Ngina Chiteji
Faculty Convener
Professor Chiteji is an economist with an interest in macroeconomic policy, intergenerational correlations, wealth inequality, household debt, connections between moral reasoning and economic policymaking, and the ancient Swahili Coast. She has worked at the Congressional Budget Office in the past and has served as a visiting fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. She is also an affiliate at the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility. Her publications include Wealth Accumulation and Communities of Color in the United States, along with several articles in scholarly journals. In addition to her teaching at Gallatin, she is an associated faculty member of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
Shady Amin
Prof. Amin is a biological oceanographer and marine chemist studying microbiomes’ role in marine host adaptation and ecosystem transformation. His research explores metabolite exchanges between hosts like microalgae, corals, and cetaceans, influencing interkingdom signaling, symbiosis, and responses to environmental change. His work also examines harmful algal blooms and marine diseases. Using genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and molecular biology techniques, his lab investigates these complex interactions.
He is part of an NYU consortium establishing an environmental monitoring system along the Abu Dhabi coast to predict harmful algal blooms. Shady earned his B.Sc. from UC Santa Barbara and Ph.D. from UC San Diego/San Diego State University, followed by postdoctoral research at the University of Washington. He joined NYU Abu Dhabi in 2015.
Ghazi Faisal Al-Mulaifi
Ghazi Faisal Al-Mulaifi, PhD is an applied-ethnomusicologist who received his PhD in ethnomusicology from New York University in 2016. In addition to working as an assistant professor of music, Al-Mulaifi is also a Venice Biennale artist, composer, Khaleeji-jazz musician, and ensemble leader.
His research interests include Kuwaiti pearl diving music, the music of the Indian Ocean civilizations trade routes, global-jazz, and heritage production. His current musical efforts include performing with his ensemble Boom.Diwan where he and traditional Kuwaiti pearl diving musicians merge Kuwaiti bahri (sea) rhythms with global jazz traditions for the purpose of creating a new Kuwaiti music and engaging in a global musical dialog.
Awam Amkpa
Awam Amkpa is the author of Theatre and Postcolonial Desires (Routledge, 2003). He is director of film documentaries and curator of photographic exhibitions and film festivals. Amkpa has written several articles on representations in Africa and its diasporas, representations, and modernisms in theater, postcolonial theater, and Black Atlantic films.
Carol Brandt
As Associate Vice Chancellor, Global Education and Outreach and Vice Provost, Carol Brandt leads the strategic and academic administration for NYUAD’s programs of global education, including Semester Study Abroad, the January Term Program, Summer Programs, Regional Academic Seminars, the Engineers for Social Impact program, Community-based Learning in the UAE, and Student Global Mobility Services. She has additional responsibility for the Office of Social Responsibility, which provides adult education to the 800 contracted staff at NYUAD as well as the Office of Community Life, which supports faculty, staff, and their families with their acculturation to living in the UAE.
John Burt
Marine biologist John Burt uses the Arabian Gulf—the world’s warmest sea—as a natural laboratory to study how marine organisms adapt to extreme conditions and predict climate change impacts on tropical marine systems. Leading a diverse research team, he investigates corals, reef fishes, mangroves, and seagrasses through genomics, molecular ecology, physiology, and ecosystem studies. His work also informs policy, management, and conservation efforts.
Burt chairs the Mideast Coral Reef Society, serves on the International Coral Reef Society council, and leads the ‘Climate Change & Terrestrial, Marine & Freshwater Ecosystems’ research cluster for the UAE Ministry of Climate Change. A member of the Mohammed bin Rashid Academy of Sciences, he received the 2017 Sheikh Mubarak Al Nahyan Award for raising awareness of UAE marine systems and the 2022 Transformative Research Award, NYU Abu Dhabi’s highest faculty research honor. He also edited A Natural History of the Emirates (2023, SpringerNature), an open-access resource for the public.
Sybil Cooksey
Sybil Newton Cooksey is a scholar of afro-diasporic history whose research unfurls at the intersections of language and literature, music and sound studies, cultural studies and performance philosophy. She teaches courses on black existentialism, noir, critical humanism, archives, affect and black marginal culture. In 2022 Professor Cooksey co-edited Afro-Gothic, a special issue of liquid blackness, and she is currently finishing her first book, “The Objective I: Black Life Writing and Inauthenticity in Post-Negrophilia Paris.”
