Sarah Lazare is working as a staff writer for Common Dreams, a progressive news and views publication based in Portland, Maine. Since graduating from CSAMES, she has also worked as a freelance journalist in Egypt and Palestine.

Darakhshan Khan graduated from our program in May 2009 with a master’s in Asian studies, focusing on South Asia. Her area of interest is religion, gender, and Islamic revivalist movements in South Asia. Darakhshan has a bachelor’s degree in microbiology and has worked as a journalist in her hometown of Bombay. She also worked as a CSAMES graduate assistant. Darakhshan began her Ph.D. program at...

Matt was a recipient of both the Summer 2016 Center of African Studies FLAS fellowship and the Academic Year 2016-2017 CAS FLAS. In summer 2016 he took Arabic here at UIUC through the SILMW (Summer Institute for Languages of the Muslim World) program. In the academic year he will be taking Introductory Persian, in addition to Arabic and other courses relevant to the field. He plans to graduate in...

Ambar graduated from our MA program in summer 2016. She entered the CSAMES MA program in the Fall of 2013 with the Middle East specialization. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Islamic Civilization and Societies from Boston College and has also studied in Morocco. Ambar’s past projects include her senior thesis about Latino Muslims and a study of a Sufi order in Mexico City....

Duygu is from Istanbul, Turkey, where she lived all her life before coming to the US in 2007. She studied in Istanbul University and has a BA and MA in economics. Duygu graduated from the CSAMES MA in Spring 2010. Her interests are the formation of the ethnic identities in the Middle East and in the Balkans during the nineteenth century, the late Ottoman Empire era and the Turkish and Kurdish...

Courtney Averkamp earned her MA in Religious Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where she focused on Hinduism and Buddhism. Her current research interests revolve around religions in and of South Asia. She is a Teaching Assistant for Asian Mythology and World Religions.

Eduardo is a graduate student in the M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies program at CSAMES. He completed his bachelor’s degree in Political Science at the University of Illinois Chicago. At this institution the department of Political Science granted him Highest Distinction for his honors thesis “The legacy of a martyr: Sayyid Qutb and twentieth century political Islam”. His research interests are...