The Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations (NMC) is pleased to welcome Visiting Professors Ilana Pardes, Mohammedmoin Sadeq and Ahmad Sa'di, Research Associate Khaled Abu Jayyab, Postdoctoral Fellows Niyosha Keyzad and Massimiliano Vassali.
Visiting Professor Ilana Pardes is the Katharine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Harvard University Press, 1992), The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (University of California Press, 2000), Melville's Bibles (University of California, 2008); Agnon's Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture (The Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies, University of Washington Press, 2013), The Song of Songs: A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books, Princeton University Press, 2019), Ruth: A Migrant’s Tale (Jewish Lives, Yale University Press, 2022). For the Fall 2025 semester, Professor Pardes teaches NMC371H1F Biblical Migrations: Literary Perspectives in NMC.
Visiting Professor Mohammedmoin Sadeq is an associate professor in history and art history with a PhD in Archaeology and Art History from the Free University of Berlin (1990), supported by a DAAD grant. He received advanced training in Museums and Cultural Heritage with the U.S. Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in Washington, D.C., and a Fulbright Fellowship in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the archaeology and art history of the southern Levant, especially Gaza, and the Gulf, highlighting ceramic art and cultural exchanges with China and India along the Silk Road. His fieldwork spans Qatar’s al-Zubarah site (1980–1984) and numerous excavations and surveys across Gaza, including Tell es-Sakan, Tell el-‘Ajjul, al-Mughraqa, Bayt Lahya, and other sites. He has published on excavated archaeological sites, surveys, and objects from the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, in a series of international refereed journals, as well as a book in German on the Mamluk architecture of the city of Gaza. For the Fall 2025, Professor Sadeq teaches NMC471H1F The Archaeology of Gaza.
Visiting Professor Ahmad H. Sa'di has taught and served as a visiting professor at institutions including Ben-Gurion University in Israel, Waseda University in Japan, the National University of Singapore, Columbia University in New York, and the College of Social Science and Humanities at Ruhr Alliance universities, Essen University in Germany. He has published more than fifty peer-reviewed articles and chapters, along with three books, with his research appearing in eight languages, primarily English, Japanese, and German. His work focuses on Collective memory, surveillance, population management, political control, political sociology, history of sociopolitical ideas, the Global South since independence, colonialism and postcolonialism, Israel/Palestine, and the consciousness evolution and its articulation in culture. He is currently working on a monograph on Palestinian culture.
Research Associate Khaled Abu Jayyab earned his PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology from the University of Toronto. His interdisciplinary research bridges archaeology, anthropology, and material culture studies, with a focus on societal dynamics and ancient economies in Mesopotamia and the Caucasus, particularly during the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. His work spans archaeological theory, landscape studies, pottery analysis, and prehistoric/Mesopotamian archaeology, with field experience at sites including Nineveh, Tepe Gawra, Hamoukar, Tell ‘Arna, and Gadachrili Gora. Since 2019, he has lectured at the University of Toronto and has also coordinated field training for students at the Gadachrili Gora field school in Georgia (2017-2024). Recently Khaled has been directing two major projects in Northern Iraq the Paths to Urban Growth in the Nineveh Plain (PUG project), and the East Nineveh project. As a research associate at NMC, Khaled will primarily be working on the Nineveh Project with the University of Chicago's Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures. Additionally, he will be teaching a new course in the winter semester, NMC471H1S Archaeology of the House and Home in the Ancient Near East.
Niyosha Keyzad, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies, holds a PhD in English and Diaspora and Transnational Studies from the University of Toronto and an MA in English from McGill University. Her dissertation, Diasporic Pilgrimage: Iranian Women’s Return Narratives, 1999–2020, explores post-Revolution return writing through the lens of pilgrimage. She has served as the Founding President of the Race and Ethnicity Caucus of the U of T’s Graduate Students’ Union and Co-Chair of the Diversity Committee at Massey College. She co-founded the Scarborough Studies Collective, earning a Graduate Fellowship Award from the U of T ’s School of Cities. Her research focuses on life writing, Iranian women’s literature, diaspora and transnationalism, narrative theory, and urban studies.
Massimiliano Vassalli is a postdoctoral researcher at Sapienza University of Rome and a fellow at the University of Toronto (2025–2027). Awarded the Marie Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2024 for his project "Tracing Records and Views of European Literature on Zoroastrians of Iran in the Late Modern Age (TRAVELS)", he examines the Zoroastrian community in Iran between 1773 and 1854 through European, Parsi, and Iranian sources. His publications include studies on late antique Zoroastrian literature and 19th-century encounters between Zoroastrians and Europeans, emphasizing cross-cultural perspectives. His recent book on Dēnkard VII (2024) presents an Italian translation and commentary of the Pahlavi text, alongside an exploration of Zarathustra’s place in European intellectual history. More broadly, his research spans Zoroastrian literature across the ages, the legend of Zarathustra; intellectual exchanges, and the history of Zoroastrianism.