Mehmet Darakçıoğlu
Mehmet Darakçıoğlu is a historian of the modern Middle East, specializing in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire. He earned his PhD from Princeton University, where his dissertation explored government translators and the Translation Bureau, the precursor to the Ottoman Foreign Ministry. He also holds a joint master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied U.S. foreign policymaking during the Johnson administration. Mehmet received the Ertegün Graduate Fellowship at Princeton and the Iranian Studies Scholarship at Texas.
His research and teaching focus on social and intellectual history, imperial bureaucracies, linguistic diversity, and international relations. He has taught courses on Ottoman diversity and Ottoman Turkish at Penn, Princeton, and NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center.
Before joining Gallatin, Mehmet was associate director of Penn’s Middle East Center, leading the renewal of a Title VI grant (2014–2018) for national resource center programming and fellowships. He also developed global education programs, academic events, and outreach initiatives while managing federal grants and fellowships.
George Jose
George Jose is Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology in New York University Abu Dhabi. He has held research, teaching, and leadership positions in the academia and philanthropy sectors. George was the Dean of the Jyoti Dalal School of Liberal Arts (JDSOLA), and Associate Professor of Sociology, NMIMS University, Mumbai. He was a Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, for Global Prayers – Redemption and Liberation in the City with Europa-Universitat Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin. George was Program Director of Asia Society’s India Centre, Mumbai, and Program Officer with the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), Bengaluru. He was Reviews Editor for South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies. George was a tutor and member of the core team that conceptualized and delivered the ArtsThinkSouthAsia (ATSA) Fellowship program, and Faculty for Jnanapravaha’s ‘Art, Criticism and Theory’ course. He was visiting faculty in architecture, design, management, and technology institutes in India, and serves collaborative arts projects in an advisory capacity. George’s research interests span urban peripheries, creative cities and mobile societies.
Salila Kulshreshtha
Salila Kulshreshtha is a Visiting Associate Professor of History and Art and Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi. Trained as a historian of South Asia, Salila teaches courses in the history and the art history program and in the Core curriculum. She received her PhD in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Salila has been a Shivdasani Fellow at the Oxford Centre of Hindu Studies (OCHS), University of Oxford. Salila’s research is interdisciplinary, making connections between history, archaeology, art history and heritage studies. She is the author of the book, ‘From Temple to Museum: Colonial Collection and Uma Mahesvara Icon in Middle Ganga Valley,’ (Routledge: 2018). She has also co-edited ‘The Routledge Handbook of Hindu Temples;’ (Routledge: 2023). Salila’s research interests include religious iconography and temple spaces in South Asia, colonial archeology, history of museums, material culture, cultural history of the Indian Ocean and heritage studies. She currently serves as the “Co-Head Chef” of the Heritage, Memory and Mobility Research Kitchen at NYUAD.
Ritty Lukose
Ritty Lukose’s teaching and research examine the intersections of culture, politics, economy, gender, and sexuality in globalization, with a focus on contemporary South Asia. An anthropologist, her current project, Between Empire and Neoliberalism: The ‘Woman Question’ in the International System of the 1970s, explores how “woman” became a key category in internationalist visions of development and democracy. She is also part of a research team conducting an ethnographic study, Digital Intimacy: Young Women and Social Transformation in Asia, across Guangzhou, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bengaluru.
Her book, Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India (Duke, 2009; Orient Blackswan, 2010), and her co-edited volume, South Asian Feminisms (Duke, 2012; Zubaan), are widely recognized. She has published in Cultural Anthropology, Social History, Social Analysis, and Anthropology and Education Quarterly. Recent works include “Decolonizing Feminism in the #MeToo Era” (Cambridge Journal of Anthropology), “South Asia” (Routledge Global History of Feminism), and The Great Indian Kitchen: Taste, Distaste, Feminism and Women’s Emancipation (Verge: Studies in Global Asias, in press).
Alvaro Luna
Álvaro Luna-Dubois is a scholar of 20th- and 21st-century French and American literature, focusing on migration and diasporic writing, particularly U.S. Latinx and Franco-Maghrebi cultures. His research explores diasporic literature’s relation to literary theory, genre, space, migration studies, and how Global South literature and visual art respond to migration.
