Visiting Scholars and Postdoctoral Fellows

Habib Borjian is a linguist with expertise on historical linguistics, language documentation, philology, dialectology and Iranian languages and literatures. His academic training spans Columbia University, University of Tehran, and the State University of Yerevan. Dr. Borjian worked as a research scholar at the Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University (2010-19). In the past nine years he has served on the board of directors of Endangered Language Alliance, aiming at documenting rare languages spoken by immigrant communities in Greater New York. Since 2012, he has also served as Co-director of the Near East region at the Endangered Languages Project, a joint project of Google and Univ. of Hawaii, in which his work entails identifying and categorizing the languages spoken in...

Brendan Kibbee is AMESALL’s postdoctoral fellow in Global Africa and the Humanities. Dr. Kibbee’s work examines music’s role in the production of public space, culture, and politics in the postcolonial African metropolis, focusing on Dakar, Senegal. His writings have appeared in the  African Studies Review, Current Musicology, and the Palgrave Handbook for Islam in Africa, among other places. A jazz pianist by training, he also plays Senegalese sabar and baay faal xiiñ percussion styles. He has taught a wide range of subjects from music and world cultures to music technology, and will be co-teaching AMESALL’s signature course “Rhythms of Resistance: Global Hip-Hop” along with Dr. Ousseina Alidou in the Spring 2024 semester. Dr. Kibbee received his PhD in Ethnomusicology from the CUNY...