Karen Spira is the assistant director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. She holds a PhD and MA in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis, focusing on Israel Studies. She also holds an MA in religion from the University of Georgia and a dual BA in English and religious studies from the University of Arizona. In July 2022, she successfully defended her dissertation, "Disadvantaged and Orphaned Jewish Children in Palestine, 1881-1939," which examines the development of child welfare systems in the Yishuv. She has taught courses on Jewish and Israeli history at Brandeis and as a community educator in a variety of settings throughout the Greater Boston area and New York. 

Naghmeh Sohrabi is the director for research and the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Her book, Taken for Wonder: Nineteenth Century Travel Accounts from Iran to Europe, was published in 2012 by Oxford University Press. She is the 2014 recipient of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship and is currently researching a book on the experience of the 1979 revolution in Iran. Sohrabi was a postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Center from 2005-2007. She holds a PhD in history and Middle East studies from Harvard University, and her dissertation received an honorable mention from the Foundation for Iranian Studies.

Ramyar D. Rossoukh is the assistant director for research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He is an anthropologist who focuses on culture and media in the Middle East. He spent time with the Bakhtiyari, a tribal group in southwestern Iran, before undertaking a three-year fieldwork project on the Iranian film industry, which is the subject of his first book project. Rossoukh co-edited (with Steven Caton) the volume Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity (Duke University Press, 2021), and contributed one of the volume’s essays on the first uses of digital film editing technologies in Iran. He is currently interested in the United Arab Emirates' efforts to develop a space agency with the goal of establishing a settlement on Mars by 2117. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University.