Dr. Häberl is Professor of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) and Religion. He was born and raised in the State of New Jersey, where he has lived for most of his life, but received his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. In addition to serving as chair of the department from 2013-2019, he has also served as the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies from 2009-2012, and currently serves on the board of the Endangered Language Alliance of NYC. In the past he has served as an Undergraduate Fulbright Faculty Advisor and member of the Advisory Committee for Study Abroad Programs in the Middle East at Rutgers, as well as a juror and panelist for the United States Department of State’s “Critical Language Scholarships for Intensive Summer Institutes,” and as Near East Regional Director for the Endangered Languages Catalogue. In 2007, he was the author of the first Title VIA Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language (UISFL) program grant to support instruction on Iranian Studies ever awarded by the US Department of Education. Together with James McGrath of Butler University, he received two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to create a critical edition and translation of the Mandaean Book of John, in 2010 and again in 2012. In 2016, he was an Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2021 and 2022, he was elected President of the International Linguistic Association, the publisher of WORD (Taylor & Francis). In 2022, he was a Willis F. Doney Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA.