Current Visiting Scholars

Click name of visiting scholar to contact.

Zheng Hao

Ph.D. Candidate in Chinese Medieval History, Minzu University of China

Zheng Hao is currently completing his dissertation, titled “Calendar Replacement and Political Operation in Sui, Tang and Five Dynasties.” His research focuses on the relationship between the compilation of the calendar and the court politics of Sui, Tang and Five Dynasties. This paper believes that there is a close relationship between the calendar replacement and the political operation in this period. To explore the background and reasons for the great achievements of the calendar reforms in this period, as well as the reasons why the reform achievements could not be inherited and applied in the Song, is one of the problem orientations of this paper.

His research interests also include animal history, plant history, medical history, women’s history, etc. His articles were published in Geological Review, Revista da Universidade Politécnica de Macau, Shiyuan, China’s Borderland and History and Geography Studies, Chinese Medical Culture.

Alison Klairmont Lingo

Research Associate


Dr. Roy Marom

Fulbright Post-doctoral Fellow, the Department of History; Senior Research Scholar, Berkeley CMES

Dr. Roy Marom is a Fulbright Post-doctoral Fellow in the Department of History. He earned his PhD in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel (2022). Marom specializes in the history of rural Palestine during the Ottoman and British Mandate periods (16th -20th centuries CE). His current project, supervised by Prof. Christine Phillou, re-examines early social interactions in Palestine’s first Jewish colonies in light of newly discovered, or otherwise rarely discussed, Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources. 

Marom is the founder of the Palestinian Rural History Project (PRHP), which aims to re-assess and re-contextualize the study Palestine's countryside in collaboration with fellow Palestinian, Israeli and foreign historians, archaeologists, geographers, sociologists, and researchers from cultural studies. Since 2014, Marom has personally conducted over 1,300 oral-history interviews about 700 Palestinian communities with the aim to record to posterity scientifically and culturally important information concerning surviving or depopulated Palestinian villages. His articles have figured in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the Palestine Exploration Quarterly, the New Orient, and War & Society, among other peer-reviewed journals. Marom's full CV can be found here


Elisabeth Perzl

Ph.D. Candidate, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich & Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History Munich-Berlin

Elisabeth Perzl is a Ph.D. candidate and research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History Munich-Berlin. Her dissertation project focuses on women and gender order(s) in the Bavarian Ministerial Administration between 1945 and 1986. 

The study begins with a deep look into the biographies and career paths on the part of female civil servants at all levels of administration as well as other female employees all throughout the Bavarian ministries. The project, secondly, investigates the conditions and limitations of the male administration as an experiential space that enables gender-specific administrative action. Of particular interest, here is whether and how this changed in the context of external influences and tendencies towards liberalization throughout society as a whole in the Federal Republic. To this end, the project pursues perspectives from the history of gender, democracy, and administration.

At UC-Berkeley, Elisabeth will work on her manuscript. She will strive to embed her source-based studies in theoretical framework grounded in Gender Studies.


Burak Sayım

Ph.D. Candidate in International History, Graduate Institute of International Studies Geneva

Burak Sayım is currently completing his dissertation, titled “Transnational Communist Networks in the Post-WW1 Middle East: Anti-colonialism, Internationalism and Itinerant Militancy (1919-1928).” His research examines the communist networks across the borders of the MENA region. In particular, it looks at the fledgling communist organizations' interaction with the anti-colonial rebellions and actors, emerging national frameworks and Islam. It also explores the daily practices of militancy -from the cross-border practices to the question of language or prison life.

Firuzan Melike Sümertaş

Assistant Professor, İstanbul Kent University

Dr. Firuzan Melike Sümertaş's research focuses on the urban/architectural/visual culture of the late Ottoman Empire and its capital city Istanbul, with a particular interest in the Greek-Orthodox community. She holds a PhD. in History from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and B.Arch and M.A degrees from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Department of Architecture, and Program in Architectural History. Her current project in the History Department of UC Berkeley under the umbrella of the Istanpolis collaboration led by Prof. Christine Philliou, focuses on utilizing digital humanities tools for urban/architectural historical research.

Christin Zühlke

Ph.D. Candidate, Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University Berlin

Christin Zühlke is a Ph.D. Student at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University Berlin. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the Yiddish writings of the Sonderkommando prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau with an approach to Cultural Studies and Literature. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy and German Literature and Linguistics and an M.A. in Jewish Studies and Philosophy. Christin was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Hebrew University Jerusalem in 2016/17. In April 2019, she became an ELES Research Fellow, and she will be a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley for the entire year of 2021. She is currently working on an edited volume on microhistorical approaches on an integrated history of the Holocaust.

During her studies, Christin has worked in political and historical education since 2007; she was an intern at the German Desk of the International School for Holocaust Studies in Yad Vashem and the educational department of the Jewish Museum Berlin. In 2014, she was in charge of the Death March Memorial in the Below Forest, which is part of the Memorial and Museum Sachsenhausen.