Charles Hirschkind

Charles Hirschkind is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the urban Middle East and Europe. In his recent book, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (2006), he explores how a popular Islamic media form?the cassette sermon?has profoundly transformed the political geography of the Middle East over the last three decades. He is also the co-editor (with David Scott) of Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad an his Interlocutors (2005). Other publications include "Cultures of Death: Religion, Media, Bioethics" (Social Text 2008),  "Cassette Ethics, Public Piety, and Popular Media in Egypt." (Media, Religion, and the Public Sphere, eds. A. Moors and B. Meyer, 2005), "The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Audition in Contemporary Cairo" (American Ethnologist 2001). His current project is based in southern Spain and explores some of the different ways in which Europe's Islamic past inhabits its present, unsettling contemporary efforts to secure Europe's Christian civilizational identity. This project has been funded through an award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Elias Muhanna

Elias Muhanna is the writer of Qifa Nabki [?ki-f? ?neb-k?] a blog about Lebanese politics, history, and culture. He is a PhD student in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Harvard University. He works on classical Arabic literature, Islamic social and intellectual history, and has published on subjects ranging from medieval encyclopaedism to travel literature, to the material culture of the pre-modern Mediterranean world.

• middle east

Linda Herrera

Linda Herrera (PhD Columbia University, MA, American University in Cairo, BA UC Berkeley) joined the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as Associate Professor and core staff  in the Global Studies in Education MA program in January 2011.  Prior to that she was a Senior Lecturer in International Development Studies (2005-2010) at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam where she was Convenor of the Children and Youth Studies MA specialization. Her major research interests and writing are around issues of  Youth and citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA); critical ethnography of schooling; youth, employment and international development policy; democracy and education; and, more recently, youth, new media and Arab Revolution.

• middle east

Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East 

Ibraaz Publishing and I.B. Tauris are pleased to announce the book launch of Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East, edited by Anthony Downey.

• media theory,
• media criticism,
• middle east,
• visual culture

Daoud Kuttab

Daoud Kuttab is a former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University ('07-'08). While at Princeton he taught a seminar on new media in the Arab world. Kuttab is a Palestinian journalist and media activists. Born in Jerusalem in 1955, Kuttab studied in the United States and has been working in journalism ever since 1980.

• Palestine,
• satellite television