Faculty
Lecturer, Modern & Classical Languages & Literatures
Email: sumaya.bezrati@csun.edu
Phone: 818-677-3580
Office location: ST 431
Biography
Sumaya Bezrati earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Arabic literature from the Near Eastern Languages & Cultures Department at UCLA. In addition to teaching at CSUN, she also currently teaches at CSU Channel Islands and Santa Monica College. She has also worked to develop Arabic curricula for heritage students at the Center for World Languages and National Heritage Language Resource Center, UCLA. She has been teaching Modern Standard Arabic since 2010.
Associate Professor, Art
Email: owen.doonan@csun.edu
Phone: 818-677-6753
Office location: SG 238
Biography
Owen Doonan is an archaeologist and art historian specializing in the cultures of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
He focused on early Sicilian Architecture and society in his PhD (1993) at Brown University’s Center for Old World Archaeology and Art (now the Joukowsky Institute). He became interested in Turkey and the Black Sea while teaching Archaeology and Art History at Bilkent University in Turkey.
Since 1996 he has led the Sinop Regional Archaeological Project, a regional study of archaeology, culture and environment in the Sinop Province, northern Turkey. He has authored one book, edited another and published more than forty articles relating to the archaeology of the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions.
His book Sinop Landscapes: Exploring Connection in the Hinterland of a Black Sea Port was published by the University of Pennsylvania Museum Press.
Doonan is also interested in the contemporary art of the Middle East and North Africa - In 2010 he co-founded the New Sahara Gallery in Northridge, the first Los Angeles area gallery to specialize in the contemporary fine art of the Middle East and North Africa.
Lecturer, Modern & Classical Languages & Literatures
Email:homa.esfarjani@csun.edu
Phone: 818-677-3196
Associate Professor, History
Email: rachel.howes@csun.edu
Phone: 818-677-2755
Office location: ST 621
Biography
I specialize in the history of the Middle East between 600 and 1500. I have a Ph.D. from University of California Santa Barbara in History, and a Master’s of Arts in Arab Studies from Georgetown University.
My dissertation dealt with the court politics of the eleventh century Middle East through the career of al-Mu’ayyad fi al-Din al-Shirazi, a Fatimid religious propagandist who worked in Buyid Shiraz, as well as Fatimid Cairo. I have continued to be interested in the court politics of the eleventh century through the lens of the political and intellectual careers of individuals in various parts of the Eleventh Century Middle East.
I am currently working on projects examining the great Egyptian Crisis of the Eleventh century from a political perspective, looking at contemporary views of nomads in the medieval Middle East, and comparing cookbooks from the Medieval Middle East, Europe, and China.
I teach a range of history courses dealing with the Middle East including History 185: A History of Middle Eastern Civilization, History 424: A History of the Medieval Middle East, History 425: A History of the Early Modern Middle East, History 426: A History of the Modern Middle East, and History 545: Graduate Readings Seminar in the Middle East. I have also taught senior readings and research seminars in topics such as: Islamic Iran, The Crusades, Islamic Law, Cities of the Middle East, and Historians of the Middle East.
Professor
Assistant Professor, Religious Studies
Email: mustafa.ruzgar@csun.edu
Phone: 818-677-7779
Office location: SN 234
Biography
Born in Turkey, Dr. Ruzgar completed his B.A. in Islamic Studies at Uludag University in Bursa, Turkey. He finished his M.A. in Philosophy of Religion and Theology at Claremont Graduate University in 2001. Dr. Ruzgar earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion and Theology from Claremont Graduate University in 2008. He is currently teaching at California State University, Northridge as an Assistant Professor.
Dr. Ruzgar’s research interests include Islamic thought, philosophy of religion, theology, process thought, religious pluralism, and interfaith dialogue.
Professor, Anthropology
Email: suzanne.scheld@csun.edu
Phone: 818-677-4935
Office location: SH 240-E
Biography
Suzanne Scheld is a cultural anthropologist specializing in urban, transnational, and globalization studies.
She has an on-going research project in Dakar, Senegal, a West African country that is 95 percent Muslim. Her research examines urbanization processes in Dakar in relationship to youth, migration, religion, and cultural identity. Her recent publications examine the impacts of Chinese immigrants on the image of Dakar and its informal economy. In the future, she plans to examine consumer identities and the role of the consumer protection movement in Senegal.
