Visiting Scholars

Khalilullah Afzali is a specialist of Persian literature and manuscript culture. Currently, he has a dual appointment as a visiting assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures) where he teaches graduate seminars and conducts research, and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Center for Near Eastern Studies. He is the founder of the Baysunghur Research Institute in Afghanistan, which focuses on study and preservation of the literary, cultural, and historical heritage of Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran. In his research and teaching, he focuses on codicology, Sufism, literary history and Bidel studies. He published two books and more than thirty papers in Persian both in Iran and Afghanistan. He is also the chief editor of Nama-ye Baysunghur annual journal of Institute.

Haydar Darici is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. His research focuses on youth politics of resistance in Kurdistan. He earned his PhD in History and Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Sarwerasa Rafizada is a specialist on Persian literature. She currently holds a dual appointment as a visiting adjunct professor in the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and as a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Center for Near Eastern Studies. She earned her degree in Persian literature at Kabul University in 2006, and her master's and doctoral degree from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in 2009 and 2015, respectively. From 2015 to 2021, she taught and conducted research at Kabul University. Prior to joining UCLA, Rafizada was a visiting researcher at the Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at UC Irvine.

Dominik Gutmeyr-Schnur is a historian and Erwin-Schrödinger-Fellow with the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) at UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies. He has joined UCLA from Austria, where he is Assistant Professor for (South-)Eastern European History and Anthropology at University of Graz (PhD, 2016). Previously, he managed the Horizon2020-project “Knowledge Exchange and Academic Cultures in the Humanities. Europe and the Black Sea Region” (2017-2021) and was a research fellow at Matenadaran Yerevan and the Armenian Academy of Sciences, Azerbaijan’s Academy of Sciences, Universities of Piatigorsk and Stavropol’ (Russian Federation), Shota-Rustaveli-University Batumi (Georgia), University of Montenegro, and University of Tallinn (Estonia).

His research encompasses visual cultures in Southeastern Europe and the Russian Empire, with a particular interest in an entangled history of photography in the wider Caucasus region. During his two-year fellowship at UCLA, he is working on a study of networks of photographic practices in the transimperial Caucasus – a study that explores the entanglement of photographic practices in the region’s adjacent Russian, Ottoman and Qajar empires and connects it to a global history of photography.

Serap Ruken Sengul served as Distinguished Research Fellow through the Promise Institute for Human Rights and the Center for Near Eastern Studies. She is an anthropologist whose work focuses on gender and sexual formations of sovereignty, nationalism, kinship, violence, memory and displacement in the Kurdish borderlands of Turkey, Iraq and Syria. During her two-year fellowship at UCLA, she has introduced several innovative and interdisciplinary courses to upper level undergraduate offerings in the Departments of Anthropology and Gender Studies, including “Gender and Militarism,” “Gender, Kinship, and the State," and "Violence and Memory in the Middle East." Dr. Sengul earned her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin, and completed her postdoctoral studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

Giuseppe Acconcia is an award-winning journalist and researcher who focuses on the Middle East. He has been a Post-Doc researcher at the University of Padova, Teaching Assistant at Bocconi University, and Lecturer at Milan’s Universitá Cattolica. He received his PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests focus on youth and social movements, Iranian domestic politics, State and transformation in the Middle East.

During his UCLA residency, Acconcia conducted research for a book on the 2011 uprisings in Egypt. Adopting Social Movement Theories (SMT) as a basic framework, he scrutinized the role of alternative networks in mobilizing and forming a potential revolutionary movement in Egypt. He showed that during the 2011 uprisings, the Muslim Brotherhood monopolized the space of dissent, preventing the formation of common identities among the protesters.

Dr. Marc André is an historian and associated researcher at the Laboratoire de recherches historiques Rhône-Alpes/Lyon (LARHRA) in France. His work focuses on the Algerian migration, the Algerian war, military justice in the Metropole and traumatic memory. He recently published a book entitled Femmes dévoilées. Des Algériennes en France à l’heure de la décolonisation [Unveiled Algerian women at the time of decolonization], ENS Editions, 2016.

