Engseng Ho is Director of the Middle East Institute, and Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Visiting Professor of Arabia Asia Studies at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. At Duke University, he is Professor of Anthropology and Professor of History. He is a leading scholar of transnational anthropology, history and Muslim societies, Arab diasporas, and the Indian Ocean. His research expertise is in Arabia, coastal South Asia and maritime Southeast Asia, and he maintains active collaborations with scholars in these regions. He serves on the editorial boards of journals such as American Anthropologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, History and Anthropology, Modern Asian Studies. He is co-editor of the Asian Connections book series at Cambridge University Press. He has previously worked as Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University; Senior Scholar, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies; Country and Profile Writer, the Economist Group; International Economist, Government of Singapore Investment Corporation/Monetary Authority of Singapore. He was educated at the Penang Free School, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago.

Madhawi Al-Rasheed is Visiting Research Professor at the Middle East Institute at National University of Singapore (2016). She was Professor of Anthropology of Religion at King’s College, London (1994-2013). Before joining MEI, she was Visiting Professor at the Middle East Centre, London School of Economics. Professor Al-Rasheed specializes in the history, politics and society in Saudi Arabia. Her interdisciplinary research includes focus on Christian minorities in Iraq, Arab migration to London, Gulf transnational connections, gender relations in Saudi Arabia, and the Islamist movement. She has published widely on Saudi Arabia: Muted Modernists: the Struggle over Divine Politics in Saudi Arabia, London: Hurst 7 Co. & Oxford University Press 2015. M. A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics and Religion in Saudi Arabia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2013 A History of Saudi Arabia, Second Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010. Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007. Mazaq Al-islah fi al-Saudiyyah fi al-Qarn al-Wahid wa al-Ishrin, London: al-Saqi 2005. Iraqi Assyrian Christians in London: the Construction of Ethnicity, New York: the Edwin Mellen Press 1998. Politics in an Arabian Oasis: the Rashidi Tribal Dynasty, London: I.B. Tauris 1991. At MEI, Al-Rasheed is working on a new research project on the resilience of monarchy in Saudi Arabia in the context of the Arab uprisings in 2011.

Peter Sluglett is a Visiting Research Professor at the Middle East Institute of the National University of Singapore. He has a BA from Cambridge (1966) and a D.Phil from Oxford (1972). He has taught Middle Eastern History at the University of Durham (1974-1994) and at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City (1994-2011), where he was Director of the University’s Middle East Centre. He has published widely on the modern history of Iraq, including Iraq since 1958: from Revolution to Dictatorship, 3rd edn., (2001, with Marion Farouk-Sluglett), and Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (2007). He has also edited and contributed to The Urban Social History of the Middle East 1750-1950 (2008), Syria and Bilad al-Sham under Ottoman Rule: Essays in Honour of Abdul-Karim Rafeq, (2010, with Stefan Weber), and Writing the Modern History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges (2012). He recently completed an Atlas of Islamic History (2014, with Andrew Currie).

Juan E. Campo is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara and Director of the UCSB Education Abroad Program.  He specializes in the comparative study of Islam, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia, with an emphasis on sacred space, pilgrimage, popular religious practices, and political Islam. His most recent book is the Encyclopedia of Islam, a one-volume reference work intended for students and the general public. It received a "Best of Reference" award from the New York Public Library in 2010.  He is also the author of The Other Sides of Paradise:  Explorations in the Religious Meanings of Domestic Space in Islam, which won the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence in 1991.  He has published articles on the hajj, death and afterlife beliefs and practices in Islam, Middle Eastern culinary cultures, and issues in contemporary Islam in edited volumes and reference works, including the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, Brill’s Encyclopedia of the Qur’an, and the Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World.  He is currently writing a book about modern Muslim, Hindu, and Christian mass pilgrimages in comparative perspective.

