Notes on Contributors

Ileana Baird

is an Assistant Professor of English at Zayed University, U.A.E. She holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from University of Virginia, U.S.A. Her areas of interest include eighteenth-century British literature, visual and material culture, Orientalism, and digital humanities. She is the editor of Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2020) and Eighteenth-Century Social Networks: Clubs, Literary Salons, Textual Coteries (CSP, 2014), co-editor of Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture (Ashgate, 2014; Routledge, 2018), and author of articles on Alexander Pope and his circle.

Marie-Claire Bakker

is an ethnographer with a special interest in material culture. She received a Master of Philosophy in Ethnology and Museum Ethnography from the University of Oxford, UK, and an MA in Arabic Language and Literature from Edinburgh University, UK. Besides teaching in the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University, she consults as an area specialist in the material culture of the region, and for the last 25 years has been researching the dynamics of social change through dress and jewelry in the Arabian Peninsula.

Joseph Donica

is an Assistant Professor of English at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York, U.S.A. He is a contributor to the Sage Encyclopedia of War and the website American Muslims: History, Culture, and Politics. His latest articles include “Rethinking Utopia for the Twenty-First Century: The Good Life after Occupy and the Arab Spring,” and “Negative Memory after Katrina: The Persistence of Memoir.” He is currently writing a monograph entitled Inequality’s Subjects: Neoliberalism Subjectivity after the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. He serves on the Executive Board of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association.

Holly Edwards

is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at Williams College, U.S.A. She holds a PhD in the History of Islamic Art from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. Her publications encompass a broad array of topics, including Afghan photography and visual culture, shrine architecture in the Indus Valley, and photojournalism. She has curated several exhibitions, among them Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: American Orientalism 1870–1930 at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain at the Williams College Museum of Art.

Yannis Hadjinicolaou

is a Research Associate at University of Hamburg, Germany, where he is working on a project titled Bilderfahrzeuge: Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology. He held a Research Fellowship in the Humanities at the New York University-Abu Dhabi and lectureships at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and University of Basel, Switzerland. He earned his PhD from Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis recently published in English under the title Thinking Bodies, Shaping Hands: Handeling in Art and Art Theory of the Rembrandtists (Brill, 2019). Since 2017 he has been leading the network Synagonism in the Visual Arts funded by the German Research Foundation.

Victoria Penziner Hightower

is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Georgia, U.S.A. She has published articles on the history and heritage of pearling in the United Arab Emirates and has co-edited a volume entitled Representing the Nation: Heritage, Museums, National Narratives, and Identity in the Arab Gulf States (Routledge, 2016). Recent articles include “Purposeful Ambiguity: The Pearl Trade and Heritage Construction in the United Arab Emirates,” in Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula, and “Pearling and Political Power in the Trucial States, 1850–1950: Debt, Taxes, and Politics,” in the Journal of Arabian Studies.

Jennie MacDonald

received her PhD in literary studies at the University of Denver, U.S.A. Her research interests concern eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature, theater studies, and visual and material culture. Her recent publications include an article on Elizabeth Inchbald’s play, Every One Has His Fault, in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, and a book chapter on James M. Cain’s Snyder-Gray novels, in New Perspectives on Detective Fiction: Mystery Magnified. An article on the Victorian toy theater and an edited collection of Gothic selections from The Lady’s Monthly Museum, a Regency-era women’s magazine, are forthcoming.

Kara McKeown

holds an MA in Museum Studies from University of Leicester, UK, and is currently teaching in the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University. Her research interests include the interface between language-teaching pedagogy and the teaching of art and design, the collection and use of oral history in the U.A.E. museums, and jewelry as an indicator of change in the Emirati society. Her most recent article, co-authored with Sabrina DeTurk, is entitled “Encounters with Interactive Technologies in U.A.E. Museums,” and was published in Appropriate Museology, Appropriate Language: Essays on Translation and Communication in the Museum.

Rana Al-Ogayyel

is a fine artist and Lecturer in the College of Art and Design at Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University, K.S.A. and a PhD candidate in Fine Arts at the Royal College of Art in London, UK. She has been a practicing artist since 2004 and has extensive experience in fine arts and arts education. Her research interests include the study of Bedouin tent dividers as multi-layered materials for experimentation and al-Sadu weaving as a cultural practice that allows to explore ideas of domestic space and division in relation to women’s identity.

Ceyda Oskay

is a practicing artist, researcher, and development consultant. She holds an MA in Middle East Studies from the Middle East Technical University, Turkey, and an MA in Fine Arts from The Royal College of Art, London, UK. She has carried out several projects for Al-Sadu House in Kuwait, including curating the 2015–2016 exhibition and contemporary art residency Sadu Art and Design Initiative (SADI), and organized workshops related to reinterpreting al-Sadu design for the Nuqat Conference in Kuwait.

Chrysavgi Papagianni

is an Assistant Professor of English at Zayed University, U.A.E. She holds a PhD in 20th-Century American Film and Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY), U.S.A. Her research focuses on women’s literature and cinema, with a special interest in issues of memory and identity. Her article, “The Salvation of Emirati Memory in Nujoom Alghanem’s Hamama,” has been recently published in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and she is currently working on an essay on Emirati women filmmakers to be published in The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication (forthcoming 2020 by Willey-Blackwell.) She also serves as a regular book reviewer for the European Journal of American Studies.

James Redman

is a cultural anthropologist at Zayed University, U.A.E. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Utah, U.S.A. His past research examined the role of social connections and informality in state structures in providing a means for accessing bureaucratic resources in Kuwait. Presently, his projects are primarily located in Oman and focus on issues of oral and textual knowledge. Particularly, he is concerned with the creation, production, consumption, and circulation of texts in predominantly oral and non-literate settings.

Eran Segal

is a researcher at the Ezri Center for Iran & Gulf Studies, University of Haifa, Israel. He teaches in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at University of Haifa and at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research interests include the Arabian Peninsula, Gulf politics, tribalism, and economic history. He has published several articles and book chapters on the history, politics, and society of the Arabian Gulf States.

Hülya Yağcıoğlu

is an Assistant Professor of English at Zayed University, U.A.E. She has earned her PhD in English Literature from Boğaziçi University, Turkey. Her research areas are comparative literature, cultural studies, and modern Turkish and American fiction. Recent articles include “Reifying Innocence: Material Contexts of Love in The Age of Innocence and The Museum of Innocence,” published in The Materiality of Love: Essays on Affection and Cultural Practice, and “Bridging the Gap between People and Things: The Politics and Poetics of Collecting in Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence,” in Orhan Pamuk: Critical Essays on a Novelist between Worlds.

William Gerard Zimmerle

is a Visiting Professor in the Division of Arts and Humanities at the New York University-Abu Dhabi and an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the School of Humanities at Fairleigh Dickinson University, U.S.A. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MDiv in Comparative Religions and Semitic Languages from Harvard University. His research interests include Pre-Islamic and Islamic material culture of the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa, archaeology and history of the Middle East and Arabia, anthropology of scent and ritual studies, and 3D imaging of material culture for heritage preservation. He is the Director of the Dhofar Ethnography Preservation Project: Documenting the Cuboid Incense Burner in the Sultanate of Oman and Dhofar Rock Art and Inscriptions Project: A Digital Humanities Initiative in the Sultanate.