ABOUT NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES

North Africa is an integral part of Middle East studies at UCLA, which offers an undergraduate major and minor in Middle Eastern and North African Studies, and graduate degrees with North Africa as a major or minor field in Anthropology, Comparative Literature, History, Political Science, Women’s Studies, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. A dozen UCLA faculty members are engaged in teaching and research about the Maghreb, and more than two dozen scholars at seven regional institutions of higher education study the Maghreb in a variety of fields, including popular religion, human rights, gender, ethnicity, minorities, urbanism, cinema, migration, musical traditions, and regional and transregional connections.

You can learn about the professional contributions of scholars and educators in Southern California (see below). Their publications and their knowledge about the Maghreb inspire us to think critically and beyond the headlines. Research and instruction on North Africa are supported at UCLA by extensive library resources and special collections, exhibitions, conferences, workshops, and cultural events that engage both the academic community and the public in Southern California.

MIDDLE EAST STUDIES ASSOCIATION (MESA)

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is a private, non-profit, non-political learned society that brings together scholars, educators, and those interested in the study of the region from all over the world. To find MESA members who specialize in the Maghreb, follow the link and select a Geographical Area of Focus: Maghreb, Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia.
North Africa Experts

AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR MAGHRIB STUDIES (AIMS)

Overseas, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) serves as a bridge between American academicians and their counterparts in North Africa, and a venue for systematic study of the region. It offers American faculty and student researchers a home base in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia for field work and interaction and collaboration with scholars from North Africa. 
About AIMS
AIMS Institutional Membership Links
AIMS Current Membership

DIRECTORY OF NORTH AFRICA EXPERTS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Dina Al-Kassim

UC Irvine, Comparative Literature
I work on North African literature, legacies of colonial psychiatry, psychoanalysis as a contributing discourse of modernity in the region, political histories of testimony and the questions raised by Muslim citizenship in the new Europe.
Website

Fazia Aitel

Claremont McKenna College, Modern Languages
North African francophone literature (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), North African cinema, and women's issues in the region. Also works on the Berber minorities in North Africa, their representation in literature, and the Berber movement in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Website

Colette Apelian

Berkeley City College, Arts and Culture
Moroccan architecture, cities, and their representations.
Email

Ali Behdad

UCLA, Comparative Literature, English
North Africa in the context of “Orientalist Photography.” I focus on photographers such as Moulin (mid-19th century), Geiser (late 19th century), and Lehnert and Landrock (early 20th century) to show how Algeria was visualized by French and other European photographers since the mid-19th century. I show how the high traffic in Algerian photography speaks both to the colonial will to knowledge and to the desire for the exotic.
Website
Website

Laurie Brand

USC, International Relations
I have done work on the state and women in Tunisia and Morocco. I have most recently finished a book on emigration and the state, looking in part at Tunisia and Morocco. I am now involved in a new project on religion, nationalism, and national narratives for which Algeria is one of the cases. In general, I am interested questions of migration, identity, and citizenship in the Maghreb.
Website

Lia Nicole Brozgal

UCLA, French and Francophone Studies
Cultural productions of francophone North Africa as they relate to, and inflect, the literary history and criticism of the metropole and postcolonial studies. Particularly interested in the novel (1950 to the present), the works of Albert Memmi, and Judeo-Maghrebi history and literature.
Website

Walter Aaron Clark

UC Riverside, Musicology
Interested in flamenco and its connections to North African traditions. Also interested in evocations of North Africa by Spanish composers, particularly of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Website

Anne Donadey

San Diego State University, European Studies, Women’s Studies
Francophone Maghrebi women writers, especially Assia Djebar, Leïla Sebbar, and Fatima Mernissi.

Caroline Ford

UCLA, History
I am currently working on the environmental history of North Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries and French landscape management and policy within a larger project on the transformation of environmental consciousness in this period. I published a recent article, "Reforestation, Landscape Conservation and the Anxieties of Empire in French Colonial Algeria" in the American Historical Review (April 2008), which won the 2009 William Korren Prize from the Society of French Historical Studies.
Website

Nancy Gallagher

UC Santa Barbara, History
Teaches the history of modern North Africa. Author of Medicine and Power in Tunisia (1983) and “Learning Lessons from the Algerian War of Independence” (Middle East Report, 2002), co-editor of Femmes, Culture, et Société au Maghreb (1999).
Website

Nouri Gana

UCLA, Comparative Literature, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
The multilingual literatures and cultures of the Maghreb. Particularly interested in the rise of the visual and the novel in Arabic and French in relation to questions of nationhood, postcoloniality, and globalization.
Website

