender and Sexuality
Dr. Amireh received a BA in English literature from Birzeit University in the West Bank and an MA and a PhD in English and American literature from Boston University. Before joining George Mason University, Amireh taught at An-Najah National University and Birzeit University (both in West Bank/Palestine).
She is author of The Factory Girl and the Seamstress: Imagining Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Garland, 2000), and is co-editor, with Lisa Suhair Majaj of Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (Garland, 2000) and Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (McFarland, 2002). Her writings on Arab women and Arabic literature have appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Critique, and GLQ: The Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, among others and as chapters in various edited collections.
Maria M Dakake
Director of Undergraduate Programs
Associate Professor
Islamic Thought; Qur'anic Studies; Shi'ite and Sufi Traditions; Women and Gender
Dr. Dakake researches and publishes on Islamic intellectual history, Quranic studies, Shi`ite and Sufi traditions, and women's spirituality and religious experience. She is one of the general editors and contributing authors of The Study Quran (HarperOne, 2015), which comprises a translation and verse-by-verse commentary on the Qur'anic text that draws upon the rich and varied tradition of Muslim commentary on their own scripture. Her most recent publication, The Routledge Companion to the Qur'an (September 2021), is a co-edited volume with 40 articles on the Qur'an's history, content, style, and interpretation written by leading contemporary scholars working from different methodological perspectives. She is currently completing a monograph, Toward an Islamic Theory of Religion, and has begun work on a partial translation of a Persian Qur'an commentary written by the 20th-century Iranian female scholar, Nusrat Amin.
Hatim El-Hibri
Associate Professor
Global Media & Television Studies; Middle East & Arab Media Studies; Visual Culture Studies
Hatim El-Hibri is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies. His research and teaching interests focus on global and transnational media studies, visual culture studies, Lebanon and the Middle East, Urban Studies, Television Studies, and Media Theory and History. His first book, Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure (Duke University Press, 2021) was awarded the Jane Jacobs Book Award by the Urban Communication Foundation. Prior to joining George Mason, he was a faculty member of the Media Studies Program at the American University of Beirut. As of now, Hatim is currently working on a book titled Streaming the Crisis.
Nathaniel Greenberg
Associate Professor
MENA Studies; Film Studies; Media Studies; Discourse Analysis; Public Diplomacy
Nathaniel Greenberg is an Associate Professor of Arabic in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University. His most recent book is How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring: The Politics of Narrative in Tunisia and Egypt (Edinburgh, 2019). A Comparative Literature scholar by training, Professor Greenberg's research and teaching examine the intersection of technology, politics, and culture in the modern Middle East and North Africa. In 2015, he created Mason's first B. A concentration in Arabic, and from 2021-202,4, he was the principal investigator of Project GO, a $1,3 million grant from the Institute for International Education and DLNSEO to train select ROTC students from across the country in critical languages and intercultural communication skills. In addition to his peer-reviewed research, Professor Greenberg's writing and reporting have appeared in The Seattle Times, Jadaliyya, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Conversation, and Euronews. In 2024, he became a Senior Fulbright Scholar to Spain, where he completed a new book concerning American public diplomacy.
Bassam S. Haddad
Associate Professor
Political Economy of Development; Violence, Terrorism, and US Foreign Policy; Syria; Authoritarian Rule
Bassam Haddad is the Founding Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of the forthcoming book, A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Magazine. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book tittled Understanding The Syrian Tragedy: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).
Sumaiya A. Hamdani
Associate Professor
Islamic History; Middle East; Women's Studies; Global History
Dr. Hamdani received her B.A. from Georgetown University and M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University in the field of Islamic history. Her book, Between Revolution and State: the Construction of Fatimid Legitimacy (I.B. Tauris 2006) examines the development of legal and historical literature by the Ismaili Shi’i Fatimid state. Her research has also included articles and reviews in the fields of Shi’i thought, Islamic history, and women in Islam. Her teaching interests include Islamic, Middle East, and world history. Her current research examines the construction of identity in Muslim minority communities in South Asia during the colonial and post-colonial periods. Dr. Hamdani has served on advisory boards of the Middle East Studies Association, the American Institute of Yemeni Studies, and the North American Association of Islamic and Muslim Studies, among others. She co-founded and was director of the Islamic Studies program at George Mason University from 2003-2008.
