All full 2025 MESA Members (fellows and students) are asked to cast their votes in the 2025 Nominating Committee Election and on the referendum to MESA's bylaws.
Eligibility: Only current-year Full members (Fellows, Students, and Honorary Fellows) are eligible to vote. This is an opportunity to select the nominators of the candidates who will be elected later this year as directors of our association. One ballot per eligible voting member is allowed. You must be a current MESA member for 2025 to vote; your membership status will be verified. Associate members and institutional members are not eligible.
Instructions: You may cast your vote electronically below, and may vote only once. The ballot is at the bottom of this page.
Please read the candidate biographies below. Select up to five candidates among the fellows, and one candidate among the students. The five fellows receiving the most votes and the one student receiving the most votes will serve on the 2025 Nominating Committee which will be responsible for identifying candidates for three positions on MESA's Board of Directors, one of them a Student Member.
Please read the proposed changes to MESA's bylaws; a summary of the proposals is included below. The Board proposed a number of technical updates to MESA’s bylaws, which were approved at the 2024 Members Meeting to move forward to a membership vote by referendum. Bylaws amendments require a supermajority of two-thirds in favor to be approved.
Deadline: to be counted, your ballots must arrive at the office of the Secretariat by no later than Thursday, March 21, 2025, at Noon Eastern Time (US).
Nominating Committee Candidates
Fellows
Hanadi Al-Samman
Hanadi Al-Samman is an associate professor of Arabic language and literature in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on contemporary Arabic literature, diaspora and sexuality studies, and transnational and Islamic feminism(s). She published several articles including Journal of Arabic Literature, Women's Studies International Forum, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, and various edited collections. She is the co-editor of the IJMES special issue “Queer Affects” and two other edited collections, and author of Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women’s Writings (Syracuse University Press, 2015). She served as AMEWS President 2017-2019.
Lisa Bhungalia
Lisa Bhungalia is an Assistant Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and core faculty member of the Middle East Studies Program. Their research examines evolving modalities of late-modern war, empire and transnational linkages between the US and Southwest Asian and North African region. Their first book, Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine (Stanford University Press, December 2023), traces the deepening entanglements of aid, law, and war in Palestine with attention to the surveillance and policing regimes produced through the embedding of counterterrorism laws and infrastructures into civilian aid flows.They are also developing new research on the social lives of terrorism databases.
Beth Derderian
Beth Derderian is assistant professor of anthropology and museum studies at the College of Wooster. She holds a PhD in anthropology (Northwestern University) and an MA in Near Eastern & Museum Studies (NYU). Stanford University Press will publish her book, Art Capital: Museum Politics and the Making of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, in winter 25/26. Her current projects include a graphic novel about excavations at Pella in Jordan, co-authored with artist Azim Al Ghussein, and a monograph on wartime seizures of Middle Eastern artifacts. She also directs the Pella at Wooster project.
Brahim El Guabli
A Black and Amazigh Indigenous scholar, Brahim El Guabli received his PhD from Princeton University. He is associate professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. El Guabli is the author of the award-winning book Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence (Fordham 2023). Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and its Radical Consequences, his second book, is forthcoming with the University of California Press. Actively involved in rehabilitating and promoting peripheralized cultural production, El Guabli has co-founded and co-edits the independent peer-reviewed journal Tamazgha Studies Journal as well as the Amazigh Studies series published by Georgetown University Press.
Esmat Elhalaby
Esmat Elhalaby is an Assistant Professor of Transnational History at the University of Toronto. Previously he was a Humanities Research Fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi and a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Davis. His first book Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization is forthcoming from the University of California Press in Fall 2025. His research focuses primarily on colonial and anti-colonial thought from the nineteenth century to the present.
Bassam Haddad
Bassam Haddad is 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 A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding The Syrian Calamity: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders.
Nader Hashemi
Nader Hashemi is the Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and an Associate Professor of Middle East politics at Georgetown University. Previously he was the founding Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver. He is the author of Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies (Oxford University Press, 2009) and co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (Melville House, 2011), The Syria Dilemma (MIT Press, 2013), Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2017) and a four-volume study Islam and Human Rights (Routledge, 2023).
Shay Hazkani
Shay Hazkani is an Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He specializes in the social and cultural history of Palestine/Israel. He is the author of Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War (Stanford 2021), a study of the Nakba, based on personal letters and official propaganda. Hazkani is also the co-creator of The Soldier’s Opinion, a documentary film based on his research. He has been active on questions of archival declassification, petitioning the Israeli Supreme Court in 2019 to open Shin Bet archives. Before academia, Shay worked as a journalist.
KOH Choon Hwee
KOH Choon Hwee is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the author of The Sublime Post: How the Ottoman Imperial Post became a Public Service (2024). Koh is interested to understand what living in the Ottoman world was like, for the powerful and the less powerful, before the heyday of European hegemony. She is a member of the UCLA Ottoman music ensemble as an amateur darbouka player, a founding organizer of the UCLA History department's Brown Bag Workshop series, and organized an Arabo-Perso-Turkish table for students. She was born and brought up in Singapore.