David Hirsch

UCLA, Young Research Library
North African libraries and publishing industry.
Website
Website

Mahmood Ibrahim

Cal Poly Pomona, History
Teaches courses on North Africa and leads a summer education abroad program in Morocco. Based at Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, students take a one-month study tour of the various regions of Morocco.
Website

Laila Lalami

UC Riverside, Creative Writing
Morocco, Moroccan literature, Moroccan politics, women and Islam.
Website
Website

Françoise Lionnet

UCLA, French and Francophone Studies, Comparative Literature
Works on the Francophone Algerian writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar and the Moroccan writer, critic, and philosopher Abdelkebir Khatibi. Interested in the postcolonial Maghreb and Mediterranean-rim literary relations.
Website
Website

Ghislaine Lydon

UCLA, History
Specializes in Saharan history. One of the rare scholars to bridge the divide between North African and so-called "Sub-Saharan" African studies. Advocates for a continental approach to the study of Africa in On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trading Networks and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Western Africa (2009), which is a study of caravan trade based on archival research and oral interviews in Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, and Senegal.
Website

Patricia Morton

UC Riverside, History of Art
I am currently developing a project on the "pattern books" of North African architecture produced by French authors, including Victor Valensi in Tunisia and Jean Gallotti and Albert Laprade in Morocco. These are the best known examples of a genre of manuals documenting indigenous architecture in French colonies which greatly influenced North African architecture during the colonial era and after independence.
Website
Website

Susan Ossman

UC Riverside, Anthropology, Global Studies
Research on media, urban form and the monarchy in Morocco and across the Maghreb, trans-Mediterranean migration, issues related to the Maghreb in France, such as "the veil" and suburban unrest. I also carried out a comparative study of beauty salons in Casablanca, Paris and Cairo and was research fellow and director of the Institute de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain.
Website

Dwight Reynolds

UC Santa Barbara, Religious Studies
Researcher in the Andalusian musical traditions in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Website

Allen F. Roberts

UCLA, World Arts and Cultures
Conducted research in Senegal for the last fifteen years concerning visual arts and practices of the Mourides, a Senegalese Sufi movement founded at the turn of the 20th century. Senegal has long served as a crossroads between northern and western African peoples and polities, with many centuries of direct caravan and later sea trade between Senegal and Morocco and Algeria carrying goods, technologies, and systems of belief in both directions across and around the Sahara.
Website

Mary Nooter Roberts

UCLA, World Arts and Cultures
Conducted research in Senegal for the last fifteen years concerning visual arts and practices of the Mourides, a Senegalese Sufi movement founded at the turn of the 20th century. Senegal has long served as a crossroads between northern and western African peoples and polities, with many centuries of direct caravan and later sea trade between Senegal and Morocco and Algeria carrying goods, technologies, and systems of belief in both directions across and around the Sahara. Also works with contemporary artists of Morocco and Algeria, initially through her previous position as chief curator and deputy director of the UCLA Fowler Museum.
Website

Hamoud Salhi

CSU Dominguez Hills, Political Science
Professor of Political Science. Political commentator for Algerian radio and television. Columnist for the independent newspaper El-Khabar (The News). Board member of El-Chaab Strategic Studies Center in Algiers. A native of Algeria. Areas of interest: ethnicity, democracy, developmental studies, and the foreign policies of the Maghreb states.
Website

Susan Slyomovics

UCLA, Anthropology, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
Gender, human rights, folklore and material culture, visual anthropology, Middle East and North Africa.
Website
Website

Stuart Tyson Smith

UC Santa Barbara, Anthropology
Particularly interested in the ancient and modern ethnic dynamics of colonial encounters, and the modern politics of race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage in northeast Africa.
Website

Sarah Abrevaya Stein

UCLA, History
Conducts research and teaches on the Jews of North Africa, including their histories, cultures, and commercial relationships.
Website

Dominic Thomas

UCLA, French and Francophone Studies, Comparative Literature
Professor of Comparative Literature, French and Francophone Studies, and Italian. Chair of the Departments of French and Francophone Studies and Italian. Interests include "Beur" literature (writings by the children of North African immigrants in France), "banlieue” writing (works by ethnic minorities residing in urban housing projects in France), African migration to France and Europe, and immigration politics and policies in Europe.
Website

Ann Marie Yasin

University of Southern California, Classics and Art History
Art historian specializing in the architecture and material culture of the Roman and late Roman world. Her work on early Christian funerary monuments, churches, and saints' cults in North Africa forms part of her larger interests in commemoration, urbanism, and the relationship between ritual and architecture.
Website