Director, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Program; Assistant Professor, Department of Gender and Women's Studies & Asian American Studies
Email: khanum.shaikh@csun.edu
Biography
Khanum Shaikh is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). She currently serves as Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies program at CSUN. She also co-directs the Civil Discourse and Social Change initiative, a cross-campus and interdisciplinary initiative that foregrounds thinking and action grounded in principles of social justice. She earned her Ph D. in Gender Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2009. Prior to joining CSUN she was a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and then a Research Fellow at the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas program at San Francisco State University. Her research interests include transnational feminist theories; Islam, gender and religious agency; gender and/in social movements; and race/racialization of North American Muslims. She has published in numerous journals including: Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies; Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies; Feminist Formations; and Feminist Studies (forthcoming). She has lived most of her life between Los Angeles and Lahore.
Professor Emerita in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department
Email: nayereh.tohidi@csun.edu
Office location: JR 340L
Biography
Nayereh Tohidi is a Professor Emerita and former Chair of Gender & Women’s Studies and the Founding Director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (2011-2021) at California State University, Northridge. She is also a Research Associate in the Program of Iranian Studies at UCLA coordinating “Bilingual Lecture Series on Iran” since 2003. She received her MA and Ph.D. from the Universities of Tehran and Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. She is also the recipient of several post-doctoral fellowships and research awards, including an NEH grant, a year of Fulbright lectureship and research at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan; universities of Harvard and Stanford, the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center, and Keddie-Balzan Fellowship at UCLA. Her teaching and research expertise include gender and development; women’s movements and feminism; women and Islam; globalization, ethnicity, and nationalism in the Caucasus and MENA. Her extensive publications include editorship or authorship of three books and numerous articles and interviews in peer-reviewed academic and policy-oriented journals. Some of Tohidi’s articles have been published in different languages, including English, Persian, Turkic, Russian, Spanish, German, Arabic and Japanese. She has served on the editorial boards of academic journals such as the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, the Journal of Azadi Andisheh, and the International Journal of Humanities and Social Development Research. Prof. Tohidi has integrated academic excellence with transnational human/women’s rights activism. She represented women NGOs at the UN-sponsored third and fourth World Conferences on Women in Nairobi and Beijing. She has also served as a consultant for the UN agencies (UNICEF and UNDP) on issues concerning children and women’s status in the Caucasus and Middle East. Dr. Tohidi has also joined the faculty board of Iran Academia of the Institute for Social Sciences since 2015.
Professor, Journalism
Email: melissa.wall@csun.edu
Phone: 818-677-5677
Office location: MZ 330
Biography
Melissa Wall is a Professor in the Department of Journalism where she teaches and researches international news and online media.
A former journalist, she created the course, “Muslims and the Media,” which was taught for the first time in Fall 2011 to student journalists.
Her journal articles, book chapters and conference presentations focused on the intersection of participatory media or international news and the Middle East and Muslims. It ncludes studies of blogs that covered Iraq (written by Iraqis as well as so-called warblogs written by Westerners); “Electronic Iraq,” an online news portal which functioned as an alternative news service; Turkish and US news media coverage of the Kurds; participatory media representations on Flickr of Thailand’s Muslim minority; the new political language for Egyptians evidenced in Asmaa Mahfouz’s vlogs disseminated on YouTube during the Revolution; and Queen Rania of Jordan’s use of social media. She is currently completing a book for IdeaPress, an Open Society initiative, on Citizen Journalism.
Among her creative works, her photograph of the Sayyida Ruqayya Mosque in Damascus is part of the media station for the new permanent exhibition, “The World of Islam” at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, Germany. Another photograph from the Souq Saroujah neighborhood also in Damascus has been selected to illustrate an Arabic language textbook. Through a collaborative project with KPFK, the Los Angeles Pacifica outlet, she produced the radio piece, “New Views of Iran & Iranian women.” She will be a Fulbright Scholar in Lebanon in spring 2012. For more about her, visit melissawall.wordpress.com, or on Twitter: @MelissaWall
