Visiting Scholars

2016-17 Visiting Scholars

Information on past IRCPL Visiting Scholars is available here.

Sami Al-Daghistani is a Visiting Scholar at the IRCPL whose research focuses on the intellectual history of Islamic economic thought, contemporary Islamic economics, and the Islamization process. Since December 2015, he has been a Visiting Scholar at MESAAS, Columbia University, working under the mentorship of Professor Wael Hallaq. Sami obtained a BA in both Sociology and Comparative Literature from the University of Ljubljana. He studied Islamic Studies and Arabic in Sarajevo (2010), Cairo (2011), Rabat (2012), and at McGill University in Montreal (2014). He achieved a Research MA in Middle Eastern Studies from Leiden University (2013). Currently, he is a double-PhD candidate at the universities of Leiden and Münster, and a lecturer at Leiden Islam Academie. Sami has published numerous articles on Islamic economics, the intellectual history of Islam, and Islamic law. He has edited two volumes on the Second Gulf War in Iraq (2010), and on Middle Eastern culture and politics (2013). Recently, he published two book translations, Ibn Battuta’s Rihla and Ibn Tufayl’s Hay ibn Yaqzan, from Arabic into Slovenian. In early 2017, he will publish a monograph on Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s economic philosophy.

Ibrahim Bechrouri is a graduate student from the French Institute of Geopolitics of the University of Paris 8.  After a research project in 2012 on “Issues and Representations around the United States Foreign Policy in Morocco,” he spent time as a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion at Columbia University and led field research on the surveillance of Muslim communities by the New York Police Department. He is presently a Fulbright grantee working on his PhD dissertation, titled Geopolitical approach of counter-terrorism strategies of the New York Police Department: a multiscale analysis.

Esra Can is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Middle East Technical University (METU), in Ankara, Turkey. She holds a B.A. in Sociology with a minor degree in Political Science, as well as an M.S. in Social Anthropology, from METU. For her prospective dissertation, tentatively titled Conservatism Among the Urban Lower-Middle Classes in Keçiören, Ankara: Family, Space, and Class in Everyday Life, she analyzes the conservative social space of lower middle class families in the capital of Turkey. Her research interests include Islam and conservatism in Turkey, urban sociology, and social class analysis.   

Rosemary R. Corbett is a Faculty Fellow with the Bard Prison Initiative and has a PhD in Religion from Columbia University with a focus on Islam in the United States. She has previously held positions as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University, and (most recently) a Young Scholar in American Religion with the Center for the Study of American Religion at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. Her research involves examining how racial and religious minorities navigate U.S. Protestant-derived norms by forming shifting alliances around civic or political issues, and her forthcoming manuscript—Muslims in the Middle: Service, Sufism, and “Moderate” American Muslims after 9/11—is under contract with Stanford University Press. In addition to works in edited volumes, her publications appear (under the names of Rosemary R. Corbett and Rosemary R. Hicks) in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (forthcoming, 2015), the journal Religion, The Journal of Islamic Law and Culture, American Quarterly, Comparative Islamic Studies, and the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (2004, New Scholar Award).

Bahar Tabakoglu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the New School For Social Research. In her current dissertation, tentatively titled Social Constituents of Religious Politics: Islamist Labor Unionism in Turkey and Hindu Labor Unionism in India, she examines labor unionism in Turkey and India with an eye to filling the gap in the literature on religious politics by analyzing its social constituents, the working class component in particular. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political sociology, sociology of religion, sociology of labor, modern Turkey, and India. Her research and teaching interests extend as well to modern social movements, civil society and state theory, classical sociological theory, modern social thought, and research methods. Her dissertation has won the support of various grants and fellowships from the New School For Social Research and she has been a student fellow at the India China Institute of the New School since 2011.

Sirine Mechbal is a French graduate student in American Studies at the University of La Sorbonne in Paris. She has a Masters’ Degree in American Studies; She was a visiting student at Columbia for the Spring 2013 semester, during which she conducted field research for her Masters’ thesis, which focused on Muslim communities in New York and their institutional presence. As for now, she is working on her Phd dissertation, dealing with street vendors in New York and their relationship to community organizing, with a specific focus on Egyptian and Mexican vendors. Although it’s considered American studies in France, her work is quite pluridisciplinary (sociology – labor studies, immigration studies etc). Sirine have been back and forth between Paris and New York for a year. Sirine has taught at La Sorbonne. She is currently working on her dissertation, tentatively titled: “Vendor Power ? Solidarity and collective organizing among New York City’s Egyptian and Mexican street vendors.”