Alumni Profiles

Alma is an assistant professor in the History and Jewish Studies Departments of UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests lie at the crossroads of Jewish history, North Africa, French empire, and the history of social movements. She is expanding her dissertation, Radical Nationalists: Moroccan Jewish Communists 1925-1975, into a book.

Alma remembers the Center as a fertile intellectual gathering space in which to meet scholars and learn about their work. Regarding the library she says, “David Hirsch, the UCLA Middle East and Jewish Studies librarian, is a rare mind and resource -- I can't count the number of people whose projects he's helped shape.”

Ziad Abu-Rish teaches in the History Department at Ohio University, where his courses focus on the political, social, and cultural history of the modern Middle East and North Africa. He also serves on the editorial teams of the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya e-zine.

A 2014 UCLA history PhD, Ziad’s dissertation work was supervised by James Gelvin, whom he identifies along with Aslı Bâli and Susan Slyomovics as role models. Ziad is grateful to the Center for providing a place to connect to faculty who shared his interests from many departments. He also salutes the library and Middle East bibliographer David Hirsch for providing the depth and breadth of materials for a robust dissertation project.

Ziad recognized the value of the Center’s wide range of public lectures and conferences that caused him to think beyond his own research area. Now he organizes community lectures, film screenings, and other informative outreach activities for the broader community in Ohio.

Janell Rothenberg received her Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from UCLA in 2015. Her dissertation, The Social Life of Logistics on the Moroccan Mediterranean Coast, received the 2016 Dissertation Award from the Association of Middle East Anthropologists. This research was supported by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the National Science Foundation Program in Science, Technology, and Society, the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, and Department of Anthropology and Graduate Division at UCLA. From 2015-2016, she was Postdoctoral Fellow in Middle East Studies at George Washington University. Most recently, she was Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Core Faculty in Middle East Studies at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.

Dr. Rothenberg is completing revisions for her book manuscript, Everyday Logistics: Making Morocco's Mega-Port, an ethnography of infrastructure, globalization, and work in North Africa. Under contract with Indiana University Press, this study is based on two years of field research in the logistics and transportation industry in Tangier, Morocco. She will also be preparing articles on subsequent research in Morocco on engineering ethics, the responsibilities of green logistics, and an urban movement for energy equality.