Senior Researchers

Daniel Brown has directed the Institute for the Study of Religion in the Middle East since 2013. He holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago, and his research has included nineteenth- and twentieth‐century Islamic intellectual history, Islamic modernism, Qurʾanist movements, Islam in the Subcontinent, and Muslim-Christian relations. He is the editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Concise Companion to the Hadith (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020) and author of A New Introduction to Islam, (3rd edition, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017) and Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

George Bristow is ISRME Senior Research Associate. He earned his PhD from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and is author of Sharing Abraham? Narrative Worldview, Biblical and Qur’anic Interpretation and Comparative Theology in Turkey (Cambridge, MA: Doorlight Academic). Since 2009 he has served as coordinator of a theological training network serving churches in Turkey.

Research Fellows

Vanessa R. de Obaldía is an Ottomanist for the ERC Starting Grant MAMEMS project at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. She holds a BA in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from the University of Cambridge, an MA in Islamic Law from Marmara University, and a Graduate Diploma in Law from BPP University. She was awarded a PhD in History by Aix-Marseille University in December 2018 for her thesis titled “A Legal and Historical Study of Latin Catholic Church Properties in Istanbul from the Ottoman Conquest of 1453 until 1740.” Her areas of research include doctrine and practice in Islamic law, historical and contemporary charitable endowments, Muslim-Christian relations, and religious minorities and missionaries in the Ottoman Empire with a particular focus on the Latin Catholic Church.

Eileen Sleesman Calderon was an ISRME research affiliate in 2019-2020 for a project entitled, “National Pasts and Religious Futures: Turkish Protestants and the Negotiation of Christianity in Uncertain Times.” She is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington.

Merav Mack was awarded an ISRME Research Grant for a project entitled, “Changing Religions Landscape: Jordan 2018.” Dr. Mack received her PhD in Medieval History from the University of Cambridge. She is a Research Fellow at the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology in Amman studying the contemporary Christian communities in Jordan. She is also teaching in the department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  Her book Jerusalem: City of the Book together with Benjamin Balint and the photographer Frederic Brenner was published by Yale University Press in 2019.

Charles Faroe is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Theology, VU University Amsterdam. He earned an MA in Turkish Language and Literature, Faculty of Language, History and Geography, from Ankara University (Thesis: Lutfullah Halimi’nin Bahru’l-Gara’ib’i) and a BA with honors in Turkish from the Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago.