Moderator: Dr. Fahad Ahmad Bishara is an Assistant Professor of History at the College of William and Mary, and a Prize Fellow in Economics, History and Politics at Harvard University’s Center for History and Economics. He specializes in the history of law and capitalism in the Indian Ocean and Islamic world. His current book manuscript is a legal history of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, told through the story of the Arab and Indian settlement and commercialization of East Africa during the nineteenth century, a period of emerging modern capitalism in the region, and the transformations in Islamic law that accompanied it. He is also working on a history of the dhow trade between the Gulf (specifically Kuwait and Sur) and the Indian Ocean. He received his PhD in History from Duke University in 2012 and holds an M.A. in Arab Gulf Studies from the University of Exeter. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, and he is an alumnus of the Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History. Fahad Ahmad Bishara is a Kuwaiti national who was born and raised in the State of Kuwait. He often spends time in Kuwait and Oman, where he visits friends and family, and engages in research on the Gulf’s connections to the Indian Ocean. He also spent a brief period in 2005 working in Dubai. Panelist: Dr. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Professor in Anthropology, teaches archaeology and ancient technology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received his Ph D in 1983 from the University of California- Berkeley, and has taught at UW Madison since 1985. He has been involved in excavations and ethnoarchaeological studies in South Asia as well as East Asia, and most recently was studying the ancient crafts of Oman. His work has been featured in the National Geographic Magazine, Scientific American, Science Magazine and on the website www.harappa.com. Dr. Kenoyer has studied the interactions between the Indus and the Arabian Peninsula, including Oman and the UAE, with a specific focus on copper metallurgy, shell working and bead making. He received a Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center Fellowship in 2013-2014 to undertake the comparative study of Indus related objects found in Oman and to carry out experimental replicative technological studies in Oman. While in Oman he was affiliated with the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, the Ministry of Heritage and Culture, the National Museum, the Department of Exploration and Archaeological Studies, and the Department of Science at the Sultan Qaboos University. Dr. Valerie Hoffman, a specialist in Islamic thought and practice, is Director of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is also Professor of Islamic studies in the Department of Religion. She is the author of The Essentials of Ibadi Islam (Syracuse University Press, 2012), as well as numerous articles on Sufism, Islamic gender ideology, Ibadi Islam, human rights, and contemporary Islamic movements. Her research on Ibadism in the Sultanate of Oman was supported by a Fulbright grant during the 2000-2001 academic year and a Carnegie scholarship in 2009-2010. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Middle East Studies and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Her current book project is Islamic Sectarianism Reconsidered: Ibadi Islam in the Modern Age. Dr. William Zimmerle completed his PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania and also holds a Masters degree in Semitic Languages from Harvard University. He is presently a Visiting Professor- Fulbright Scholar at Dhofar University for 2013-2014, where he has completed field research on the handicraft production of the Omani al-majmar. Since 2001, he has taught as a Lecturer in Religious Studies and Humanities at Fairleigh Dickinson University-Metropolitan Campus-in Teaneck, NJ. Recently, he was the 2012 Coleman Curatorial Research Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, and also the 2011-2012 Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center Research Fellow in the Sultanate of Oman. Dr. Zimmerle is the Project Director of the Dhofar Ethnoarchaeology Project, a multi-year ethno-archaeological survey that studies the ethnographic origins of the Omani al-majmar in the Dhofar, the southernmost region of the Sultanate.

• published: 09 Feb 2015
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