Previously, he was a Chateaubriand doctoral research fellow and a postdoctoral fellow for the EU’s DETECt project, studying ethnic minority detectives in French and German crime fiction. He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Santa Barbara, specializing in contemporary French and American literature. He has taught at Sciences Po-Paris, Paris 8 University, the University of Limoges, Dunkirk-Tourcoing School of Fine Arts, and UC Santa Barbara.
Sara Murphy
Sara Murphy’s research and teaching interests include literature and philosophy, critical theory, feminist and gender studies, and 19th-century literary cultures. Her Gallatin courses have included “Literary and Cultural Theory;” “Sex, Gender, Nature, Culture; and Gender, Sexuality, and Self-Representation,” as well as courses in romanticism and the 19th-century and 20th-century novel. She has also taught at Rutgers, SUNY Albany, York College at the City University of New York, and NYU’s General Studies Program. Professor Murphy’s current projects include an exploration of the concept of consent in literature and political theory and a collection of essays on the representation of sexual violence in law and culture. Her work appears in such publications as Hypatia; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Philosophy & Social Criticism; Studies in Law, Politics and Society; The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History; Feminists Contest Politics and Philosophy; and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, as well as several forthcoming essay collections. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the NYU Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship, among others. In 2003, she received the Gallatin Adviser of Distinction Award and, in 2011, the Gallatin Excellence in Teaching Award.
Francesco Paparella
Francesco Paparella is interested in developing and studying mathematical models for geophysical fluids and Earth-systems processes. His main focus has been on convection in fluids with one or two buoyancy-changing scalars. But he also works on vortex dynamics, time series analysis, granular flows and ecological and population dynamics modeling.
Tim Power
Tim is an archaeologist and historian specializing in Arabia and the Islamic world. He began his career in Egypt in 2001 and went on to Oxford to complete his PhD in Islamic art and archaeology. He has been based in the Emirates since 2009 and is currently an Associate Professor of Archaeology at UAEU in al-Ain. His research focuses on the oasis landscape of al-Ain and Indian Ocean trade networks in the Islamic centuries. His next book, ‘A History of the Emirati People: Identity and Belonging between the Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean,’ is currently in preparation.
M. Yunus Rafiq
M. Yunus Rafiq is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at NYU Shanghai and a Global Network Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at NYU. He is a trained medical anthropologist focusing on public health, region, and communicative practices in Tanzania. He received his PhD from Brown University in 2017 and, before joining New York University, worked on two large-scale randomized control trials aimed at improving maternal and child health and increasing the uptake of modern contraceptives in rural Tanzania. His research has been funded by Wenner Gren, Fulbright Hays, Hewlett, Ash Center at Kennedy School, and the American Philosophical Society.
Rafiq’s research examines how governmental and non-governmental health programs mobilize faith-based religious intermediaries to manifest public health governance and biopolitical agendas. It explores how religion is defined by biomedical programs and the ways these programs transform religion. His research questions how religion and biopolitical programs in the post-colony are re-assembled to create new forms of authority, governance, and power.
Soha Sarkis
Soha is a Lecturer of Writing at NYU Abu Dhabi, and a historian of slavery in the French colonial empire in the nineteenth century. Her research interests include enslavement, emancipation, missionaries, charity work, and social reform in the metropole and the colonies. Before joining NYU, she studied and taught European, Middle Eastern, and North African history at Georgetown and the American University of Beirut.
Gunja SenGupta
Gunja SenGupta is a Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her current research and teaching interests lie in slavery and freedom in the 19th-century Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds; US Civil War and Reconstruction within transnational frames of reference; African American history; women’s history; Afro-Asian interactions in the U.S.; race, gender, poverty, and social welfare; and Black Atlantic history on film. SenGupta’s most recent work, Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire, co-authored with Awam Amkpa (University of California Press, 2023), won the 2024 Bentley Book Prize for “outstanding contributions” to the field of World History awarded by the World History Association (WHA). The book fleshes out on a granular level, the interface among the personal, domestic, and international politics of slavery by tracking the circulation of people, the echo of ideas, and the resonance of policy among nodes of commercial exchange, imperial power rivalries, and reform activism, extending from Anglo America through the Swahili coast of East Africa, the Red Sea, and the Gulf into South Asia. The authors have developed a related, grant-funded pedagogy site, Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves.
