People

Director: Dr. Sara Rahnama

Assistant Professor of History

Dr. Rahnama's areas of expertise are gender and Islam, colonialism, and print culture in the Middle East and North Africa. Her book The Future is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria analyzes how Muslim feminism transcended the colonial relationship of Algeria to France and illuminates Algeria’s connections to the broader Middle East. Her writing has appeared in both academic and popular spaces, including Gender & History and The Washington Post. At Morgan she teaches courses on the Middle East and North Africa, as well as the African diaspora in the departments of History, International Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Assistant Director: Dr. Samia Kirchner

Associate Professor of Architecture

Interim Chair of the Department of Undergraduate Design

Dr. Kirchner’s research focuses on urban history and theory of port cities along the Persian Gulf and the Atlantic seaboard. She has published numerous articles and a book on American and Middle Eastern urban architecture and has won numerous grants. She has taught architecture, historic preservation and urban heritage management at the American University of Sharjah in the UAE, the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Georgia Institute of Technology in addition to Morgan State. Dr. Kirchner’s research focuses on urban history and theory of port cities along the Persian Gulf and the Atlantic seaboard. She is currently serving as Board of Trustee Member and Chair of the Governance Committee of the Interfaith Partnership for the Chesapeake Bay. She is also serving as the Middle East Area Editor for the forthcoming Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture, as Editorial Member of the Journal of Arabian Studies, as Desk Reviewer for ICOMOS on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and as Chair of the Morgan Internationalization of Education Task Force.