Campus Watch Home  |  Middle East studies in the News  |  Donate New Campus Watch Resource: Professors to Avoid Campus Watch, a Project of the Middle East Forum June 23, 2016 http://www.campus-watch.org/avoid.php http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/15897 Share: Be the first of your friends to like this. Campus Watch is often asked which professors are most responsible for the politicization and bias sadly endemic to Middle East studies. Given the discipline's decline, compiling an inclusive list would be futile. Hundreds of names could be credibly included, but even such a list would surely omit some while failing to highlight those most responsible for the field's general decline into a mockery of academe's purpose and aspirations. In this spirit, we have selected those professors whose biases, ahistorical claims, apologetics, willful blindness, intolerance of opposing views, and mixing of politics and scholarship mark them as the most egregious offenders of the high standards to which faculty should be held: Professors to Avoid For a listing of the field's outstanding figures, please go to the parallel page, "Recommended Professors." Rabab Abdulhadi Senior Scholar, Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies/Race and Resistance Studies San Francisco State University Listed academic expertise: Palestine, Arab, and Muslim communities; race and resistance studies; transnational feminisms; gender and sexuality studies. http://amed.sfsu.edu/faculty Khaled Abou El Fadl Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Professor of Law Chair, Islamic Studies Interdepartmental Program University of California, Los Angeles Listed academic expertise: International human rights; Islamic jurisprudence; national security law; law and terrorism; Islam and human rights; political asylum; political crimes and legal systems. https://law.ucla.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/khaled-m-abou-el-fadl/ Thomas Abowd Lecturer in Arabic studies, anthropology, American studies Tufts University Listed academic expertise: colonialism and decolonization; race and racial politics; gender and sexuality; Arab and Muslim Americans; policing and urban protest. http://as.tufts.edu/americanStudies/faculty/ Nadia Abu El-Haj Professor of Anthropology Barnard College Columbia University Listed academic expertise: archaeology, genetic anthropology. https://barnard.edu/profiles/nadia-abu-el-haj As'ad AbuKhalil Professor of Political Science California State University, Stanislaus Listed academic expertise: comparative politics of the Middle East; gender and sexuality in the Middle East; politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict. https://www.csustan.edu/ppa/asad-abukhalil Lila Abu-Lughod Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science Professor of Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies Columbia University Listed academic expertise: gender politics and nationalism in the Muslim world; liberalism, culture, and the politics of human and women's rights. http://anthropology.columbia.edu/people/profile/347 Reza Aslan Professor of Creative Writing University of California, Riverside Listed academic expertise: religion, theology, fiction, sociology. http://creativewriting.ucr.edu/people/aslan/ Hatem Bazian Director, Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project Lecturer, Arabic language University of California, Berkeley http://nes.berkeley.edu/faculty/bazian.html Co-founder and Professor of Islamic Law and Theology Zaytuna College https://www.zaytuna.edu/academics/faculty/ Listed academic expertise: Arabic language, Arab society and culture, colonialism and post-colonial studies, ethnic studies, Islamic studies, Islamic law, Palestine studies. Joel Beinin Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History Stanford University Listed academic expertise: workers, peasants, and minorities in the modern Middle East; Israel, Palestine, Arab-Israeli conflict. http://web.stanford.edu/~beinin/ Juan Cole Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History University of Michigan Listed academic expertise: modern history of the Middle East; America and Middle Eastern wars; religion in South Asia; Shia Islam: Iran, Iraq and India; Bahá'í studies. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jrcole/ Elliott Colla Associate Professor and Chair Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies Georgetown University Listed academic expertise: modern Arab literature, culture and politics, antiquities. http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/ec393/?action=viewgeneral&PageTemplateID=360 Miriam Cooke Braxton Craven Professor of Arab Cultures Duke University Listed academic expertise: Arabic, 20th century, criticism, feminist theory, comparative literature. http://asianmideast.duke.edu/people?subpage=profile&Gurl=%2Faas%2FAMES&Uil=mcw Hamid Dabashi Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature Columbia University Listed academic expertise: Iranian studies, Iranian cinema. