Hassan Hakimian
Director

Human Resources; Demography; Trade Policy & Regional Integration; Energy and Natural Resources with reference to the MENA region.
- Tel: 020 7898 4475
- Email: hh2@soas.ac.uk
Human Resources; Demography; Trade Policy & Regional Integration; Energy and Natural Resources with reference to the MENA region.
Graphic designer for the LMEI's bi-monthly magazine The Middle East in London.
Palestine and the Middle East; human rights; nationalism; the United Nations; investigative commissions; political epistemologies; revolution; anthropology of violence; political anthropology; historical anthropology
Anthropology of food, gender, urban space, material culture, knowledge reproduction, food security, risk and uncertainty, Middle East and North Africa (especially Morocco).
Middle East with emphasis on the Arabian Peninsular (especially Yemen): elites, memory, religion and politics
Architecture of Cairo, the art and archaeology of Turkey, Iran and the Near East
Islamic architecture and urbanism; sociological dimensions of the art and architecture of North Africa, especially Morocco; architectural and visual theory; Islamic studies.
Art, archaeology, and architecture of Anatolia, the eastern Mediterranean, and SW Asia from the 11-14th centuries with a special interest in landscape, urbanism, and ceramics
Art and architecture of the Islamic world; Cross-cultural dimensions of Islamic material culture; Glass and Ceramics of Islamic lands; Orientalism.
Arabic Literature, Palestine Studies, Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Nation and Nationalisms, Palestinian Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Concepts in History, Trauma Studies
Political economy and sociology of globalisation; global power structure and grand strategy; empire theory and US hegemony; politics and development of the Middle East and North Africa; sociology of religion; Islam and Islamic Fundamentalism; social change and social theory.
Political economy of labour migration, class and capitalism in the Middle East. With a focus on the the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Palestine, and the dynamics of regional accumulation.
Political Economy; Emerging finance capitalism; Privatization; Alternative development; Banking, finance, and development; Mexico, Turkey, other emerging capitalisms; State-capital-labour relations; State theory; Internationalization.
Dr. Suhleria is a Teaching Fellow for both Development Studies and the Department of Politics and International Studies.
Political, Economic and Social History of Turkey and the Middle East with special reference to the Kurdish Question in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria; Politics and Development Economics of the Countries of the Middle East; Social Change and Social Theory.
Refugees and forced migration with particular reference to Iraq and Syria, transnationalism, diaspora contributions to conflict transformation and peace-building, sociology of religion, and faith-based humanitarianism.
Ramin has won the awards for Best Fractional Teacher in the Economics Department for two consecutive years (2014/2015 & 2015/2016) and has been awarded the Director's Teaching Prize for Innovative and Inspirational Teaching in 2016/17
Cross-cultural marketing, international consumer behaviour.
Analysis of water resources in semi-arid regions and the role of global systems in ameliorating local and regional water deficits. Established the concept of Virtual Water. Was awarded the Stockholm Water Prize in 2008 in recognition of his contribution to water science.
Critical management; critical marketing; (contested) heritage marketing, management and interpretation; experiential marketing; destination branding/marketing/representation; post-conflict cultural settings; Ottoman Empire; Balkans; India
Management in Middle East and North Africa (MENA), managerial systems and management of renewable and non-renewable resources in the Middle East (MSc), and Islamic banking and finance.
Adel Hamaizia is a DPhil Candidate at St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, and a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Department of Financial and Management Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His research focuses on the Political Economy of the Maghreb. His special interests are MENA-oriented and include regional integration; energy policy; economic diversification; private sector development; rentier states; state-business relations; and the development of institutions.
Dr Sahar T. Rad is a development economist focusing on the political economy of international development, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa. She holds a PhD in development economics from SOAS. Her areas of research and work include international trade and investment, conflict and economic development, political transition and economic transformation, political economy of institutions, and the global development architecture. Dr Rad has taught international economics, political economy and development economics at King's College London, SOAS and the University of Westminster, and has also worked as a senior economist in several international development organisations, including the United Nations, the International Labour Organisation, and the African Development Bank.
