Dr Sarah El-Kazaz

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Sarah El-Kazaz is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics of the Middle East at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests include: comparative political economy, urbanism in the Global South, infrastructure, the politics of science and technology, and ethnography. Her upcoming book, Building Politics: Urban Transformation and (Un)Making Markets in Cairo and Istanbul (with Duke University Press) examines the political economy of redistribution and property market-(un)making in neoliberalizing economies through the lens of architectural politics and urban transformation in contemporary Cairo and Istanbul. Her next book project investigates the politics of digital infrastructures by following the physical and infrastructural materialization of “Cloud” technologies across the Global South, with a focus on South Africa and Bahrain. She co-edited a special issue on “The Un-Exceptional Middle Eastern City” with City and Society. She is also a co-book review editor at the Arab Studies Journal. Her work appears in Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and City and Society, among other venues.

Prior to joining SOAS, she was Assistant Professor of Politics at Oberlin College. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University and was the Clifford Roberts Graduate Fellow at Gettysburg College. She completed her PhD at Princeton University, MA at NYU and BA at the American University in Cairo.

Comparative Political Economy, Urbanism in the Global South, Politics of Science and Technology, Infrastructure, Corporations, Neoliberalism and Ethnography.