Heather J. Sharkey is a Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures in the School of Arts and Sciences. She holds degrees from Yale (BA Anthropology), the University of Durham (MPhil, Marshall Scholar), and Princeton (PhD History). Before joining the Penn faculty in 2002, she taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Trinity College in Connecticut. In 2011 she won the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award from the School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania. During the 2012-13 year, she was a Visiting Professor at the √âcole des Hautes √âtudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. In 2024 she was invited to serve on the inaugural advisory committee of the ‚ÄúHumanities and Social Justice‚Äù initiative of the Wiki Education Foundation in partnership with the Mellon Foundation.  During the 2024-25 year, she will be an Oliver Smithies Fellow at Balliol College of Oxford University in the UK and a senior fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.