Charles Häberl

Charles Guntram Häberl III
Born (1976-06-22) June 22, 1976
Neptune, NJ, USA
Occupation Academic

Charles Guntram "Chuck" Häberl III /ˈheɪbərl/ is a member of the faculty at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Background

Häberl was born and raised in the State of New Jersey, and has spent most of his life in Monmouth County. After leaving New Jersey at the age of 18, he has lived in Warwick, Rhode Island; Milan, Italy; Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts; and New York City. He has also lived briefly in Beirut and worked several summers on the islands of Corfù and Cunda in the Mediterranean.

Education

Häberl attended Ocean Township High School in Oakhurst, New Jersey. He is a graduate of Brown University (AB, 1998) and Harvard University (AM, 2002 and PhD, 2005). He has also studied at the Università degli studi di Bologna, the American University of Beirut, and the Yemen College of Middle Eastern Studies.

Professional work

In addition to teaching Arabic language courses and courses on the modern Middle East, Häberl is also responsible for the Center's development and communication. In the past he has edited the official newsletters of the Semitic Museum at Harvard University and the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute. He is currently a co-editor with Jorunn J. Buckley of the Gorgias Mandaean Series (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias) and a senior editor for the Arab Washingtonian, a weekly bilingual (Arabic and English) based in Washington, D.C.

Häberl's primary focus is upon ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities, including the Mandaeans, Assyrian and Chaldean Christians in the Middle East, as well as Muslims in America. With regard to the latter, he has criticized the media coverage of Arabs and Muslims in America and the West, and suggests that the media could potentially play a more positive role in bridging the divide between the West and the Arab world. He believes whenever Islam is involved, the media frequently eschews first-hand accounts from the principal actors in favor of hearsay (no matter how outlandish it may be), and sacrifices traditional standards of journalistic integrity in favor of sensationalism.

Academic contributions

Häberl is an active and dedicated fieldworker. Since Rudolf Macuch's death in 1993, he has been one of a very small number of linguists conducting fieldwork on the Mandaic dialect of Aramaic spoken in the Iranian province of Khuzestan and in a sizable diaspora. The Mandaic language is the liturgical language of the Mandaean religion, which (unlike most other languages of the ancient Middle East, save for Persian) has survived to the present day in a vernacular form. He has recently completed writing a descriptive grammar of the Neo-Mandaic dialect of Khorramshahr, which has been published by the German publishing house Harrassowitz.

Academic societies

Häberl is a member of the American Oriental Society (AOS), the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), and the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics (NACAL). He is a frequent attendant and occasional speaker at their annual meetings, and was the official Convener for its 35th annual meeting in San Antonio. He is also responsible for maintaining NACAL's web presence.

Publications and articles

External links

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