Early Career Fellows (2019-2020)
The Early Career Fellows Program, previously known as Postdoctoral Fellowships Program, is a 12-month fellowship program aimed at enabling young researchers, up to three years out of the PhD, to pursue their research and publishing plans, become part of Arab research networks and plan a research career in the Arab region.
Fellowships are awarded competitively to junior scholars who are citizens or nationals of an Arab country and show high quality academic credentials and promise. The ACSS research fellow should be affiliated with a research institution in the Arab region during the period of the fellowship and should have an academic mentor at this institution.
2019-2020 Early Career Fellows
Below are the fellows and Selection Committee for the 2019-2020 Cycle of the Early Career Fellows Program.
Sana Tannoury-Karam
Postdoctoral affiliation: American University of Beirut
Project title: Red Flags in the Streets of Beirut: An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Lebanese Left, 1920-1948
Country: Lebanon
Biography: Sana Tannoury-Karam is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a specialization in the intellectual and social history of the Mandate Levant and a focus on the history of the political left, internationalism/nationalism, and the sociology of intellectuals. Her current book-project is titled, Red Flags in the Streets of Beirut: An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Lebanese Left, 1920-1948. Tannoury-Karam is a coeditor and contributor to the volume The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives (forthcoming Leiden University Press). Her chapter “No Place for Neutrality: the Case for Democracy and the League Against Nazism and Fascism in Syria and Lebanon, 1935-1945”, will appear in Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective (forthcoming Routledge). She has a forthcoming article on anti-fascism among Lebanese communists during WWII in the Journal of World History (September 2019). She is currently a postdoctoral
fellow at Rice University.
Loumia Ferhat
Postdoctoral affiliation: Farouk K. Jabre Center for Arabic and Islamic Science and Philosophy at the American University of Beirut
Project title: Articulating Epistemology, Ethics and Aesthetics through the Lens of Ghazālī
Country: Lebanon
Biography: Loumia Ferhat is an Algerian scholar of philosophy. After finishing her undergraduate studies in Modern philosophy at the Sorbonne Paris I and ENS Ulm, focusing on a potential conceptual filiation between Avicenna and Spinoza on the notion of essence, she decided to focus mostly on Islamic Medieval philosophy. She graduated with a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation was concerned with the heart in Ghazālī's corpus and how such a notion is the gateway to a conception of knowledge that is embodied. She contends that such a notion overcomes the divide between epistemology and ethics. She is also a graduate from the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. On the side of her studies she has started a documentary on spoken word poetry in Baltimore as a vector of change, for which she was awarded the Saul Zaentz fellowship.
Caroline Barbary
Postdoctoral affiliation: CEDEJ
Project title: Les espaces-temps militants, inégalités sociales et politisations différentielles en Egypte révolutionnaire
Country: Egypt
Biography: Caroline Barbary holds a PhD in Political Sociology. She is currently conducting research on the modalities of political engagement and militancy in Egypt. Moreover, she reflects on the political fabric of the Actor–network theory and the fluctuation of space-time in a revolutionary context in Arab societies.
Maissoun Sharkawi
Postdoctoral affiliation: Institute for Palestinian Studies
Project title: Souvenir Business in Palestine: Development of 19th Century Craft Trade in Relation to Religious Tourism
Country: Palestine
Biography: Maissoun Sharkawi, associate researcher at IFPO, and assistant professor at Palestine Technical University Khadouri, holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Lorraine- Nancy. Her thesis explores the social, historical and economic environment in which the concept of Palestinian cultural heritage has been formulated throughout the past two centuries. Her research focuses on the material archive that documents the economy of the village in 19th century Palestine. She taught a course on Introducing cultural heritage in the Arab world in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Aix-Marseille University. Sharkawi holds an MA in Cultural Heritage Studies on Conservation
and Development of Cultural Industrial and Economic Heritage form the University of Nantes.
Abdelhamid Faiz
Postdoctoral affiliation: Faculty of Literature and Human Sciences at Ibn Tufail University - Quneitra
Project title: Institutionalization of Violence, Creation and Provision Trends in the Western Sahara between the past and present
Country: Morocco
Bio: He holds a PhD from Mohammad V University in Rabat. His main research focuses on the anthropology of violence and war in tribal communities and on oral narratives. He has several publications and papers. His publications include: War in Pastoral Communities (Center of Sahara Research: 2015) Pierre Bonet Anthropology of the Western Sahara communities (joint paper). Anthropological Path in the Western Sahara by Pierre Bonet (French: joint paper) He also co-wrote articles in collective books and journals.
