Middle East, especially Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, international political communication; media and conflict; critical global media studies; activism and media; social movements; memory studies and oral history; diasporas and ethnic minorities.
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.
Palestine and the Middle East; human rights; nationalism; the United Nations; investigative commissions; political epistemologies; international law; anthropology of violence; political anthropology; historical anthropology
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.
Feminist Economics; Gender and Employment; Care and Social Reproduction; Aid, Debt and International Financial Institutions; Macroeconomic Policies and Employment; Commodities, Agriculture and Rural Development; Research Methods; Qualitative Methods; Middle East; Palestine; Jordan; Egypt; East Africa; Tanzania; Uganda.
South and South East Asia: institutional economics and political economy; the economics of rent seeking, corruption and patron-client networks; late industrialisation and the state
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.
Postcolonial Theory, Critical Political Economy, Islamic Studies, African Studies, Middle East Studies, Ottoman History, Legal History, Science and Technology Studies, Histories of Capitalism, Anthropologies of Debt and Neoliberalism.
Classical and modern Arabic literature and culture, with emphasis on narrative and storytelling, comparative narratology and critical theory, and gendered thinking and discourse.
Arabic Literature Classical and Modern; Comparative Literature; Qur’an and Hadith Studies; Islamic Art; Sufism and Neoplatonism; Refugee and Exile Studies
Nationalism in the Middle East; Foreign Policy Making in the Middle East; Egyptian Politics and History; Turkish Politics and History; Arab-Israeli Conflict
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and human security; art, poetry, emotions as languages for global peace; political/social psychology; the global politics of power and resistance; global thought and comparative philosophies; Iran, East-West relations, West Asia and North Africa.
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 Theory; postcolonial, feminist, and critical theory; political violence; liberal thought; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; movement and mobility; the formation of political identities.
War and humanitarianism, racism and the security state, political economy and state formation in the Middle East, military and humanitarian logistics, Gulf Cooperation Council, Israel/Palestine.
Dr Farah Aboubakr is a Teaching Fellow on the Postgraduate Arabic Programmes at the University of Edinburgh, Islamic and Middle Eastern Department in the United Kingdom. She obtained her PhD (2014) in Translation and Intercultural Studies, at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on a number of areas mainly: Palestinian popular culture and oral literature within memory, gender and cultural studies, identity development and relation to language, music and cinema in Palestine. Her latest publication is a monograph entitled The Folktales of Palestine: Cultural Identity, Memory and the Politics of Storytelling (2019) with IB Tauris in collaboration with SOAS Palestine Studies Centre.
Mai Abu Moghli is a Palestinian/British human rights activist based in London. Mai holds a PhD from the Institute of Education, University College of London (IOE UCL). Her research focus is on human rights education in Palestinian Authority schools in the Occupied West Bank. Mai holds a Masters degree in human rights from the University of Essex and has worked extensively in the fields of human rights and education in the MENA region.
Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Dublin (Trinity College), Ireland. Teaching and research interests: comparative politics Northern Ireland and Palestine, peace and conflict studies, NGOs and civil society, Gaza and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
PhD (2005) in International Relations from the University of Bradford. Assistant Professor in Political Science at the Islamic University of Gaza, political analyst and leading member of a number of Palestinian academic and research institutions.
Sophia Brown is currently an Associate Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Kent, where she undertook her doctoral studies. Her thesis examined contemporary Palestinian life writing in English, focusing in particular on the theme of exile. She is also a member of the Postcolonial Studies Association, a Commissioning Editor for the Middle Eastern Literature and Culture section of The Literary Encyclopedia, as well as an active member of the International Auto/Biography Association’s Graduate Student and New Scholar Network and the co-editor of its blog.
Professor of Communications engineering at UCL since 2006. Member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute of Palestine Studies (from 2013) . Founding member of the British Arab Association and member its executive committee (2008-2013), then Director from 2011. Member of the Council for British Arab Understanding (Caabu).
Patricia de Mayo is a musician, singer and composer. She plays the piano, the Arabic lute (al Oud), bass guitar and various percussion instruments. Her love of theatre and dance also led her to join the contemporary dance company Lorent Ballet during the nineties, and later on she became a professional flamenco dancer with Alma Flamenco. She also writes.
