Ghada Qaisi Audi currently teaches courses on the American legal system at Köln University to students in the L.L.M. degree program. She was a German Chancellor Scholar sponsored by the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation from 2003–2004 and spent a year conducting at the Institut für Internationales und Ausländisches Privatrecht at Köln University. Her project focused on comparative law, German private international law and cases before the German courts concerning Islamic family law. She is a member of the Bar in Virginia and New York and practiced law in Washington, DC before moving to Germany. She received her Juris Doctor (J.D.) from the University of Richmond School of Law in 2000, where she served as Associate Editor of the Richmond Law Review. She obtained a Master’s degree in Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan in 1997 and graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1994.
Mita Banerjee is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Siegen. She is the author of The Chutneyfication of History, 2002, and Race-ing the Century, 2005. She is currently working on a study of the ways in which ‘postcolonial’ concepts have been reconfigured as we enter the new millennium.
Anton Escher is Professor of Geography at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. His research focus lies on cultural geography, Arab culture and society, geography of religion and ideology, with a current emphasis on Arab networks in Latin America, gentrification in Marrakech, Tunis and Tripoli, the “cinematic city” Marrakech and the communication between lifeworlds (“Lebenswelten”) and cultures. He has been teaching at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, the University of Vienna, the University of Rabat, Morocco, and Mainz. Since 2001, he has been serving as the director of the Competence Centre Orient Occident (KOOM). Amongst his numerous publications are: Malula und M’alloy. Erzählungen aus einem syrischen Dorf, Würzburg 2004 (with Werner Arnold and Carmella Pfaffenbach), Die Medina von Fes. Geographische Beiträge zu Persistenz und Dynamik, Verfall und Erneuerung einer traditionellen islamischen Stadt in handlungstheoretischer Sicht, Erlangen 1992 (with Eugen Wirth, Frank Meyer and Carmella Pfaffenbach), Sozialgeographische Aspekte raumprägender Entwicklungsprozesse in Bergregionen der Arabischen Republik Syrien, Erlangen 1991, and Studien zum traditionellen Handwerk der orientalischen Stadt. Wirtschafts- und sozialgeographische Strukturen und Prozesse anhand von Fallstudien aus Marokko, Erlangen 1986.
Anneka Esch-van Kan has studied Theatre in Frankfurt on the Main, Giessen (Germany) and at Stony Brook University (New York, USA). She is currently affiliated with the Graduate School for the Study of Culture at Justus-Liebig University Giessen (Germany) where she has been working on her PhD thesis “Representation of Crisis—Crisis of Representation. The Politics of Aesthetics and 21st Century Political Theatre in the United States” since 2007.
Omar Khalidi is Professor of Muslim architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was educated in India, Britain, and the United States. His research interests are in the sociology of politics, upward and downward economic mobility of ethnic groups, nationalism and diaspora. He is the author of Indian Muslims Since Independence, 1996, and edited Hyderabad: After the Fall, 1988.
Günther Sommerschuh is a teacher trainer from Kiel and advisor on teacher training to the state of Schleswig Holstein. He is a consultant for schoolbook publications with a German publishing house. Günther Sommerschuh studied English in Kiel and Lawrence, Kansas. He taught at schools in Neumünster at the German School in Geneva, Switzerland, for several years.
Lisa Suhair Majaj was one of the first, and remains one of the most insightful, scholars to explore Arab-American literature. Born in Hawarden, Iowa to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she was raised in Jordan and attended the American University of Beirut from which she received her B.A. In the summer of 1982, she evacuated out of Lebanon during the Israeli invasion and moved to the United States to work on her doctoral dissertation on Arab-American literature at the University of Michigan. Since 2001, she has been living in Cyprus with her husband and two children. Her volume of academic work includes three co-edited collections of essays on contemporary Arab and third world women writers: Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels, 2002, Etel Adnan: Critical Essays, 2002, and Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers, 2000. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in many journals and anthologies including South Atlantic Quarterly, Mizna, Radical Philosophy Review and Al-Jadid. Lisa Majaj frequently travels to the United States and the Middle East to read her poetry and present papers at conferences across the United States and the Middle East.
Rolf Theis is IB-Coordinator at Goethe-Gymnasium Frankfurt a. M.. He is a textbook author and curriculum writer, and coordinates the ‘Frankfurter Bilingualzertifikat’—a one-year course offered at Goethe-University Frankfurt to teachers planning to teach History, Geography, Social Studies, or Biology in the English language.
Mark Tessler is Samuel J. Eldersveld Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, where he is also Vice Provost for International Affairs. He previously served as Director of the Center for Political Studies of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Professor Tessler has attended university and/or conducted research in Tunisia, Israel, Morocco, Egypt, and Palestine (West Bank and Gaza). He is the author or coauthor of eleven books, including Area Studies and Social Science: Strategies for Understanding Middle East Politics; Democracy, War and Peace in the Middle East, and A History of the Israeli?Palestinian Conflict. Professor Tessler’s current research, funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the U.S. Department of State, deals with the attitudes and values of ordinary citizens in the Middle East toward issues of peace, democracy, religion, and gender. Recent reports of this research appear in Comparative Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, and Public Opinion Quarterly.
