Heather Ferguson graduated summa cum laude from La Sierra University with an honors thesis entitled Womenspirit Writing: Re-visioning Feminist Theologies as Sacred Biographies. After a summer spent studying Hebrew in Jerusalem, she continued her edu
...MoreHeather Ferguson graduated summa cum laude from La Sierra University with an honors thesis entitled Womenspirit Writing: Re-visioning Feminist Theologies as Sacred Biographies. After a summer spent studying Hebrew in Jerusalem, she continued her education at the University of Texas, Austin and received an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies (May, 1999). Heather’s thesis, Handicrafts, Heritage, and History: Rural Weavers, Urban Elites, and the Construction of Cultural Identity in Jordan, was based on both ethnographic and archival fieldwork. Her work in the History Dept. at the University of California, Berkeley includes language study and paleographic research in Arabic, Turkish, and Ottoman and grant supported research in Syria and Turkey. Moving from an original interest in the family and legal dynamics (see the publication “Property, Language, and Law: Conventions of Social Discourse in Seventeenth-century Tarablus al-Sham”) to a broader investigation of the seventeenth-century crisis as a global dynamic indicating efforts toward state centralization, Heather hopes to complete her dissertation in the 2008-2009 academic year.
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New Directions in the Humanities