Jonathan Sharfman
Jonathan graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1999 with a Masters degree in maritime archaeology. Following graduation Jonathan worked on various shipwreck excavation projects including the wrecks of the Grosvenor (1782), Oosterland (1697) and Waddinxveen (1697). In 2003 he joined the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA). From 2005 he was the Manager of the Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage Unit and remained in the position until 2013. He completed his PhD in Maritime Archaeology at the University of Leiden, Netherlands in 2017. His dissertation dealt with alternative approaches to the identification and management of maritime and underwater cultural heritage in sub-Saharan Africa. Jonathan formed the African Centre for Heritage Activities (ACHA) in January 2013. ACHA was established as an institution through which heritage could be promoted through capacity building, training and awareness raising initiatives. ACHA’s goals are to utilize heritage as a driver for development and social cohesion. In 2017, Jonathan took up a position as a post-doctoral associate at New York University Abu Dhabi and is now a Lecturer of Writing there. His current research focuses on the impacts and influences of maritime networks on societies in the Indian Ocean and beyond.
David Spielman
David B. Spielman is a historian of the Horn of Africa, with a focus on early modern Christian Ethiopia. His research draws upon literary and archival materials in Ge’ez, Amharic, Italian, and more to examine the processes by which the Ethiopian Orthodox Church integrated a Coptic-Arabic legal text into its corpus and applied it across a society where multiple legal orders coexisted. Spielman has a wide range of research interest that include Ethiopian/Eritrean Ge’ez literature, Ethiopian/Eritrean religion and theology, Horn of Africa manuscript cultures, law, African history, Global history and more. He earned a BA in African-American Studies from UCLA, his MA in African Studies from UCLA, and his PhD in History from UCLA. His research has been funded by the Fulbright-Hays and the James S. Coleman African Studies Center at UCLA among others.
Eric Staples
Eric Staples is an interdisciplinary maritime experimental archaeologist and historian whose interests include Indian Ocean shipbuilding, seafaring and navigation. He has been particularly active in experimental vessel reconstruction, having overseen the construction of ten different maritime experimental archaeology reconstructions to date. He has also been involved in a variety of other maritime-related research initiatives, including maritime landscapes documentation, digital mapping of Arabic navigational texts, maritime ethnography, nautical lexicography and underwater excavation and survey. His most recent project is the Zayed National Museum Bronze Age Boat Project, a joint DCT, Zayed University and NYUAD initiative to build and sail a hypothesis of a 120-gur merchant vessel from the Bronze Age. He is currently head of maritime archaeology at the Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi.
Deepak Unnikrishnan
Deepak Unnikrishnan is a writer from Abu Dhabi and the author of Temporary People, a novel exploring Gulf narratives through Malayalee and South Asian lingo. The book won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, the Hindu Prize, and the Moore Prize, and was shortlisted for several others, including the Believer Book Award and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize. His fiction was commissioned for the UAE National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2017) and the Oslo Architecture Triennale (2019), and his voice appears on musician Sarathy Korwar’s album More Arriving. His essays and fiction have been published in Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, Guernica, Drunken Boat, Himal Southasian, and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature (Penguin Classics).
A former writer-in-residence at Sangam House, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and Brown University, he was also a Margaret Bridgman Fellow at Bread Loaf. As a professor at NYU Abu Dhabi, his courses The Outsider and Street Food encourage students to explore the city through walking. Winner of the 2014 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award, he has performed at literary festivals, indie bookstores, and any venue willing to lend him a mic.
Alia Yunis
Alia Yunis works within the intersecting fields of media, environment and transoceanic heritage. As a scholar, journalist, author and filmmaker, her work has been translated into 10 languages. Heritage Futures: Stories in the Global Heritage Industry, co-edited with Robert Parthesius and Niccolò Cappalletto, is a unique pedagogical exercise in Heritage Studies recently published by Routledge (UK, 2025). Her feature documentary, The Golden Harvest, continues to play in festivals and events around the world, most recently at the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art. The Golden Harvest has led to Tree Routed, an interactive film platform globally connecting personal heritage stories about trees (in production). Alia recently co-edited the book Re-Orienting the Middle East: Film and Digital Media Where the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean Meet (Indiana University Press, 2024). Her novel, The Night Counter (Random House 2010), has been critically acclaimed by the Washington Post and several other publications. In 2010, she co-founded the Zayed University Middle East Film Festival (ZUMEFF), now the longest-running film festival in the Gulf. She currently teaches film and heritage at NYU Abu Dhabi.