Mohammed Bamyeh earned an Einstein Fellowship

University of Pittsburgh professor Mohammed Bamyeh in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences was recently awarded the Einstein Fellowship.

As an Einstein Visiting Fellow, Bamyeh will spend several months at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies (BGSMCS), housed at the Free University of Berlin, over the next four years. There he will coordinate an international project to trace more than 150 years of historical genealogies, meanings and usages of the 60 most fundamental concepts in sociology across three languages: English, French and Arabic.

A collaboration between scholars from BGSMCS and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), the project’s goal is to produce a critical, comparative lexicon of conceptual history, examining how different histories and colonial experiences affect the logic and definitions of starting points in the social sciences. The project also involves the creation of a 60-part podcast series, with each segment exploring an important sociological concept — like “religion,” “nation,” “revolution,” “community” and “individual” — across time and language.

Parallel to this project, Bamyeh, who served as president of ACSS’ board from 2019 to 2023, will coordinate the ACSS’ fifth report on the future of social sciences across the 22 countries of the Arab region. Bamyeh will be assisted by an international team that will prepare several background papers and collect primary data on the use of new technologies, networking capacities, work conditions and perceived future role of Arab social scientists in a region that he describes as witnessing much turmoil but holding great potential.