Mohamed-Ali Adraoui is a political scientist and a historian working on International Relations and Middle East politics. He received his PhD in Political Science at Sciences Po Paris (France) in 2011. In 2013-2015 he was a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute (Florence), and was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Paris Saint-Denis University, and a part-time Lecturer at the Institute of Political Studies in Grenoble (France) in the field of History of Political Thought. His research is concerned with the history and development of Salafism, with a special focus on how the quietist approach to Salafism has impacted Western, particularly French, youth, and has gone global over the last few decades (mainly from Saudi Arabia to the rest of the world). He has published Du Golfe aux banlieues. Le salafisme mondialisé (with English and Arabic versions coming soon). He has also edited a volume dealing with the foreign policies of Islamist Movements, Les islamistes et le monde. Islam politique et relations internationales. His current research is on the history of Jihadi thought. He is also involced in a project dealing with the US foreign policy towards political Islam.

Veronika Deffner is a social and cultural geographer. Before joining the Middle East Institute, she was working as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the German University of Technology in Muscat (GUtech) and at RWTH Aachen University (Germany). Her research covers social, cultural and political aspects of international migration and heterogeneous societies in the GCC countries. Her main focus is on the Sultanate of Oman. Her current research at MEI concentrates on the complexities of economic nationalisation and diversification strategies, in combination with the concepts of national identity and citizenship in the Arab Gulf countries. She also extends the scope of this research to the exchange of experiences between the GCC and the ASEAN states, particularly Singapore and Malaysia. After her studies in Geography, Sociology and Anthropology (as a minor subject) in Germany and France, she received her PhD from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Passau (Germany) for her research on the production of social and spatial inequalities in Salvador da Bahia (Brazil). Her latest co-edited Special Issue is on “Conceptualising ‘Muslim Diaspora’” in Journal of Muslims in Europe (5, 2016).

Before joining the Middle East Institute in 2011, Ali Kadri was Visiting Fellow at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and previously head of the Economic Analysis Section at the United Nations regional office for Western Asia. His current research is on the political economy of development in the Arab World. During his work at the United Nations, he was the lead author of the UN flagship publication dealing with the economic and social conditions of Arab Western Asia, and he has published widely on aspects of the labour process in the Arab world. His recent book, Arab Development Denied (2014), discusses the formidable obstacles facing development in the Arab world. His latest edited volume is Development Challenges and Solutions After the Arab Spring (2015).

Charlotte Schriwer’s research has focused mainly on the history of the Levant, (Jordan, Syria, Lebanon), in particular on its agricultural history from the 12th century to the 1800s. She has also explored the question of ethnic identity in the Ottoman architecture of the Levant. Since joining MEI in 2011, she has started a project documenting the history of protest art in the Arab world, with a focus on the Arab Uprisings. She holds a PhD in History and an MA in Middle East Studies from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and an MA in Islamic Art and Archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Charlotte Schriwer co-edited Converging Regions: Global Perspectives on Asia and the Middle East (2014) with Nele Lenze and wrote Water and Technology in Levantine Society, 1300-1900: A Historical, Archaeological and Architectural Analysis (2015).

Fanar Haddad is a Senior Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. He previously lectured in modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Exeter and, most recently, at Queen Mary, University of London. Prior to obtaining his PhD, Haddad was a Research Analyst at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office where he worked on North Africa. He has since published widely on issues relating to historic and contemporary Iraq. His main research topics are identity, historical memory, nationalism, communal conflict and minority politics. He is the author of Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity (London/New York: Hurst/Columbia University Press, 2011). His research at the MEI will focus on historical memory and narratives of state in the Middle East.

Linda Matar is a Senior Research Fellow at NUS’s Middle East Institute. She is also a lecturer at The College of Alice and Peter Tan. Her research involves the political economy and economic development of the Arab Near East with particular emphasis on Syria. She obtained her PhD in Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her research at MEI focuses on the political economy of the Arab Spring. She is the author of The Political Economy of Investment in Syria (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Mattia Tomba is a multi-disciplinary investment professional based in Qatar with a track record of investments and acquisitions in different asset classes, sectors, and geographic areas. He has extensive experience in evaluating, negotiating, and structuring direct investments globally across all parts of the capital structure, in public and private markets.In 2008 he joined Qatar’s Sovereign Wealth Fund (Qatari Diar), where he has been managing an equity portfolio, and working on large private equity and real estate transactions worldwide.Previously he was part of the Goldman Sachs Group in the Principal Investment Area (Whitehall Real Estate Funds), where he was involved in portfolio management, and in strategic planning of large European acquisitions. He began his career with the Private Wealth Management team of Merrill Lynch. He is a graduate of Fletcher School, Tufts University (Boston, US), and Bocconi University (Milan, Italy)/Science Po (Paris, France).