Women & gender in the Middle East; women’s movements and feminism in Middle East; secularism and Islamism; transnational migration, diaspora mobilization; gendering violence, war and peace; history of Iraqi women; impact of sanctions, war and occupation on Iraqi women, Iraq.
Gender, Islam and modernity in the Middle East and Europe; Islamic feminism, secular and religious women’s movements in the Middle East, transnational migration and gender; multiculturalism and citizenship; Islam in Europe, globalization; disapora and refugee studies; the Palestine question.
Lecturer in the Department of History
Cultural and social history of the late medieval and early modern Persianate world; urban and local history in Iran; space, memory, and narrative in Persian historiography; shrine-centered religiosity; Safavid history
Arabic Historiography (Popular/Scholarly), Crusades, Arab-Byzantine Relations, Early Islamic History.
Hittite, Akkadian language and literature in Syria
Applied International Relations, weapons of mass destruction, diplomacy, globalisation and corporate accountability, globalisation and democracy, globalisation and energy, the role of international non-governmental organisations, the United Nations and the Nazis.
Islamic Law
The Novel; 20th Century Turkish Literature; Turkish Cinema; World Literature; Comparative Literature; 20th Century Literary Criticism; Modernity and Modernization in late 19th and 20th Century Turkey.
Classical Arabic literature, Popular literature, Comparative literature
Comparative Literature, 19th and 20th Century Arabic Literature, hermeneutics, modern philosophy and theory.
Senior Lecturer in Arabic Popular Literature & Culture.
Medieval history of Arabic-speaking lands.
Literary and cultural studies: postcolonial studies, diaspora studies and comparative literature
West Armenian language and literature
Computer-assisted language learning; orality and oral literature of the Gulf; Arabic language pedagogy
Medieval Arabic Intellectual History; medieval Arabic philosophy; medieval Islamic theology, especially kalam; ethical theory; the Islamic manuscript tradition.
Arabic Literature Classical and Modern; Comparative Literature; Qur’an and Hadith Studies; Islamic Art; Sufism and Neoplatonism; Refugee and Exile Studies
Intellectual Property Law, Commercial Law of the Middle East, the Gulf Cooperation Council States (GCC), especially Trademark Law, Counterfeit goods in transit, and Border measures
Islamic Law, International and Comparative Human Rights Law, Public International Law, Human Rights & Islamic Law, especially interaction between International Law, Human Rights Law, and Islamic Law in Muslim States. Appointed as Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights in the Sudan by the UN Human Rights Council at its 19th Session on 23rd March 2012.
Indigenous rights, law and colonialism, post-colonial, feminist and critical legal theories.
Financial laws of Arab state jurisdictions; Islamic financial law; legal change and globalisation.
Law and Society of South Asia (esp. Pakistan), South East Asia (esp. Indonesia) and West Africa (esp. Senegal); Islamic Law; Legal and Social History; Legal and Social Anthropology; Gender, Sexuality and the Law; Colonialism and Slavery in the 18th and 19th Centuries; Marxism; Critical Theory; Law of Tort; Global Law/Governance; Cold War Studies.
Public Law; Legal and Political Theory; Comparative Constitutionalism; Public International Law and Human Rights Law.
Public international law, especially its relation to the Israel/Palestine situation; theory of international law; international humanitarian law; the law and practice of the International Court of Justice
Indo-Iranian History, Historical Geography and Philology (Avestan, Old Persian, Parthian, Pahlavi, Sanskrit, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Urdu, Pashto, Balochi and Kashmiri); Languages and Religions of Late Antiquity and the Silk Road (Bactrian, Khotanese, Sogdian, contacts among Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and early Islam); Pakistan studies (Ancient and early Medieval History, Dardic and Nuristani dialectology, ethnography and topography of NWFP, FATA, Northern Areas and Trans-Karakoram Tract); Pakistani minorities; HUMINT counterterrorism and linguistic analysis; South Asian Muslim psycho-sociology; Muslim non-Muslim relations (Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh).
