Visiting Scholars and Postdoctoral Fellows
- Brendan Kibbee
- Email: bkibbee@amesall.rutgers.edu
- Phone: 848-445-0275
- Room #: 15 Seminary Place Room 5123, College Avenue Campus
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 Graduate Center in 2022, and he is a recipient of a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 21st Century Dissertation Fellowship, and an honorable mention for the African Studies Association’s Graduate Student Paper Prize.
- Habib Borjian
- Email: hb146@columbia.edu
- Phone: 848.445.0275
- Room #: 15 Seminary Place Room 5122, College Avenue Campus
- Visiting Scholar
Habib Borjian is a philologist with interests in historical linguistics, dialectology, Persian literature, and the history of Inner Asia. His academic training in the humanities 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 in 2010-19. Currently he serves 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 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 Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Turkey, and Iran. During his tenure at the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (2006-12), Dr. Borjian organized and presided over biannual conferences in Tbilisi, Lahore, and Hyderabad. During the academic years of 2017-19, he sat on the Libraries Senate Committee of Columbia University.