Cortney L. Hughes Rinker
Professor
Medical Anthropology; Aging & end-of-life care; Pain Management; Reproductive Health, Islam
Cortney Hughes Rinker is Professor of Global Affairs and serves as the program's Director. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, with emphases in Feminist Studies and Medicine, Science, and Technology Studies. Her teaching and research interests are in medical anthropology, Islam, aging and end-of-life care, public policy, reproduction, Middle East Studies, development, science and technology, and applied anthropology. She conducted long-term research (2005-2009) on reproductive healthcare among working-class women in Rabat, Morocco, which turned into her book Islam, Development, and Urban Women’s Reproductive Practices (Routledge, 2013). This research focused on the ways the country’s new development policies impact how childbearing and child-rearing practices are promoted to women and how women incorporate these practices into their ideas of citizenship. Before joining George Mason, Cortney was a postdoctoral fellow at the Arlington Innovation Center for Health Research at Virginia Tech, where she worked in conjunction with a healthcare organization in southwest Virginia, developing projects to improve end-of-life care and psychiatric services in a rural Appalachian town.
Yasemin Ipek
Assistant Professor
Activism & Civil Society; Crisis, Political Imagination; Citizenship & Belonging, Decoloniality; Sectarianism
Yasemin İpek is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Global Affairs Program. Her research is situated at the intersection of the anthropology of politics, activism, and inequality; critical studies of humanitarianism and refugees; decoloniality studies; and studies of Islam, sectarianism, and nationalism in the modern Middle East. As a political anthropologist interested in emergent political formations against globally and locally hegemonic forms of power, her interdisciplinary research trajectory draws upon ethnography, political theory, sociology, and critical area studies. She is particularly interested in how crisis can become generative of competing political and ethical lifeworlds, and her diverse research projects demonstrate how new political imaginations and (un) belongings continually arise in contexts of ongoing precarity.
Her book Crisiswork: Activist Lifeworlds and Bounded Futures in Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2025) examines the relationship between crisis and political imagination in Lebanon by ethnographically studying activism as a simultaneously colonizing and decolonizing field of encounters between a wide range of self-identified activists, such as unemployed NGO volunteers, middle-class consultants, leftist entrepreneurs, and humanitarian workers.
Peter Mandaville
Professor
International Affairs; Islam; International Relations
Dr. Peter Mandaville is Professor of International Affairs in the Schar School of Policy and Government and Director of the AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies (ACGIS) in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) at George Mason University. From 2024-25 he served as the Director of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and Senior Advisor for Faith Engagement at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). From 2022-24 he was Senior Advisor for Religion and Inclusive Societies at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). His prior government experience includes serving as a member of the U.S. State Department's Policy and Planning Staff (2010-12) and as a Senior Advisor in the Secretary of State's Office of Religion and Global Affairs (2015-16). \ He is the author or editor of the books The Geopolitics of Religious Soft Power (2023), Wahhabism and the World (2022), Islam & Politics (Third Edition, 2020) and Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma (2001)
Huseyin Yilmaz
Associate Professor
Ottoman History; Middle East; Early Modern Political Thought; Translation and Transmission of Knowledge
Dr. Yilmaz holds a Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. His research interests focus on the early modern Middle East including political thought, geographic imageries, social movements, and cultural history. His most recent publications are “The Eastern Question and the Ottoman Empire: The Genesis of the Near and Middle East in the Nineteenth Century” and “From Serbestiyet to Hürriyet: Ottoman Statesmen and the Question of Freedom During the Late Enlightenment.”
Prior to his appointment at George Mason in 2012, Dr. Yilmaz taught for the Introduction to the Humanities Program and Department of History at Stanford University and the Department of History at University of South Florida. Prior to that, he was appointed Research Fellow with the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, Austria. His new book, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought, is the first comprehensive study of pre-modern Ottoman political thought, and was published by Princeton University Press in January 2018. Dr. Yilmaz is also the Research Director for the AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University.