Typology, morpho-syntax, language documentation and description, historical linguistics, Lexical-Functional grammar, computer-aided linguistic analysis, Austronesian languages, Australian Aboriginal languages
Phonology, morpho-phonology, stress systems, vowel harmony, syllabic structure, word-structure, Altaic languages, Turkish, French
General descriptive linguistics, Arabic, Persian, North American Indian languages, dialects and oral literature of the Arabian Peninsula - in particular the dialects of the Arabian bedouin, covering the dialects of the Al Dhafir, Mutair, Al Murrah and Rwalah tribes; Lakota (Siouan), Cree (Algonquian)
Historical linguistics, Arabic linguistics, Maltese linguistics, Arabic dialectology, language contact, linguistic variation, contact-induced language change, Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin, Dynamic Syntax, Relevance Theory, Arabic language, Afro-Asiatic languages, English
Linguistics, Arabic Literature and history and Politics of the Arab World. Lecturer in Arabic Language and Culture at the University of Westminster.
My research interests include language, politics and literature of the Arab world in particular. In Arabic culture, political discourses tend to draw on rich political and literary traditions which are used by various groups in different ways. I have researched, alongside other scholars, a number of interrelated themes, including nationalist and Islamist discourses and their interrelations in Palestine, political poetry, avant-garde classical and modern Arabic poetry, the politics and culture of movements such as the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, and the Lebanese movement Hizbullah; language and national identity in the Palestinian territories and postcolonial ideas and their relevance to Palestinian conditions and Arab narratives in general.
Middle East, especially the Arab world; international political communication; Arab cultural politics; Arab cultural studies; memory studies and oral history; Islamist movements; social movements and media; diasporas; ethnic minorities; transnational movements and communications.
Ethiopian music; Music in Israel/Palestine; Biblical cantillation; migration and nationalism; music and gender
Nationalism in the Middle East; Foreign Policy Making in the Middle East; Egyptian Politics and History; Turkish Politics and History; Arab-Israeli Conflict
International Relations Theory; International Security; Migration and Diaspora Mobilization; Globalisation and Global Governance; Transnational Identity Movements
Kazakhstan: politics of language, ethnicity and nationalism in post-Soviet countries
Urban politics and state-society relations in the Middle East; the study of Islamism; Islamist movements; modern Arab and Islamic political thought; political ethnography.
Political violence, wars and counterinsurgencies, the political economy of military mobilities, refugees and humanitarian regimes, the politics of logistics and transport, Middle East, Israel/Palestine.
Political Theory; postcolonial, feminist, and critical theory; political violence; liberal thought; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; movement and mobility; the formation of political identities.
International theory; hierarchy and world history; historical sociology; postcolonialism; foreign policy analysis; ideas, culture and ideology.
Eurocentrism; international historical sociology; World History; historical materialism; postcolonialism; critical race theory; the Ottoman Empire; Turkey; the Middle East
Dr. Moriel Ram is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies.
Dr. Dara Salam is a Teaching Fellow for the Department of Politics and International Studies.
Middle East: states and ideologies, war, Islamic political thought
International Organisation; International Politics of International and Transitional Justice; Religion, Human Rights and International Relations Theory; International Diplomacy and the Use of Force; International Diplomacy and Transitional States.
Elian is a lecturer in Middle East Politics. Before re-joining SOAS she was the deputy director of the CBRL Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem (2015-2017).
Rafeef Ziadah is Lecturer in Comparative Politics of the Middle East. Prior to this she was Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the SOAS Politics and International Studies department with the 'Military Mobilities and Mobilising Movements in the Middle East' project
Judaism in Hellenistic and Roman times; rabbinic literature; social history of Jews in late antiquity; American Jewish history and literature, Jewish identity, gender studies
Professor Hintze takes an interest in all aspects of Zoroastrianism, the religion of pre-Islamic Iran.
Eastern Christianity; Syriac Christianity in the Middle East, with particular reference to Iraq; Syriac Christianity in medieval Central Asia and China
Lecturer in Zoroastrianism, with particular reference to the living tradition in Iran and India.