Nele Lenze’s research focuses on the cultural online sphere in the Gulf. Her main research interests include literature published in social media, cultural production online and online participation culture. She holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies and Media Studies from the University of Oslo where she lectured on the Arab online sphere. She obtained her master’s in Arabic literature from Freie University Berlin. Recently she co-edited Converging Regions: Global Perspectives on Asia and the Middle East (2014) with Charlotte Schriwer as well as The Arab Uprisings: Catalysts, Dynamics, and Trajectories with Fahed Al-Sumait and Michael Hudson (2014).

Victor Kattan is a Senior Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute of the National University of Singapore, where he is completing a book on the Reagan administration, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the ideological origins of the “war on terrorism”. Before he moved to the Middle East Institute, Victor was a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Law where he was also the convener for the course on the use of force in international law. Before Victor moved to Singapore, he was a legal adviser to the Government of Palestine in Ramallah on secondment from the United Nations Development Program in Jerusalem. Previously, Victor taught international law to Masters students at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, where he completed his doctorate. Victor has acted as a consultant for the European Council on Foreign Relations, the Oxford Research Group, and a number of governments. He has lectured extensively overseas and taken parts in workshops organized by the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Victor is the author of numerous articles on various aspects of international law and is the author of the critically acclaimed book From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1891-1949 (London: Pluto Press, 2009) and editor of The Palestine Question in International Law (London: The British Institute of International and Comparative Law, 2008).

Amal Sachedina completed her Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology and Middle East studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research on Oman, now a book project, explores the material practices of making and reflecting on the past through examining the changing functions and roles of material objects and landscapes over the course of the 20th century at a time when the last Ibadi Imamate (1913-1959) ruled much of the interior of what is now the Sultanate of Oman. Before coming to MEI she was the Agha Khan visiting professor in Islamic Humanities at Brown University. Amal Sachedina earned a B.A. in archaeology from the University of Michigan and an M.Phil in Islamic Art and Archaeology from Oxford University, and has been a research consultant for World Heritage advisory bodies such as ICOMOS (International Council for Monuments and Sites) and ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property).

Shuang Wen’s first book project investigates the mediated and intertwined intellectual, commercial, labor, and religious (both Islam and Christianity) connections between the geographically distant and culturally disparate Arabic- and Chinese- speaking societies at the turn of the twentieth century. It narrates several little-known stories that linked the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and the United States. They include the ways in which Arab and Chinese thinkers regarded each other in response to their common challenge of global imperialism; how the British industrial interests led to the export of soybeans and the transference of their cultivation from Manchuria to Egypt; the encounters of Arab and Chinese labourers working for the American Expeditionary Forces in WWI France; and the Anglo-American missionary efforts to proselytize in Africa and Asia and how a converted Egyptian missionary doctor practised the western medicine among Chinese in Fujian for more than thirty years. Research for this project has taken her to archives and libraries in China, Egypt, Syria, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Shuang holds a PhD in History from Georgetown University and an MA in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo. She also received additional Arabic language training from the University of Damascus and Middlebury College. Before switching career to the academy, Shuang was a broadcast journalist in Hong Kong and Chinese-English simultaneous interpreter in Beijing. Her publications include “Muslim Activist Encounters in Meiji Japan,” Middle East Reports 270 (Spring 2014) special issue on “China in the Middle East” published by the Middle East Research and Information Project in Washington DC and “Two Sides of the Same Coin: How Historians and Journalists Can Work Together,” Perspectives on History 53 (October 2015) published by the American Historical Association.

Zoltan Pall is an anthropologist specialising in transnational Islamic movements in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. His main research topics include social movement theory, the structure and function of transnational networks, religious authority and sectarianism. His current research in MEI focuses on Salafism in Lebanon and its networking in the Arabian Gulf and Europe. Before obtaining his PhD from Utrecht University he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) in Leiden and a Research Fellow at Utrecht University. He has published articles on Salafism in Kuwait and Lebanon, and is the author of Lebanese Salafis between the Gulf and Europe: Development, Fractionalization and Transnational Networks of Salafism in Lebanon (2013).

