Aline Schlaepfer
Co-President
Aline Schlaepfer leads a research project hosted at the University of Basel (Near and Middle Eastern Studies/Nahoststudien), and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF-Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship). The project, entitled "Ottoman afterlife in Jordan and Iraq. Politics of remembering and forgetting in new Arab states” (2020-2025), deals with questions of memory, heritage and continuity with the Ottoman Empire in Arab spaces. Aline obtained her PhD at the University of Geneva. She was a visiting doctoral student at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (2009), and a postdoctoral fellow at the American University of Beirut in 2016 and Princeton University in 2017. Before joining the University of Basel, she was maître-assistante at the University of Geneva until 2020. She is the author of Les intellectuels juifs de Bagdad. Discours et allégeances (1908-1951) (Brill 2016), and a number of articles dealing with the history of Jews in Arab lands, nationalism, history of minorities and the study of Ottoman imprint in Arab spaces.
Elife Biçer-Deveci
Co-President
Elife Biçer-Deveci is a historian specialising in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Her current research focuses on abstinence politics in Turkey and the influences of international organisations. She is the author of the book "The Ottoman Turkish Women's Movement in the Context of International Women's Organisations" (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017) and a number of articles dealing with the history of the "alcohol problem" in Turkey. She has been a visiting scholar at various foreign institutions (Central European University, University of Oxford and Freie Universität Berlin) and most recently an Interdisciplinary Research Fellow at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg of the University of Bern.
Sophie Glutz von Blotzheim
Vice-President
Sophie Glutz von Blotzheim studied Arabic at the University of Geneva with a focus on general linguistics, comparative literature, Mesopotamia, Assyrian and Sumerian. She has lived in Scotland for one year (1999-2000) and one year in Syria (2009-2010) and is fluent in German, French, English, Arabic (Arabic and Syrian dialect), Italian and Spanish. For more than fifteen years she has been passionate about the Arabic language in all its forms: grammar of the standard language, literature, usage phenomena, dialect forms, etc. Since 2007 she has been teaching Arabic for students in the first and second year at the University of Geneva. Since 2014, she has been responsible for the publication of the SGMOIK bulletin, which is published twice a year.
César Jaquier
Administrator/Treasurer
César Jaquier holds a PhD in history from the University of Neuchâtel and the Université Lumière Lyon 2. His research focuses on mobility, borders and space in the Mashreq in the early twentieth century, with a related interest in imperial, economic and environmental history. His thesis, completed in September 2022, examines the reshaping of the Syrian-Iraqi region in terms of mobility, territoriality and regional integration by articulating a history of the Baghdad-Damascus route in the 1920s and 1930s. César Jaquier previously studied history, social sciences and Arabic (classical and dialectal) in Switzerland and Lebanon. He is currently involved in a number of research and scientific communication projects, and works on the documentation and promotion of museum collections. In parallel, he is pursuing a post-graduate degree in museology.