Anthropology of religion, theory in the study of religions, continental philosophy, Gramsci and religion, intercultural and inter-religious dialogue, minorities (Dalits), mysticism and heresy, non-Western Christianities, Mediterranean anthropology; South-Asia (India, Bangladesh), Sardinia, world philosophies.
Dr Al-Sharekh conducts research on socio-political, cultural and security issues in the Arabian Gulf, and is a board member of several academic and non-governmental organisations, as well as directing the Abolish153 campaign to end honour killing legislation in Kuwait and the GCC, and the ‘Friends who Care’ project for young girls (under 21) at risk within Kuwait’s social care system.
She has been Consultant Researcher on gender and citizenship at the Supreme Council for Development and Planning in Kuwait, Senior Fellow at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Senior Political Analyst at the Kuwait National Security Bureau and a gender politics consultant for UNIFEM, Freedom House and the UNDP on academic and social outreach projects in Kuwait and the GCC.
She holds a BA from King’s College, London and a Master’s and PhD from the SOAS, University of London. Her teaching posts include Kuwait University, Gulf University of Science and Technology, the Arab Open University, visiting lecturer at Uppsala University, Sweden, and Fulbright Scholar on Women and Islam at Whittier College, USA. She has published several books and articles on gender and kinship policies in the GCC, including The Gulf Family, and Popular and Political Cultures of the GCC, examining the persistent importance of family and tribe in modern Gulf politics and society. Her work won the Arab Prize for best publication in a foreign journal for 2013-2014, and the Voices of Success Kuwait Award in 2012.
George Joffé teaches at the University of Cambridge on the international relations of the Middle East and North Africa and on political theory and North Africa at King's College, London. Dr Joffé has been engaged in research and teaching on these regions since 1978 and has published widely on them in academic journals and books as well as editing six books on these and similar subjects. He provides briefings on states in the region for the LMEI and is a member of the Editorial Board of the LMEI’s The Middle East in London magazine. He was formerly deputy-director and acting-director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House).
Hamid Keshmirshekan is an art historian, critic and Senior Lecturer at the Advanced Research Institute of Art (ARIA), Iranian Academy of Arts. From 2004 to 2012, he was the Associate Fellow at the KRC, Faculty of Oriental Studies and History of Art Department at Oxford University. His interests are twentieth and twentieth-first century art from the Middle East, with particular attention to the recent developments in art practice and its relation to the context. Dr Keshmirshekan has taught art history and criticism in British and Iranian universities and has organised several international conferences and events on aspects of modern and contemporary Iranian and Middle Eastern art, and has contributed extensively to various publications. His latest publications include Koorosh Shishegaran: The Art of Altruism (2017), ‘Standardisation and the Question of Identity: On the Dominant Discourses on Contemporary Middle Eastern Art’ (2015), Contemporary Art from the Middle East: Regional Interactions with Global Art Discourses (ed.) (2015), Hunar-i mu’asir-i iran, risheh-ha va nazar-gah-hay-i nuvin (2015), Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives (2013), ‘Reclaiming Cultural Space: Artist’s Performativity versus State’s Expectations in Contemporary Iran’ (2013).
Helen Lackner worked as a consultant in social aspects of rural development for four decades in over thirty countries, mostly in the Middle East, Africa and Europe. She has been involved in Yemen since the early 1970s where she lived in all three Yemeni states for over 15 years. She now focuses on analysis and writing, trying to promote commitment to equitable development and peace in Yemen. Her most recent publications include Yemen’s Peaceful Transition from Autocracy: could it have succeeded? (International IDEA 2016) and Understanding the Yemeni Crisis: the transformation of tribal roles in recent decades (Durham, Luce Fellowship Paper 17, 2016). Her latest book is Yemen in Crisis: autocracy, neo-liberalism and the disintegration of a state (Saqi, 2017).
