Jens Hanssen, Associate Professor of Arab Civilization, Modern Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean History, University of Toronto,Amal N. Ghazal, University Professor, History Department, Simon Fraser University

Jens Hanssen is Associate Professor of Arab Civilization, Middle Eastern Studies and Mediterranean History. He received his D.Phil. in Modern History from Oxford University in 2001 and joined the University of Toronto the following year. He held a SSHRC Insight Grant (2014-2018) on “German-Jewish Echoes in 20th-Arab Thought.”
His writings have appeared in The New Cambridge History of Islam, Critical Inquiry, Arab Studies Journal, and the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.


Amal Ghazal received her BA from the American University of Beirut and her MA and PhD from the University of Alberta. She held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto. She was a faculty member at Dalhousie University (2006-2017) before she moved to Simon Fraser University where she holds the title of a University Professor and is the Director of the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies. She specializes in modern Arab intellectual history. Her work has covered the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa and East Africa. Her first book looked at the politics of identity of the Omani intellectual elite in Zanzibar, situating then in the context of the Arab nahda, Islamic reform, Arabism and anti-colonialism. Her publications have covered a broad spectrum of topics, including Sufism, Islamic reform, conservative thought, Arab nationalism, Ibadism, Word War I, and slavery.

Reem Abou-El-Fadi, SOAS University of London
Gilbert Achcar, SOAS University of London
Zahra Ali, London School of Economics
Omar Al-Shehabi, GUST University
Atiaf Alwazir, Université Catholique de Lille
Asli Bâli, University of California, Los Angeles
Murat Birdal, Istanbul Üniversitesi
Rosie Bsheer, Harvard University
John Chalcraft, London School of Economics
Sherine Hafez, University of California, Riverside
Adam Hanieh, SOAS University of London
Linda Herrera, University of Illinois
Christopher Houston, Macquarie University
Laleh Khalili, SOAS University of London
Abdelrahman Mansour, independent scholar
Linda Matar, National University of Singapore
James McDougall, Oxford University
Maya Mikdashi, Rutgers University
Shourideh C. Molavi, The American University in Cairo
Michael Provence, UC San Diego
Avi Raz, Oxford University
Eugene Rogan, St Antony's College, Oxford University
Reem Saad, The American University in Cairo
Larbi Sadiki, Qatar University
Ryme Seferdjeli, University of Ottawa
Nader Sohrabi, Freie Universität Berlin
Shahla Talebi, Arizona State University
Abbas Vali, Bogazici University
Frederic Wehrey, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Max Weiss, Princeton University
Elizabeth Williams, University of Massachusetts Lowell

"...the handbook does offer a comprehensive and usually high-quality collection of essays covering a wide range of topics and as such will still prove to be a very useful and instructive overview of the modern Middle East and its historical background." -- Asher Susser, bustan: the middle east book review