During his 2017 residency at the Center for Near Eastern Studies, Dr. André’s research focused on Algerian women who came to France during the decolonization process and who struggled for independence in the metropole. He also worked on a new manuscript which studies Fortress Montluc, the military prison in Lyon. This prison is at the intersection of varied memories: that of Vichy, the Holocaust and the Algerian War.

Melissa Bilal is a Distinguished Research Fellow at UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies and a Lecturer in the Department of Ethnomusicology. Dr. Bilal comes from the American University of Armenia, where she is an Assistant Professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Previously, she held the positions of Visiting Professor of Armenian Studies in NELC at the University of Chicago, Visiting Scholar of History at MIT, Visiting Faculty of Armenian Studies in MESAAS at Columbia University, Visiting Lecturer of History at Boğaziçi University, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Orient-Institut Istanbul, and Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Music at Columbia University.

Mehrzad Boroujerdi is Professor of Political Science and O’Hanley Faculty Scholar at Syracuse University. He is currently a Fellow of the American Council on Education in residence at California State University, Northridge.

Dr. Boroujerdi’s research centers on intellectual and political history of modern Iran. He is the author of Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (1996), I Carved, Worshiped and Shattered: Essays on Iranian Politics and Identity [in Persian] (2010), and Post-Revolutionary Iran: A Handbook (2018). He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters in English and Persian, and edited Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and Theory of Statecraft (2013).

Dr. Boroujerdi’s dissertation at The American University won the Foundation for Iranian Studies Best Doctoral Dissertation in 1990. He has been a postdoctoral Fellow and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Harvard University and University of Texas at Austin. In addition, he has served as the editor of the Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East book series published by Syracuse University Press (1996-2014), the book review editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (2002-2007), and a principal investigator of the Iran Data Portal. Dr. Boroujerdi has also been a non-resident Scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C (2005-2016), and President of the International Society for Iranian Studies (2012-2014).

Verónica García Moreno is a Spanish scholar, journalist, and award-winning writer. She has been faculty in several universities in the USA and she is a Teaching Assistant Professor at Montana State University. Verónica obtained a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature at UCLA and a MA in Islamic Studies at the Universidad de Sevilla. Her research explores the Islamic Arab element in the articulation of the Hispanic identities and peripheral nationalisms, the liquid frontier of al-Andalus, and the power of the image in the configuration of Arab otherness. Her current research focuses on the works of Rafael Cansinos as a translator of the Persian poets into Spanish and his influence on Borges’ orientalism. Verónica is an active member of the Spanish Iranian Society and the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society-Latina.

Lorenzo Veracini is Associate Professor in History and Politics at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. His research focuses on the comparative history of colonial systems and settler colonialism. He has authored Israel and Settler Society (2006), Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010), and The Settler Colonial Present (2015). Lorenzo is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism (2016) and Editor in Chief of Settler Colonial Studies.

During his stay at UCLA, Veracini continued working on his 'displacement as method' project: a history of the ways in which collectively displacing elsewhere has been imagined and practiced throughout modernity as an alternative to revolution. He also gave a keynote talk at the UCLA conference on settler colonial studies in honor of the work of the late Patrick Wolfe. He partnered with UCLA faculty on an edited volume of the conference, published by Verso Press.

Umut Yildirim is an anthropologist working at the intersection of political, medical, and environmental anthropology with an ethnographic perspective from the Armenian/Kurdish region in Turkey. A manuscript for her first book, Low Intensities: Politics of Extraction and Refusal in a Middle Eastern Capital, is in the works. Her research is available in platforms such as Jadaliyya (2022), Current Anthropology (2021, fc), and Anthropological Theory (2019). She’s currently editing a book volume on Brown Ecologies, An-archic Fragments by ICI Press Berlin. Previously, she was affiliated with the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at FU Berlin and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, ICI Berlin, and taught political anthropology at Bilgi, Bogaziçi, and Sabanci Universities in Istanbul.