Dr Corinna Mullin has been based for the past five years at the University of Tunis, as a Visiting Assistant Professor in International Politics. In the fall of 2017, she will be joining the Political Science Department at John Jay College, The City University of New York. Her research interests include genealogies and political economy of “national security”, anti-/post-/de-colonial theories and struggles, empire, knowledge production, and critical race theory, with a focus on North Africa and West Asia. Prior to moving to Tunisia, Dr. Mullin was a lecturer in Comparative Politics of the Middle East at SOAS. She is a Research Associate at the LMEI, where she has taught the Government and Politics of the Middle East summer course for the past five years.
Dr Sharri Plonski is a part-time lecturer and researcher at SOAS, University of London. Her research sits at the nexus of critical political geography, border spaces and community struggles in Israel/Palestine, with her current projects range from investigations into the ontology of global transport corridors, political settlements in borderland contexts and (settler) colonial relations in the Middle East. Dr Plonski’s first book will be published in 2017 as part of the new SOAS Palestine Studies Book Series with I.B. Tauris, under the title Palestinian Citizens of Israel: Power, Resistance and the Struggle for Space.
Before joining the LMEI as a research associate, Hamid Pouran was Iran Heritage Foundation (IHF) Visiting Fellow in Iran’s Environmental Sustainability at the LMEI's Centre for Iranian Studies and senior research associate at Lancaster University. He was part of the Transatlantic Initiative for Nanotechnology and the Environment (TINE), an international scientific consortium of UK and US universities to better understand fate and behavior of nanomaterials in the environment.
Dr Pouran was the convener of SOAS Centenary Conference, Environmental Challenges in the Middle East and North Africa. He was also scientific consultant for a BBC World documentary called Dust Storms. This documentary had major inputs from NASA, USGS and UNEP. He was also guest visiting scholar at Princeton University in 2017.
Tom Selwyn is a Professorial Research Associate at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology and the London Middle East Institute. He was awarded an Emeritus Professorial Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Foundation in 2014. He is widely published in the field of the anthropology of tourism/pilgrimage with regional interests in Palestine/Israel and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He directed/co-directed four major research and development projects in Palestine and Bosnia-Herzegovina for the European Commission between 1995-2005; founded the MA in the Anthropology of Travel, Tourism, and Pilgrimage at SOAS in 2010; and was awarded the Lucy Mair medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2009. Recent publications include 'The Future of Palestinian Tourism' in Isaac,R., CM Hall, F. Higgins-Desbiolles (eds), 2016, Power and Politics of Tourism in Palestine, London, Routledge; 'Tourism and Sight Prevention' in Andrews, H.(ed) 2016, Tourism and Violence, London, Routledge; 'The Rise and Fall of Orientalism in Travel, Tourism, and Pilgrimage: Report from Palestine/Israel', Tourism, Culture, and Communication, 17, 2017.
John Waterbury became the 14th President of the American University of Beirut in January 1998 and retired from the presidency in July 2008. Before joining AUB, Dr Waterbury was, for twenty years, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Dr Waterbury has published widely on the political economy of the MENA region, most recently in The Political Economy of the Middle East, co-authored with Alan Richards. He has also focused since the 1970s on issues of transboundary water resources and the collective action problems that they entail. In 1979 Syracuse University Press published his The Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley, and in 2003 Yale University Press published the sequel, The Nile Basin: National Determinants of Collective Action.
Sami Zubaida is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London and has held visiting positions in Cairo, Istanbul, Beirut, Aix-en-Provence, Berkeley CA, Paris and New York. His research interests include Middle East Politics, Religion and Law, Nationalism, Food and Culture. Professor Zubaida is a regular contributor to the LMEI’s The Middle East in London magazine and has published extensively on the Middle East, most recently an article in openDemocracy on Islam and Reform. He is also a Professorial Research Associate of the Food Studies Centre, SOAS and has published widely on food and culinary cultures including 'Drink, meals and social boundaries', in Jakob A. Klein and Anne Murcott (eds), Food Consumption in Global Perspective: Essays in the Anthropology of Food in Honour of Jack Goody (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and A Taste of Thyme: Culinary Cultures of the Middle East (ed. with Richard Tapper, Tauris Parke, 2001).