Oroub has a PhD in Development Studies from SOAS and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the British Academy- CBRL/Amman. She worked for twelve years before starting her PhD and had empirical exposure to the field while working with UN/World Food Programme in Iraq, NGOs in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, added to policy exposure through working with the World Bank- Iraq mission, Fafo studying the globalised labour opportunities and their effect on Palestinians living in camps in Jordan, ICMC/ Austcare and UNHCR studying Iraqi refugees in Jordan. The academic exposure started with Professor B. Harrell-Bond in Egypt at the American University of Cairo/ The Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Center where she taught Palestinian refugee issues and continued teaching at SOAS and lecturing at several academic venues and conferences.
Yasmeen is a postgraduate student in Cultural Heritage Studies at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL, with a focus on the archaeology of Gaza. She is currently involved with a number of placements on Palestinian archaeology in London, while conducting research for Almat'haf (the archaeological museum of Gaza), where she was working as a curator for five years before moving to London. While in Gaza, she was also highly involved in cultural initiatives for youth including Diwan Ghazza, the Palestine Literature Festival, among others.
Toufic Haddad holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London. He is co-author of Between the Lines: Israel, the Palestinians and the US War on Terror (2007) and previously worked as a journalist, editor and researcher in Jerusalem, including for different UN bodies.
Lina Edward Khamis is an Assistant Professor in political science, human rights and democracy in the Department of Humanities at Bethlehem University. She has extensive work experience in the field of culture at UNESCO in Amman, Jordan.
Professor Nur Masalha is a Palestinian historian and formerly Director of the Centre for Religion and History at St. Mary's University, Twickenham. He is Editor of “Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies”: http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/hls, published by Edinburgh University Press. He is the author of many books on Palestine-Israel. His current work focuses on religion and politics in the Middle East, oral history and social memory theory, subaltern studies, new Palestinian and Israeli historiography, the Bible and Zionism, Holy Land toponymy, Jerusalem archaeology, theologies of liberation in Palestine and Life-Long Learning in Palestine.
Munir Nuseibah is a human rights lawyer and academic based in Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, Palestine. He is an assistant professor at Al-Quds University's faculty of law; the director (and co-founder) of Al-Quds Human Rights Clinic, the first accredited clinical legal education program in the Arab World; and the director of the Community Action Center in Jerusalem. He holds a B.A. degree in Law from Al-Quds University; an LL.M in International Legal Studies from the Washington College of Law of the American University in Washington DC and a PhD degree from the University of Westminster in London, UK, which he acquired after successfully defending his thesis entitled: Forced Displacement in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, International Law, and Transitional Justice.
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.
Hadje Cresencio Sadje obtained his MA in Crosscultural Theology at the Protestant Theological University, The Netherlands, and MA in Ecumenical Studies (specializing in Sociology of Religion) at the University of Bonn.
Lecturer in the history of the modern Middle East at King's College, London.
Main interests: Political Economy of Arab state-building with emphasis on central banking; Arab and Islamic Intellectual history with emphasis on economic thought; History of Palestinian/Arab Israeli Conflict.
Sobhi Samour has finished his PhD thesis entitled The Palestinian economy between settler colonial invasion and neoliberal management, in the Department of Economics at SOAS in 2016. He is the 2017 recipient of the Ibrahim Abu Lughod Award in Palestine Studies, Columbia University. His research interests include comparative political economy of settler colonialism, economic history, economic sociology, institutional and development economics. He has taught at SOAS, Bethlehem University and Birzeit University and worked as an economist with UNDP, UNCTAD and the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS).
Somdeep Sen is Associate Professor in International Development Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. His research focuses include spatial politics, race and racism in international relations, liberation movements, settler colonialism, postcolonial studies and migration.
Nibal Thawabteh has been the Director of the Media Development Center at Birzeit University since 2008 and has worked in media training and production in Palestine for more than ten years. She is the Editor in Chief for Al-Hal newspaper and she is the board chairwoman of Ma’an Palestinian News Agency. Nibal was awarded an international Women Of Courage award in 2008 (USA) and has published several books, she holds a Masters degree in management and educational training.
Teodora is a Teaching Fellow in the Sociology department at Warwick. Prior to September 2016 she worked in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at The University of Nottingham. Her recent doctoral thesis (2013) explored the practices and narratives of three case study Israeli civil society groups responding to the call for decolonisation, right of return, and equality by Palestinian counterparts.
Settler colonialism; Zionism; resistance; hegemony; law in society; Israeli state and society; Palestine; anticolonial solidarity; knowledge production in/on (settler) colonial contexts.
SOAS alumna, former Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Queen Mary, University of London, currently Director of Publications for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (www.palestinecampaign.org).