Announcing Winter 2018 Middle East Studies Research Travel Award Recipients

December 6, 2018

Undergraduate Research Travel

Daniel Satlow ’19 is a concentrator in religious studies whose thesis research analyzes the writings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook, the first Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Mandatory Palestine, and how his work became received and interpreted by the Israeli Religious Zionist society, especially the settler movement. With his award, he will travel to the Israeli National Library in Jerusalem for archival research, reading through weekly Religious Zionist publications.

William (Liam) Walk ’21 is researching the Dönme, a sect of Jewish converts to Islam who have communities in modern day Turkey. Practicing both Muslim and Jewish rites and being neither Islamicized Jews nor crypt-Jews, but rather a self-standing sect, he hopes to investigate changes in the Dönme's religious self-conception in the early years of the Turkish Republic with archival research of the collection of Dönme related materials in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Graduate Research Travel

Maria Victoria (Vicky) Almansa-Villatoro is a graduate student in the Department of Egyptology and Assyriology whose research is on the social aspects of linguistic variation in Old Kingdom (ca. 2700-2200 BCE) Egyptian letters and administrative documents, and its effects on linguistic change between the old and middle stages of the ancient Egyptian language. She will use her research travel funding to go to Egypt in spring 2019. 

Anil Askin is a graduate student in history interested in examining the “non-Western” histories of capitalism in the nineteenth century. He plans to travel to Turkey for preliminary research on the interactions among two seemingly disconnected “non-West,” or peripheral, geographies: that of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Caribbean. Utilizing the Ottoman State Archives in Istanbul, he hopes to strengthen his archival and factual repository in support of his broader PhD project.