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/mesaas/faculty/directory/dabashi.html Noura Erakat Assistant Professor New Century College George Mason University Listed academic expertise: legal studies, international area studies, and social justice/human rights. http://integrative.gmu.edu/people/nerakat John Esposito Professor of Religion and International Affairs and Islamic Studies Founding Director, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding Project Director, Bridge Initiative Georgetown University Listed academic expertise: Islam, Islam and politics, Islamophobia, Muslim-Christian relations, religion, violence and terrorism. http://sfs.georgetown.edu/faculty-bio/john-esposito/ http://bridge.georgetown.edu/team/ James Gelvin Professor of History University of California, Los Angeles Listed academic expertise: social and cultural history of the modern Middle East, particularly Greater Syria, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. http://www.history.ucla.edu/faculty/james-gelvin Sherman Jackson King Faisal Chair in Islamic Thought and Culture Professor of Religion and American Studies and Ethnicity University of Southern California Listed academic expertise: classical Islamic Studies, including law, theology and intellectual history; modern Islam in the West; Muslim communities in America. https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1038031 Rashid Khalidi Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies Co-director, Center for Palestine Studies Director, Middle East Institute in the School of International and Public Affairs Columbia University Listed academic expertise: Middle Eastern history; the United States, the Middle East and the Cold War; Islamic movements in the modern Middle East; Orientalism; modern history of Palestine; nationalism in the Arab world. http://history.columbia.edu/faculty/Khalidi.html Muqtedar Khan Professor, Department of Political Science and International Relations Founding Director, Islamic Studies Program University of Delaware Listed academic expertise: American Muslims, foreign policy, international relations, Muslims in the West, national security, Pakistan, political Islam. https://www.poscir.udel.edu/people/faculty/mkhan Deepa Kumar Associate Professor of Media Studies and Middle Eastern Studies Rutgers University Listed academic expertise: Islamophobia, political Islam, empire, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia, the Arab Spring, women and Islam. https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/directory/dekumar/index.html Mark LeVine Professor of Middle Eastern History University of California, Irvine Listed academic expertise: Middle East history, cultures and religions of the modern Middle East, globalization, the role of music in political struggles, culture jamming, critical theory. http://www.faculty.uci.edu//profile.cfm?faculty_id=5356 Ian Lustick Bess W. Heyman Professor of Political Science University of Pennsylvania Listed academic expertise: comparative politics, international politics, Middle Eastern politics, agent-based, computer assisted modeling for the social sciences. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/polisci/people/standing-faculty/ian-lustick Saree Makdisi Professor of English and Comparative Literature University of California, Los Angeles Listed academic expertise: British Romanticism, imperial culture, colonial and postcolonial theory and criticism, cultures of urban modernity, contemporary Arab politics and culture. http://www.english.ucla.edu/all-faculty/231-makdisi-saree Mahmood Mamdani Herbert Lehman Professor of Government Professor of Anthropology, Political Science and African Studies Columbia University Listed academic expertise: the study of Africa; the modern state and the colonial subject; the Cold War and the Third World; the theory, history, and practice of human rights; civil wars and the state in Africa. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/mesaas/faculty/directory/mamdani.html Joseph Massad Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History Columbia University Listed academic expertise: Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli nationalism; theories of identity and culture; theories of nationalism, sexuality, race and religion. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/mesaas/faculty/directory/massad.html Ingrid Mattson London and Windsor Community Chair in Islamic Studies Huron University College at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada Listed academic expertise: Islamic studies; classical Islamic thought, culture and practices; Islamic ethics; interpreting the Qur'an. http://www.huronuc.on.ca/academics/theology Gabriel Piterberg Professor of History University of California, Los Angeles Listed academic expertise: history of the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean in the early modern period; colonialism, Zionism, and Palestine/Israel. http://www.history.ucla.edu/faculty/gabriel-piterberg Jasbir Puar Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies Rutgers University Listed academic expertise: critical ethnic studies, cultural studies, feminist globalization studies, immigration and diasporas, queer studies, sexualities studies. http://womens-studies.rutgers.edu/faculty/core-faculty/66-the-faculty/core-faculty/143-jasbir-puar Omid Safi Director, Duke Islamic Studies Center Duke University Listed academic expertise: Islamic mysticism (Sufism), contemporary Islamic thought, medieval Islamic history. http://islamicstudies.duke.edu/people?Gurl=%2Faas%2Fdisc&Uil=omid.safi&subpage=profile Steven Salaita Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies American University of Beirut Listed academic expertise: Native American studies, Arab-Israeli conflict, anti-Arab racism. https://www.aub.edu.lb/fas/casar/FacultyStaff/Pages/index.aspx This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL. 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