Joanne Randa Nucho
Joanne Randa Nucho is Visiting Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power (Princeton University Press, 2016). Her work focuses on how processes of urban infrastructure building, including electricity, bridges and roads, as well as social welfare provision, are the channels that help produce and recalibrate forms of violence and exclusion. Her book in progress is provisionally titled Post-Grid Futures and looks at energy infrastructure that demands new forms of analysis. She is also a filmmaker and a member of the editorial collective of the journal, Cultural Anthropology.
Aseel Sawalha
Aseel Sawalha is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Fordham University, New York. She conducted anthropological fieldwork in Amman, Beirut, Nablus, and New York City. In Beirut, she explored how various readings of the past informed and shaped debates over identity, ethnicity, culture, and gender relations in the context of urban reconstruction in postwar Beirut. She is the author of Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City. University of Texas Press. Currently, she is studying the ways Iraqi and Syrian refugee artists reshape Amman’s cultural and physical landscapes. She is a board member of Insaniyyat, the Palestinian Anthropological Association.
İpek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu
İpek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu is Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program at Northwestern University. She is currently serving as the President of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. She taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before joining Northwestern’s History faculty. Her first book, Blood Ties: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, was published by Cornell University Press in 2014. Her current monograph project is on Jewish muhajirs emigrating from Eastern Europe into the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Gizem Zencirci
Gizem Zencirci is an associate professor of political science at Providence College’s Department of Political Science, where she is also the director of the Middle East Studies program. During 2024, she was a residential fellow at the Inherit-Heritage in Transformation, the Centre for Advanced Study at Humboldt University, Berlin. Her first book, The Muslim Social: Neoliberalism, Charity, and Poverty in Turkey (Syracuse University Press, 2024) examines how two seemingly separate forces—neoliberalism and Islamism—intersect and shape poverty governance in Turkey. Zencirci’s research examines the relationship between Islamic politics and neoliberal globalization; the reproduction of Ottoman-Islamic civilizational heritage; and the transformation of political governance in Turkey.
Students
Lily Hindy
Lily Hindy is a PhD candidate in history at UCLA. Her dissertation explores how Kurds in Iraq and the diaspora used the language and bureaucracy of human rights to raise awareness about their plight and gain support for autonomy from the 1960s until 2005. In addition to archival research, she has conducted oral history interviews in Iraqi Kurdistan, England, Sweden, France, and the U.S. Her research has been published by The Century Foundation, the Luskin Center for History and Policy, and Syria Deeply. Hindy holds a B.A. in political science from Smith College and a Master’s in International Affairs from Columbia University.
Summary of Proposed Bylaws Changes
To see the full details of the changes including the current, proposed, and if adopted versions, go here.
Bylaws Amendment #1.
Add Personnel Committee to Article VI as new Section 5, move current Section 5. Other Committees to become Section 6.
Explanation: The Board of MESA would like to formalize the annual review process of the MESA Secretariat's operations.
Proposed new committee text:
- Section 5. Personnel Committee. The Personnel Committee shall consist of three persons: The MESA President as chair, and two senior Fellow Members from the Board of Directors—one of whom may be the Past President (if available)—appointed by the President in consultation with the Executive Director. The Committee shall conduct the annual review of the Executive Director, address any personnel issues that arise, and assess the staffing needs of the Association in collaboration with the Executive Director. The Committee shall submit its report and recommendations annually to the Board of Directors for approval.
Bylaws Amendment #2.
Update petition signature threshold:
Explanation: MESA has not updated this number since the organization was founded with 50 members, when 25 members represented half of the membership. The Board prefers to set a certain number, rather than a percentage, so the total needed is always clear.
Update number of members required for petitions in five places. Current number is 25, changing to 75.
- Article III. Section 4. b. 1) seventy-five
- Article IV. Section 7: seventy-five members (Fellows); seventy-five Student Members
- Article V. Section 2: seventy-five fellows
- Article VIII. seventy-five voting members
Bylaws Amendment #3.
Increase notice period for receipt of resolutions by an additional week.
Explanation: The Secretariat requests additional time to prepare in case of a membership resolution. The weeks before the Annual Meeting are by far the busiest time for the staff, so an additional week to take the needed preparations is operationally essential.
Update resolutions to be received three weeks in advance, currently two weeks before the Annual Meeting
- Article III. Section 4. b. 1) three weeks
Bylaws Amendment #4.
Add a miscellaneous provision explicitly authorizing virtual or electronic meetings.
Explanation: For avoidance of doubt, and to comply with potentially applicable state laws, MESA would like to update the bylaws to reflect what has been our practice for many years.
Add a new section in ARTICLE VII. MISCELLANEOUS PROVISIONS
- Section 9. Virtual Meetings and Participation by Certain Electronic Means
Subject to the provisions of applicable statutes and these Bylaws, any meetings of the Members and meetings of the Directors, including Annual Meetings, may be held virtually or in a hybrid format approved by the Board of Directors through the use of any means of communication by which all Members and Directors participating may simultaneously hear each other during the meeting and have a reasonable opportunity to participate in the meeting. A Member or Director participating in a meeting by this means is deemed to be present in person at the meeting.