Center for Middle East Studies
Date
May 8, 2025
Announcing Summer 2025 CMES Research Travel Award Recipients
Made possible by a generous gift from the Sams Family.
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Graduate Student Recipients
Imen Boussayoud is a fifth-year Ph.D. Candidate in the History department at Brown University. Her research focuses on late medieval and early modern histories of slavery in the Mediterranean and early Atlantic worlds.
Imen’s dissertation, titled "Descent of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in the Canary Islands (1400-1600 CE)" focuses on the circumstances and choices of enslaved Indigenous Canary Islander and Northwest and Western African peoples who sought manumission in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Canaries. She utilizes a wide array of manuscript sources from archives in the Canary Islands and beyond, including petitions and suits, contracts of sale, freedom papers, and Inquisition trial records. In doing so, she centers on what she terms as freedom-seeking practices to understand several routes enslaved peoples followed to freedom, such as legal manumission, self-emancipation, escape, and marronage.
Kate Elizabeth Creasey is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Brown University. She holds a B.A. from the University of Toronto, an M.A. from Istanbul Bilgi University, and an M.A. from Brown University. She is an intellectual and cultural historian of the modern Middle East who specializes in contemporary Turkey. She has published in Review of Middle East Studies, International Labour and Working-Class History, The European Review of Books, and Bülent Journal.
Kate’s current project titled "The Unspeakable Years: Militarism, Neoliberalism, and Left Resistance in Late Cold War Turkey" studies anti-left counterinsurgency and the instantiation of neoliberalism in the aftermath of the 1980 coup d'état. In her work Kate pays particular attention to how people from social democratic and left movements that flourished in the 1970s before the coup d'état worked to preserve—often at great risk—the imaginaries of different possible futures in the face of violent state repression. In doing so, Kate connects this period in the history of Turkey to the 1979 moment in the Middle East and larger histories of the late Cold War in the Global South.
Frank Faverzani is a Ph.D. student in the History Department at Brown University. His research is on alcohol and environmental history in the Ottoman and modern Eastern Mediterranean. He also works as an importer of ancestral wines and spirits from the region.
This summer, Frank will be conducting research on the material history of arak production and consumption in Lebanon. He asks how each of the component parts required for its production are produced and arrive at the site of distillation. Furthermore, he asks about the life cycle of arak itself - how it is produced, stored, sold, and consumed. Lastly, the project looks at the relationship between the material reality of arak and changes in agro-ecologies and political-economies in Lebanon over the long 20th century.
Patryk Imielski is a first-year Religious Studies Ph.D. student, in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean track. His academic interests centre on late antique Christian literature and their use in the construction of religious identity, particularly focusing on the position of East Syriac martyr acts and conciliar acts as a form of early Christian history-writing within Sasanian Persian and early Islamic contexts. Before coming to Brown, Patryk was based at the University of Oxford where he received both his B.A. and MPhil in Theology and Religious Studies.
Patryk’s research primarily focuses on the analysis of various forms of late antique Christian literature, with a specific interest in the East Syriac texts that emerged from the political and cultural context of Sasanian Persia, to explore how these texts contributed to the process of early ecclesial identity formation. As a majority of his sources are written in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic that characterised the spread of Christianity within Mesopotamia in late antiquity, he intends on taking a Syriac summer language course offered by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute to acquire a deeper understanding of the linguistic complexity of Syriac, as well as this corpus's place alongside contemporary texts composed in other ancient languages of the Middle East. Through this course he will be better equipped to explore and understand the vibrant literary culture of the Middle East in late antiquity, and how ideas ultimately spread at the crossroads of a multitude of communities and empires.
Mohammad Geldi Geldi Nejad is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology and Ethnomusicology at Brown University. He holds an M.A. in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University (2023). Prior to his studies in the United States, he earned an M.A. from the Turkmen National Conservatory and a B.A. from the State Music College located in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. His research interests include issues of borders and musical styles, the music of Central Asia, and the music of the Turkic-speaking world.
Türkiye and Turkmenistan are strengthening their economic, and political partnership. Mohammad’s research aims to explore the cultural aspects of this growing relationship. As a professional Turkmen folk musician, during his performances with Turkish folk musicians, he has noticed similarities between Turkmen and Turkish folk music, such as the strumming techniques and the modes used in playing stringed lutes. Through ethnographic fieldwork among Turkish folk musicians, he aims to better understand this relationship and how cultural practices may reflect broader geopolitical trends between these two nations.
Undergraduate Student Recipient
Genevieve Sychterz is a rising junior in the Archaeology Department, focusing on the Ancient Near East. Originally from Bangor, Maine, she aspires to become a museum curator, with a particular interest in curating exhibits that highlight the intricacy of ancient Near Eastern cultures. Genevieve is passionate about the role of museums in the repatriation of cultural artifacts and strives to promote the respectful display of copies in museums while addressing issues surrounding ownership and heritage. Currently, she works at the Joukowsky Institute and was the recipient of an Anthropology Apprenticeship, where she curated an exhibit on seed banking in the Campus Center.
This summer, Genevieve will be traveling to Petra to assist Professors Rojas from the Archaeology Department and Sarah Newman from the University of Chicago with their research on green spaces in Petra. Her role will involve preparing an exhibit at the Petra Museum to showcase Professor Rojas and Newman's work and findings from the past decade. The trip will last for two weeks and will include work in Amman and Wadi Musa.