Serkan Yolacan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. His research focuses on the role of diasporas in the transformation of state and society. His dissertation project, entitled The Azerbaijani Triangle: Order Beyond Borders Across West Asia, employs diasporic analytics to explore transnational networks of religion, education, and business across Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Turkey. He is a graduate of Sabanci University, Central European University, and Duke University and has previously worked as Projects Officer at the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation in Istanbul. 

Fahed Al-Sumait is Assistant Professor of Communication and Department Chair at the Gulf University for Science and Technology, where he also serves as an Advisor to the Vice President of Academic Services. He was previously a Fulbright-Hays research fellow before serving as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore. His notable publications include Terrorism's cause and cure: the rhetorical regime of democracy in the US and UK (2009); as well as chapters in Transforming International Communication: Media, Culture and Society the Middle East (2014) and State Power 2.0: Authoritarian Entrenchment and Political Engagement Worldwide (2014). He is also co-editor, with Nele Lenze and Michael C. Hudson, of The Arab Uprisings: Catalysts, Dynamics and Trajectories, 2014, Rowman & Littlefield), and Covering bin Laden: Global Media and the World’s Most Wanted Man (2015, University of Illinois Press). He holds an MA from the University of Washington and a PhD from the University of New Mexico, both in Communications.

Francesco Mancini is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). His work focuses on geopolitics, global governance, international peace and security, armed conflicts and the means to prevent and solve them. Francesco is also a Non-resident Senior Adviser at the International Peace Institute (IPI), where he was Senior Director of Research before relocating to Singapore in June 2014. As Director, he focused on conflict analysis, prevention, mediation, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding in Africa and the Middle East. He also led IPI’s largest program, Coping with Crisis, Conflict, and Change, that aimed at strengthening multilateral response capacity to crises and conflict. He launched the daily policy analysis website The Global Observatory. Francesco is a member of the Board of Directors of the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS), a member of the Research Committee of the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), and a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Peacebuilding. Prior to joining IPI, Francesco served as an Associate at the EastWest Institute in New York, where he co-managed the Worldwide Security Initiative, a program designed to enhance international cooperation in addressing new security threats, particularly transnational terrorism. Earlier in his career, he was a management consultant at Group CRCI in France, Italy, and Morocco.

Gwenn Okruhlik specializes in the politics of the Arabian Peninsula. She has worked in Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar and the UAE, and principally in Saudi Arabia. She is the recipient of two Fulbright Awards to Saudi Arabia and served as the Brookings Doha Fellow in 2011-2012 when she taught courses at Qatar University on labor migration and citizenship in the Gulf. Her research is largely at the intersection of political economy and socio-politics. It covers a wide array of issues such as networks of Islamist dissent; oil wealth and opposition; labor migration and cultural (in)security; regional border disputes; tourism and global opening, and struggles over the rights of citizenship. Her current research projects are on the relationship between ideas of “belonging to the nation” and dependence on foreign labor, as well how to re-think the politics of distributive states in light of the recent Arab uprisings. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. She is President of the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS). She has co-edited Political Change in the Arab Gulf States: Stuck in Transition (2011).

Susanne Dahlgren is an anthropologist interested in moral questions, law and politics. She studied anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the University of Helsinki where she received her PhD in 2004. She has been a fellow in the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and at the Academy of Finland. Her PhD project was published as Contesting Realities. The Public Sphere and Morality in Southern Yemen (2010). Her recent work has involved theorizing the Arab revolutions as part of a project on ‘Geographies of Gender in the Arab Revolutions’, convened by Frances Hasso and Zakia Salime. A recent photo essay was published in Muftah.org on ‘Rebels without Shoes: A Visit to South Yemen’s Revolution Squares.’ At MEI she has worked on a project entitled ‘Post-Socialism in the Arabian Peninsula: the Politics of Islam and Modernisation in South Yemen.’