UNC Faculty Research Spotlight (1)
Dr. Micah Hughes
Micah Hughes is the Associate Director of the UNC Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the Department of Religious Studies at UNC-CH. Micah is an intellectual historian specializing in the study of religion, secularism, higher education, and civil society in 20th-century Turkey. He was formerly a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Muslim Philanthropy Initiative at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Prior to returning to UNC, he worked with an interdisciplinary team of researchers studying Muslim philanthropy from a global perspective. For more about his research, please visit his Academia.edu page.
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UNC CMEIS Faculty Research Spotlight
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UNC CMEIS Faculty Research Spotlight Dr. Banu Gökarıksel
Dr. Banu Gökarıksel has explored politics through relationships between neighbors and how tensions can come to a head when people with different beliefs live close to one another, an issue that resonates globally and locally. Her wide range of inquiry includes a new project in the Tar Heel State. She recently embarked on “Refugee Resettlement in North Carolina,” which examines the role of volunteering and community sponsorship as Afghans, Syrians, Ukrainians, and other refugees arrive in the state. The project explores what motivates people to work with refugees and how they navigate differences in religion, race, culture, and gender.
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UNC CMEIS Faculty Research Spotlight Dr. Ana Vinea
Dr. Ana Vinea’s current research project is broadly concerned with questions of knowledge production and knowledge contestations in medical practices at the intersection of biomedicine and religion. More specifically, Dr. Vinea’s book in progress Healing Muslims: Islam, Psychiatry, and Therapeutic Dilemmas in Contemporary Egypt, ethnographically investigates the emergence of Islamic revivalist spirit exorcism and the debates it has stirred among both Islamic scholars and psychiatrists in late 20th- and early 21st-century Egypt.
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UNC CMEIS Faculty Research Spotlight Dr. Michael A. Figueroa
Dr. Michael A. Figueroa (Associate Professor, Department of Music) is currently writing a book, Racial Awakening in Arab America: Performance, Intimacy, and Self-Critique, with the support of a Howard Foundation Fellowship (on leave, 2023–24). In the book, Figueroa examines post-9/11 racial formation in the context of a translocal Arab American music scene, which he argues has been a primary site for experimentation, commemoration, and other performative acts through which diaspora Arabs negotiate their racialization, sense of self and community, and orientation to others.
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UNC CMEIS Faculty Research Spotlight Dr. Claudia Yaghoobi
Dr. Claudia Yaghoobi is working on her fourth monograph tentatively titled, Voices from Margins: Exploring Experiences of Iranian Armenian American Women. In this project, she embarks on a literary journey that narrates her life, but also transcends the confines of a single narrative, extending her pen far beyond the pages of her own life. This project transcends the realm of memoir or biography; it is a mélange of autoethnography, oral history, and archival research. Her narrative, a symphony of 32 years spent under the cloak of the Islamic Republic, encapsulates not just the echoes of ethno-religious marginalization but also the complexities of class and gender discrimination. Dr. Yaghoobi’s life’s threads are interwoven with those of countless other Iranian Armenian women who have each navigated their own unique but undeniably relatable experiences. Within this project, she illuminates the intricate lives of Iranian Armenian women, not only within the context of their homeland in Iran but also as they grapple with the complexities of their identity on American soil. The layers of their existence are peeled back, revealing the struggles and triumphs of women who found themselves labeled as “women of color” in the US.
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UNC CMEIS Faculty Research Spotlight Dr. Nadia Yaqub
Dr. Nadia Yaqub has recently published an edited volume titled, Gaza on Screen (Duke UP). Gaza’s long association with resistance and humanitarian need has generated a complex and ever shifting range of visual material, comprising not just news reports and documentaries, but also essay, experimental, and fiction films, militant videos, and solidarity images. Contributors to Gaza on Screen, who include scholars and Gazan filmmakers, explore the practice, production, and impact of film and videos from and about the Gaza Strip. Conceptualizing screens—both large and small—as tools for mediation that are laden with power, the volume explores Gazan film and video in relation to humanitarianism and human rights, care, community, environment, mobility and confinement, and decolonization. The volume includes visual material ranging from solidarity broadcasts on Lebanese television, mid-twentieth-century British Pathé newsreels, and fiction films to breaking news, visuals of contemporary militant resistance, documentaries, and found footage films, arguing for a visual ecosystem in which differing types of film and video affect and inform each other. Throughout, Gaza on Screen demonstrates that screens shape and sustain relationships between Gaza and the world, and help to sustain the possibility of a different future.
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UNC CMEIS Faculty Research Spotlight Dr. Charles Kurzman
Dr. Charles Kurzman is working with the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, a non-profit organization based in Beirut, to build a data archive for research materials on and from the Arab region. The ACSS Dataverse went live several years ago and now contains more than a hundred datasets, which are preserved and made publicly available for the benefit of future generations of researchers. With support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, the ACSS Dataverse continues to work with data depositors and to train early-career researchers in open science practices for data management.
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UNC CMEIS Faculty Research Spotlight Dr. Eren Tasar
Although Islam was the second largest religion in the USSR, to date the impact of Soviet atheism on the country’s Muslims has not received even the most peripheral scholarly attention. Dr. Eren Tasar’s project seeks to address this significant gap in the scholarship on religion in the Soviet Union and immediate post-Soviet period, and Islam and politics in the twentieth century, by bringing scientific atheistic literature written in languages employed by Muslims in the USSR’s largest Islamic region, the five republics (“the ’stans”) of Central Asia, into the scholarly discussion about Soviet religion and Soviet Islam. Atheist genres constituted the one legal means of writing about everyday Islam in the Soviet Union. Encompassing a wide variety of genres, from children's literature to drama, atheist literature ironically became a vehicle for the expression of Islamic values, a religious medium hiding in plain sight within the midst of an irreligious society.
