2019/20

Supervisor: Prof. Eyal Ginio and Dr. Julia Rubanovich

Bio: I hold a B.A. with a major in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies and a minor in Arabic Language and Literature, as well as an M.A. in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. I completed both of my degrees with honors. My Master's thesis, entitled "The Ottoman Sultan in Safavid Shah's Eyes: Self and Other Perception in The Personal Writings of Shah Tahmasp I (r. 1524-1576)," was written under the supervision of Prof. Eyal Ginio and Dr. Julia Rubanovich. It aimed to examine the ways in which the second Safavid ruler of Persia constructed and presented the political, cultural, and religious image of the Ottoman empire and its ruler Suleiman I (r. 1520-1566), as opposed to how he presented his own image.

Abstract:  My doctoral dissertation revolves around the question of why various members of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal dynasties engaged in the writing of self-narratives characterized by autobiographical elements during the 16th and 17th centuries. Through a systematic and careful reading of diverse self-narratives written in Persian, Ottoman-Turkish, and Arabic, I seek to analyze the ways in which different rulers, princes, and princesses in these royal houses shaped and represented their self-images and understood such notions as kingship, sovereignty, legitimacy, and subjectivity.

Azrieli Scholarship 2021/22

Presidents Stipend 2020/21

Supervisor: Michal Marmorstein, Elisha Moses, Dagmar Barth-Weingarten

Abstract: My PhD research aims at deconstructing the well-known notion of “Question Prosody” – a final rising tone – into a set of different question-type prosodies, each carrying a unique interactional meaning and mobilizes a different type of response in natural conversation.

Bio: Nadav Matalon is a PhD student in the Linguistics Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds a B.Mus. from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, and a M.A. (magna cum laude) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Nadav is interested in the nature of the prosodic sign - what are its pertinent acoustic building blocks, and what meanings does it carry in human communication.

Publications:

Matalon, N. (2021).The Camel Humps prosodic pattern: Listing for disaffiliating in spoken Hebrew. In Building Categories in Interaction: Linguistic resources at work, Mauri, C., Fiorentini, I. & Goria, E. (eds), 155-186. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Marmorstein, M. & Matalon, N. (2021). Responses within activities: Alignment via Egyptian Arabic ?ah ‘yeah’ in extended turns. Interactional Linguistics.

Biron, T., Baum, D., Freche, D., Matalon, N., Ehrmann, N., Weinreb, E., ... & Moses, E. (2021). Automatic detection of prosodic boundaries in spontaneous speech. Plos one, 16(5), e0250969.

Presidential Stipend 2019/20