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Dr. Natalie Khazaal is an associate professor in the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech and the director of the Arabic and Middle East & North Africa programs. She is also an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellow for her work on Arab atheists. She grew up in Burgas—the largest port city on the Black Sea, and received her doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). 

Dr. Khazaal studies how disenfranchisement, media, and language affect each other and has focused on Lebanon, atheists in Arabic-speaking communities, refugees, and non-human animals. Her book, Pretty Liar: Television, Language, and Gender in Wartime Lebanon (Syracuse UP, 2018), is the only study that explores the role of audiences in the development of media legitimacy during violent crises with a focus on Lebanon. Her publications on speciesism in the media—including her co-edited volume on borders and the displacement of human refugees and nonhuman animals, ‘Like an Animal’: Critical Animal Studies Perspectives on Borders, Displacement, and Othering (Brill 2020)—have received international recognition in Spain, Turkey, Australia, Canada, and the US. She has contributed to the topic of atheism with publications on the use of pseudonyms by Arab atheists, on how gender affects the way Arab atheists approach television, and on the embedded atheism in Mohamed Choukri’s literary oeuvre.

Mohammad Ghomi is a geometer who works on classical problems involving curves and surfaces in Euclidean space, and more broadly Riemannian submanifolds. He completed his PhD thesis in 1998 under the direction of Joel Spruck at Johns Hopkins U., where he had received the J.J. Sylvester Award. Subsequently he held positions at U.C. Santa Cruz, U. South Carolina, and Penn State U., before moving to Georgia Tech in 2005. His research has been consistently supported by NSF grants including a CAREER Award, and he has been a Simons Fellow. He lives with his family in Midtown Atlanta, and enjoys biking to campus all year round.