Stephen Sheehi (Ph.D, Michigan) is Associate Professor of Arabic and Arab Culture and Director of the Arabic Program. In addition to introduction to Arabic, he also teaches courses on the intellectual, literary, cultural, and artistic heritage of Arabo-Islamic world.
His work attempts to interrogate various modalities of self, society, and political economy with Arab modernity.

He is the author of Foundations of Modern Arab Identity http://www.upf.com/book.asp?id=SHEEHS04) as well as publishing in journals such as International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, The British Journal of Middle East Studies,Critique, The Journal of Arabic Literature, Jouvert, and The Journal of Comparative South Asian, African, and Middle Eastern Studies. He has written for a number of websites and op-ed pieces in national and local newspapers concerning the Middle East.

His research interests include the history of visual and intellectual culture in the Arab world during the 19th and 20th centuries as well as Marxism, radical political theory, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and post-colonialism.

Currently, he is working on two books.

Why We Should Hate You represents to a larger Anglophone audience ignored voices from the “Arab street”, media and intelligentsia as well as from marginalized communities with in the Arab world that refute globalization, US gun-boat diplomacy, local authoritarianism, privatization, economic liberalization and ecological negligence.

The second book, The Arab Imago: Consumerism, Capital and the Social History of Arab Photography in Lebanon investigates the relationship between native photography, class formation, political representation, and capital accumulation in Lebanon in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Mohamed Gassi
mohamedgassi@hotmail.com

Mohamed Gassi joined the Arabic Program in 2006, bringing with him twenty-two years of experience teaching Arabic to native and non-native speakers. In addition to teaching Arabic at the advanced level in the Moroccan public school system, he has been the Arabic Language Instructor at the Islamic Academy of Columbia, South Carolina since 2003.

Education

Professional Diploma (1984), Arabic Language Instruction, Annakhil, Marrakech, Morocco.
BA, Arabic Literature (1983), Université Mohamed V, Marrakech, Morocco.

Teaching interests:

Theoretical and practical teaching of Arabic.