Contributors4 Lawrence G. Potter has been Deputy Director of Gulf/2000, a major research and docu- mentation project on the Persian Gulf states, since 1994. He is also Adjunct Associate Pro- fessor of International Affairs at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1996. A graduate of Tufts College, he received an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a Ph.D. in History (1992) from Columbia University. He taught in Iran for four years before the revolu- tion. From 1984 to 1992, he was Senior Editor at the Foreign Policy Association (FPA), a national, nonpartisan organization devoted to world affairs education for the general public, and currently serves on the FPA’s Editorial Advisory Committee. He specializes in Iranian history and U.S. policy toward the Middle East. He coedited (with Gary Sick) The Persian Gulf at the Millennium: Essays in Politics, Economy, Security, and Religion (St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Security in the Persian Gulf: Origins, Obstacles, and the Search for Consensus (Palgrave, 2002); and Iran, Iraq, and the Legacies of War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). His most recent article is “The Consolidation of Iran’s Frontier on the Persian Gulf in the Nineteenth Century,” in War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and Present, ed. Roxane Farmanfarmaian (Routledge, 2008). * * * Frederick F. Anscombe is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He previously taught at the American University in Bulgaria (1994–2003). He earned a B.A. in History from Yale University (1984) and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University (1994). His research interests lie in the Ottoman Balkans and Middle East. His work on the Gulf includes The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar (Columbia University Press, 1997) and “An Anational Society: Eastern Arabia in the Ottoman Period,” in Madawi Al-Rasheed, ed., Transnational Connections: The Arab Gulf and Beyond (Routledge, 2005). He also edited The Ottoman Balkans, 1750–1830 (Markus Wiener, 2006). William O. Beeman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He was previously Professor of Anthropology at Brown Uni- versity and currently serves as the President of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association. He has lived and worked for more than thirty years in the Middle East, including a number of years in the Gulf region. Author of fourteen books and more than one hundred scholarly articles, his publications include Language, Status and Power in Iran (Indiana University Press, 1986); Culture, Performance and Communication in Iran (Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia & Africa, 1982); and The “Great Satan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other (University of Chicago Press, 2008). A frequent commentator in the public media 312 Contributors on Middle Eastern affairs, he has also served as a consultant to the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, the United Nations, and the U.S. Congress. Mohamed Redha Bhacker (M.Sc., Ph.D. Oxon) is an Omani scholar who writes and lectures on the historical, economic, and political development of Oman, the Gulf and the Indian Ocean region. He is the author of Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zan- zibar (Routledge, 1992) and coauthor of “Qalhat in Arabian History: Context and Chronicles” (Journal of Oman Studies 13 [2005]). He is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Oman Studies and Journal of Colonial History and is currently working on the Ibadi renaissance in East Africa and Oman and the emergence of modern Oman, its performance and prospects. He is also the founder of Al Mustadaama (Sustainability), a research consultancy that advocates the preservation of Omani culture. João Teles e Cunha is a member of the teaching staff of the Institute of Oriental Stud- ies, connected with the Catholic University in Lisbon, Portugal. He holds a degree in History from the University of Lisbon and a Master’s degree from the New University of Lisbon. The topic of his master’s thesis is “Economy of an Empire: The Economics of Estado da India in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Seas, 1595–1635.” He is presently completing work on his doctorate on “Goa and the Creation of the Portuguese Inter- Colonial Market, 1660–1750.” Among his publications are articles on the reigning fam- ily of Hormuz between 1565 and 1622, published in Anais de Historia de Alem-Mar 3 (2002), and on the consumption of tea in Portuguese society compared with China. He is on the editorial team of the new series Livros das Monçoes and is writing chapters on the economic history of Estado da India and of Goa from 1497 to 1830. Touraj Daryaee is Howard Baskerville Professor of History of Iran and the Persianate World and Associate Director of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California, Irvine. His specialty is Ancient Persian and World History. He attended schools in Iran, Greece, and the United States and received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 1999. In addition to a number of articles on the Per- sian Gulf in antiquity, he published Shahrestaniha-i Eranshahr: A Middle Persian Text on Late Antique Geography, Epic and History, translation and commentary (Mazda, 2002) and Sasanian Iran (224–651 CE): Portrait of a Late Antique Empire (Mazda, 2008). Willem Floor is an independent scholar of the social and economic history of Iran, having published more than 150 books and articles, including about a dozen on the Persian littoral of the Gulf. Recent major works include The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities 1500–1730 and The Persian Gulf: The Rise of the Gulf Arabs—The Politics of Trade on the Persian Littoral, 1747–1792 (Mage, 2006 and 2007). He received his Ph.D. from Leiden University in 1971, after having studied sociology, economics, Arabic, Persian, and Islamology at Utrecht University (the Netherlands). After serving at the Middle East Desk (Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs) from 1968 to 1971, he worked in development projects in Africa from 1971 to 1974, before becoming a policy advisor to the Dutch Minister of Development Cooperation (1974–83). From 1983 to 2002 he worked worldwide as an energy specialist for the World Bank. He now writes about Iran full time. Rudi Matthee is Unidel Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Dela- ware. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in Arabic and Persian Language and Literature from Utrecht University, and studied in Iran (1976–77) and Egypt (1981–83). He gained a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from UCLA in 1991. Matthee is the author of The Politics of Contributors 313 Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600–1730 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500–1900 (Princeton University Press, 2005), and Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan (I.B. Taurus, 2009). He is coeditor (with Beth Baron) of Iran and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie (Mazda, 2000); and coeditor (with Nikki Keddie) of Iran and the Surrounding World: Interactions in Culture and Cultural Politics (University of Washington Press, 2002). He has authored some thirty articles on Safavid and Qajar Iran (16th–19th centuries), dealing with issues of political, socioeconomic and material history. Shahnaz Razieh Nadjmabadi has been a Research Fellow at the Institut für Historische Ethnologie at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt/Main (Germany) since 2002. She has been a lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Heidelberg since 1986, as well as teaching at the Freie Universität Berlin and at the University of Maryland/Heidelberg. Dr. Nadjmabadi received a Ph.D. in 1973 in social anthropology from the University of Heidelberg, with a thesis on kinship systems among the nomadic populations of Luristan. After teaching at the University of Zürich, she worked at UNESCO in Paris from 1977 to 1986, where she was a project offi cer in the Department of Social Sciences supervising activities related to Human Settlement and Environment. She was also a member of the working group “Monde Iranien Contemporain” at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifi que, where she developed a project on the topic of identity among Arab and Iranian populations in the Iranian coastal province of Hormuzgan. She has published a number of articles on questions of identity, migration, and the historical development of the Hormuzgan area. J. E. Peterson is an independent historian and author on the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University (SAIS) and has held vari- ous teaching and research positions in the United States. Recent positions have included Historian of the Sultan’s Armed Forces in the Offi ce of the Deputy Prime Minister for Security and Defence in the Sultanate of Oman; the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London; and Sir William Luce Fellow at the University of Durham. His most recent books include a Historical Dictionary of Saudi Arabia (Scarecrow Press, 1993, rev. 2003), Historical Muscat: An Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer (Brill, 2007), Oman’s Insurgencies: The Sultanate’s Struggle for Supremacy (Saqi, 2007), and Oman Since 1970 (forthcoming). Daniel T. Potts is Edwin Cuthbert Hall Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology at the University of Sydney. He was born in New York and educated at Harvard (A.B., Ph.D.), and taught at the University of Copenhagen (1980–81, 1986–91), the Free University of Berlin (1981–86), and the University of Sydney (since 1991).