Selection Committee (2019-2020)
Below are the Selection Committee members of the 2019-2020 Cycle of the Early Career Fellows Program.
Samer Kherfi
Samer Kherfi is an Associate Professor of Economics at the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. He teaches Middle East economics, international macroeconomics, labor economics and econometrics. His current research focuses on education and labor market outcomes in the Middle East and macro forecasting. He has served as an economic and statistical consultant to a number of national and international organizations. His research appears in books by Oxford University Press and in academic journals such as Journal of Economic Education, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, and Journal of Economic Studies.
Dida Badi
Dida Badi has worked since many years on the changes of socio-political structures of Tuareg populations of the Sahara and the Sahel (Algeria, Libya, Mali), adopting perspectives of cultural and historical anthropology. He holds a PhD in Anthropology awarded by Bayreuth University in Germany (2010). He studied political effects of the installation of state borders in Algeria and Mali upon Tuareg communities. From the beginning of the recent political dynamics in the Sahel and Sahara region, in 2012, he did fieldwork in Algeria, Niger, Libya and particularly in Northern Mali (Badi 2013, 2015, Lecocq et al. 2013) first as senior researcher of the “Centre National de Recherches Préhistoriques, Anthropologiques et Historiques (CNRPAH)” in Algiers, then as consultant of the United Nations for the Sahara, finally as senior researcher of Bayreuth University, in Germany since 2017. Dida Badi worked as an associate teacher of the Amazigh language at the Universities of Tizou Ouzou and Béjaia from 1992 to 2008. He also taught the module on Tangible and Intangible Cultural Heritage at the University of Bouira, Algeria from 2012 to 2014. Author and producer of several cultural programmes on channel II of the Algerian national radio from 2008 to 2014. Authors of several articles (31) published in national and international scientific journals, as well as 07 monographs, all on the socio-cultural and historical anthropology of the populations of the Sahara and the Sahel region. He was awarded the prize for the best book on cultural heritage at the 8th edition of the International Book Fair in Algiers in 2008 for his book: L’Imzad : Une musique millénaire touarègue. Edit. ENAG, Alger, 2007.
Fadia Kiwan
Fadia Kiwan is Professor of Political Science and the Director General of the Arab Women Organization. She was director of the postgraduate program of political science in 2000, then founder of the Institute of Political Science in 2002 at the same University. As a researcher, she has published several books and hundreds of articles. She is very active in the field of advocacy for human rights, women’s rights, quality of education, democratization, and sustainable development. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Management of Social Transformations (MOST) Program at UNESCO since 2013. She currently serves as its Chairperson. As a member of the Executive Board of the National Commission for Lebanese Women since 2003. She is also the representative of Lebanon in the Permanent Council of the Francophonie.
Islah Jad
Islah Jad (Hossneya Gad) is an Associate Professor, currently linked to Qatar University, International Affairs Department since 2014. Jad is a lecturer on gender issues and politics at the Women's Studies Institute and Cultural Studies Institute of Birzeit University, where she was its director from 2008-2013. She is a founding member of Birzeit University's women’s studies MA program. She has written books and papers on the role of women in politics, Palestinian women and the relationships among them, Islam, and NGOs. She is also a consultant on gender issues to the United Nations Development Programme and is co-author of the UN's Arab Development Report on Women's Empowerment and author of two books: Women at the Crossroads: The Palestinian Women's Movement between Nationalism, Secularism and Islamism (2008, second edition 2013) and Palestinian Female Headed Households (2002). Jad received her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 2004.
Amina Elbendary
Amina Elbendary is an associate professor (tenured) of Arab and Islamic civilizations at The American University in Cairo, where she teaches courses on early and medieval Islamic history, Muslim political thought and social and cultural history of the Arab Muslim world since 2009. Her publications include a monograph, Crowds and Sultans: Urban Protest in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria. The book explores reports of urban protest and dissent in the cities of Egypt and Syria under the late Mamluk and early Ottoman regimes, and analyzes both the historiography of protest and the intricacies of urban politics in the late medieval period. She is currently working on a research project related to popularization and late medieval historiography. Elbendary earned her PhD in oriental studies from Clare Hall, University of Cambridge (2007). Before studying at Cambridge, she studied at AUC, earning an MA in Arabic studies with a specialization in Middle East history for her thesis “Histories of the Muslim Hero: Medieval and Modern Perceptions of al-Zahir Baybars” (1999) and a BA in political science (suma cum laude, 1996). At AUC, she was a recipient of the Riyochi Sasakawa Young Leaders Graduate Fellowship. She was also the winner of the Middle East Medievalists award for best graduate paper on a medieval topic in 1998.
