Jens Hanssen is Associate Professor of Arab Civilization, Middle Eastern Studies and Mediterranean History. He received his D.Phil. in Modern History from Oxford University in 2001 and joined the University of Toronto the following year. He held a SSHRC Insight Grant (2014-2018) on “German-Jewish Echoes in 20th-Arab Thought.”
His writings have appeared in The New Cambridge History of Islam, Critical Inquiry, Arab Studies Journal, and the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.
Amal Ghazal received her BA from the American University of Beirut and her MA and PhD from the University of Alberta. She held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto. She was a faculty member at Dalhousie University (2006-2017) before she moved to Simon Fraser University where she holds the title of a University Professor and is the Director of the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies. She specializes in modern Arab intellectual history. Her work has covered the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa and East Africa. Her first book looked at the politics of identity of the Omani intellectual elite in Zanzibar, situating then in the context of the Arab nahda, Islamic reform, Arabism and anti-colonialism. Her publications have covered a broad spectrum of topics, including Sufism, Islamic reform, conservative thought, Arab nationalism, Ibadism, Word War I, and slavery.