New Penn librarian is a Semitist

A NEW PENN LIBRARIAN is a Semitist:

The Penn Libraries announced the appointment of Waleed el-Shobaki to the position of Middle East Studies Librarian. Mr. el-Shobaki comes to Penn from The John Rylands University Library of the University of Manchester (UK) where he had been employed since May 2004 as the academic liaison librarian for Middle Eastern Studies.

Mr. el-Shobaki holds a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Manchester and another in library & information management from the Manchester Metropolitan University. He also holds a BA in Oriental languages from the University of Cairo with specialization in Semitic languages and cultures, primarily Hebrew and Judaism.

Since the early 1990s, Mr. el-Shobaki has supplemented his formal degrees with professional training in online cataloging and post-graduate coursework in politics and economics, Spanish language and culture, Islamic Studies, and religious education. He is a native speaker of Arabic, has near-native command of Hebrew, and has working proficiency in Spanish, Persian, French, German, and Turkish. His range of expertise in languages and cultures of the Near East extends from Syriac and the history of the Eastern Church to Persian and the history of Iran.

For more information about Mr. el-Shobaki and other subject specialists at the Penn Libraries, see http://gethelp.library.upenn.edu/contact/subjspec/.

Congratulations to Penn and to Mr. el-Shobaki.