Brahim El Guabli is an academic whose work and research interests encompass the Maghreb, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. He probes questions of trauma and memory, and the way aesthetics enable various forms of coming to terms with violent pasts. Brahim’s articles have appeared, among others, in Arab Studies Journal, The Journal of North African Studies, Francosphères and Jadaliyya. He is also the co-editor of the two-volume special issue of The Journal of North African Studies entitled “Violence and the Politics of Aesthetics: A Postcolonial Maghreb Without Borders” (2017). Brahim is the co-editor of Jadaliyya Maghreb page.

Sara Pursley is assistant professor of modern Middle East history in the departments of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and of History at NYU, in addition to serving as the Director of Graduate Studies. She is the author of Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2019) and numerous articles, including “Ali al-Wardi and the Miracles of the Unconscious," Psychoanalysis & History 20/3 (2018): 337-51; "The Stage of Adolescence: Anticolonial Time, Youth Insurgency, and the Marriage Crisis in Hashimite Iraq," History of the Present 3/2 (2013): 160-97; and "'Lines Drawn on an Empty Map': Iraq's Borders and the Legend of the Artificial State," Jadaliyya, 2 June 2015.

Matt is a George Mason alumnus who eats, breathes, and sleeps football. Just don’t ask him to play because he’s clumsier than newborn deer on ice skates. When he’s not complaining about defenders, drawing formations, or looking up obscure facts, he’s reading a book with a cup of coffee. Come on You Spurs!

Mekarem Eljamal is a Doctoral Student in Urban Planning at Columbia GSAPP. She has a Master's Degree in Modern Middle Eastern and North African Studies and Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Michigan. Her research interests center the legal and policy histories around community and economic development of Palestinian neighborhoods in urban centers such as Haifa and Yaffa. Eljamal is the Managing Editor of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative and the Coordinator of the Middle East in Cyberspace Database of the Arab Studies Institute’s Knowledge Production Project.

Dr. Katty Alhayek is an Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Ryerson University (renaming in process) in Toronto, Canada. Alhayek’s research centers around themes of marginality, media, audiences, gender, intersectionality, and displacement in a transnational context.

Alhayek completed her Ph.D. in Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the United States of America with a graduate certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies. Her publications include articles in the International Journal of Communication; Feminist Media Studies; Gender, Technology and Development; and Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies. Twitter: @kattyalhayek

Lina Abou-Habib is currently the senior gender advisor at the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at the American University of Beirut. She is also the chair of collective for Research and Training for Development – Action and serves as a board member for Gender at Work as well as the MENA strategic advisor for the Global Fund for Women.  She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Gender and Development journal published by Oxfam.

Abou-Habib was previously the executive director of Women’s Learning Partnership and before that, the director of the Collective for Research and Training-Action. She has led in designing and managing programs in the Middle East and North Africa region on issues related to gender and citizenship, economy, trade, and gender and leadership. She has considerable experience in qualitative research, gender analysis, and training/facilitation. She was a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Applied Humanities, Institute of Public Policy (Auckland University of Technology). As a global gender consultant, Abou-Habib worked in most countries of the MENA region, in West Africa, and the Caucuses.