Board of Directors
Officers
President
Yael Warshel
Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of International Migration, UCLA and Founding President, Invisible Light: Realizing Conflict Zone Children's Rights. Yael is an expert on conflict zones, media, and Middle Eastern and African children and youth, she is author of the 7-time award-winning monograph, Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Children, Peace Communication and Socialization (Cambridge University Press) and When Conflict is Real : Reimagining the Study of Children, Youth and Media in International and Global Conflict Zones (under contract with Stanford).
Vice President
Dylan Baun
Historian of youth and young people in the modern Middle East and Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Dylan is the author of Winning Lebanon: Youth Politics, Populism, and the Production of Sectarian Violence, 1920-1958 (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and the forthcoming Beirut Radical: A Global Microhistory from the Sixties to the Lebanese Civil War (I.B. Tauris).
Treasurer
Heidi Morrison*
Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse.
Communication Chair
Tylor Brand
Assistant Professor of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. Tylor specializes in the history of crisis, disease, and famine in the modern Middle East. His monograph, Famine Worlds: Life at the Edge of Suffering in Lebanon’s Great War (Stanford Press, 2023) examines the social and personal impacts of the Lebanese famine of World War I. He received his Ph.D. from the American University of Beirut’s Department of History and Archaeology in 2014.
Secretary
Reda Rafei
Reda Zafer Rafei is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of History at Texas Tech University. Her research examines gender dynamics in the early modern Middle East, with a particular focus on family structures, childhood, and parenting practices in Bilād al-Shām. Reda Joined the AMECYS Board in 2023
Graduate Student Representative
Melis Süloş
PhD candidate at the History Department at the CUNY Graduate Center, with a major in Middle Eastern Studies and a minor in European History. Melis is working on the history of childhood, nationalism, performance, and philanthropy in Turkey.
Board Members at Large
Board Member
Rehab Alayoubi
Ph.D. student in Mass Communications at Penn State University. Rehab's research focuses on strategic health, environmental, and prosocial communication across cultures.
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Board Member
Majid Hannoum
Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, USA. Majid earned a Ph.D. from Sorbonne University, a Diploma of Advanced Studies from EHESS, France, and a second Ph.D. from Princeton University, USA. He is the editor of Practicing Sufism: Sufi Politics and Performance in Africa (2016), and author of Secular Narrations and Transdisciplinary Knowledge (2023).
Board Member
Hilary Falb Kalisman
Assistant Professor of History and Endowed Professor of Israel/Palestine Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Hilary's research focuses on the history of education in Iraq, Israel and the Levant.
Board Member
Didem Yavuz Velipaşaoğlu
Graduate of Istanbul Technical University, Department of Architecture in 2006. Didem received her master’s degree in Architectural Design from Istanbul Bilgi University in 2008. In 2010, she began her doctoral studies as a Fulbright scholar in the
joint program of Rutgers and NJIT in the field of Urban Systems - Architectural History, and
graduated in 2018. Didem is one of the founding partners of MVDY Architecture.
She is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design at Izmir University of Economics. She is the author of the book, Crafting an Empire: the Hereke Factory Campus (1842-1914).
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Board Member
Atacan Atakan
Lecturer at Sabancı University in Istanbul. Atacan's research primarily focuses on
the history of childhood during the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, with additional
interests in the Ottoman feminist movement, political Islam, and theories of gender and
sexuality.
Board Member
Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay
Associate Professor of Performing Arts and founding director of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Performance and Politics at the University of Milan. Rüstem's research in childhood and youth studies explores youth theatre and performance, Islamic dramatic
literature for and by children, the politics and aesthetics of vocational education, critical
curriculum studies, and bioethics in Turkey and its connected geographies.
*Past Presidents
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Heidi Morrison, 2017-2024 (Founding President)