AIS Welcomes Two New Faculty Members

The Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies is pleased to announce that Dr. Rodrigo Adem and Dr. Sara Omar will be joining our faculty as tenure-line assistant professors in Fall 2020.

Dr. Adem (Ph.D., Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago) is an historian of the premodern Middle East. As an intellectual historian, he carries out original research on the historical development of early Islamic thought, both Sunnī and Shīʿi, within the domains of theology, philosophy, historiography, and hermeneutics. As a social historian, he is interested in the role played by medieval Damascene libraries and institutions of learning for the preservation and development of classical Arabo-Islamic literature considered vital for the latter-day construction of Islamic traditionalism and Arabic ethnic identity.

Dr. Omar received her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Middle East Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. She has received a number of fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship in Syria where she conducted field work on female religious authority. Her research interests include: Islamic intellectual history, Islamic Law, textual hermeneutics, gender and sexuality, and religious authority.

Welcome, Dr. Adem and Dr. Omar!