Christopher Stone
Office: 1303 Hunter West
Phone: (212) 650-3138
E-mail: cst@hunter.cuny.edu
Stone Publications 2011

Christopher Stone is Associate Professor of Arabic and Head of the Arabic Program.  He received his M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. (2002) in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University where he specialized in Arabic language, literature and culture.  His dissertation received the Malcolm Kerr Dissertation Award for the Humanities from the Middle East Studies Association in 2003, and the book based on it  -- Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon:  Fairouz and the Rahbani Nation -- was a Middle East Report Editor's Pick.  It is currently being translated into Arabic by Egypt's National Translation Center. In the spring of 2008 he was a Fulbright Scholar to Egypt where he started his current project on Egyptian Cinema.  Another current project is the translation of Palestinian Literature. He has recently translated stories by Adania Shibli and Najwan Darwish, one of which can be read here.  In the summer of 2011 he spent 10 days in Egypt conducting interviews with Egyptian writers about recent revolutionary events.  You can read his interview with Mohamed Salah al-Azab here.  He is also interested in Arabic pedagogy.  He has spent two recent summers co-facilitating NMELRC Arabic teacher training workshops with Mahmoud al-Batal at The University of Texas in Austin.

Alexander Elinson
Office: 1304 Hunter West
Phone: (212) 772-5044
E-mail: aelinson@hunter.cuny.edu
Elinson Publications 2011

Alexander Elinson, Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Literature and Director of the Hunter College Summer Arabic Program, received his M.A. (1998) from the University of Washington in Seattle, and Ph.D. (2004) in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures from Columbia University. His research interests cut across the Middle East and North Africa, and include Arabic and Hebrew literature from the pre-Islamic to the modern period. His book entitled Looking Back at al-Andalus: the poetics of loss and nostalgia in medieval Arabic and Hebrew Literature is published by Brill. Professor Elinson has published articles, reviews and translations on the Arabic and Hebrew strophic poem (zajal and muwashshah), rhymed prose narrative (maqama), and modern Arabic poetry and narrative in numerous peer-reviewed journals. In addition to projects dealing with fourteenth century Granada and Fez (stemming from research conducted with a Fulbright fellowship in 2010), he is currently examining political, social, and literary debates surrounding writing in Moroccan colloquial Arabic.

Jamal Ali
Office: 1440 Hunter West
Phone: (212) 772-4050
E-mail: jamal.ali@hunter.cuny.edu
Ali Publications 2010

Jamal Ali, Distinguished Lecturer of Arabic, holds a PhD in Arabic from UCLA (2005). He has taught Arabic at all levels at many colleges and universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. His research interests include linguistic and religious thought in the classical period, and he is the author of Language and Heresy in Ismaili Thought: The Kitab al-Zina of Abu Hatim al-Razi (Gorgias Press 2009), which is about 10th century Arabic linguistics, grammar, and lexicography, and examines an unpublished glossary authored by the Ismaili preacher Abu-Hatim al-Razi. Dr. Ali has lived and studied in the Middle East extensively, including having received the CASA (Center for Arabic Study Abroad) fellowship, as well as the CASA III fellowship twice. He is also the co-author of Arabi Liblib, a reference on idiomatic expressions in colloquial Egyptian Arabic aimed at advanced students of spoken Egyptian Arabic, written in collaboration with Kamal AlEkhnawy of the Arabic Language Institute at the American University in Cairo and published by AUC Press.

Amira Saleh
Office: 1404 Hunter West
E-mail: asa0029@hunter.cuny.edu 

Amira Saleh received her BA in English studies at Alexandria University, Egypt. Upon graduation, she worked as a teacher of English at Kaumya International Language Schoool. In 2011 she was selected as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Fellow to assist with the Arabic language program at Hunter College.

Khaled Al-Hilli
Email: hillykhalid@gmail.com

Khaled Al-Hilli is a PhD student in the Graduate Center's Comparative Literature program. He has a BA in English Literature and a Masters in Teaching Second Languages. Born in Iraq, Khaled lived, studied and worked in several places including Manchester, Cairo, Damascus, Beirut and Riyadh. Prior to joining the Graduate Center and teaching at Hunter College, he taught extensively in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia at both college and high school levels. He has also worked with various Iraqi news outlets and has subtitled/translated documentary films dealing with current social and political issues. His research interests include Arabic political literature, prison literature and literature in the Diaspora, and he has also written on the emergence of political hip hop in Lebanon and the Middle East.