Early Career Fellows (2020-2021)
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.
Ali Kassem
Ismahen Ben Fraj
Yassine Yasni
Review Committee (2020-2021)
Below are the Review Committee members of the 2020-2021 Cycle of the Early Career Fellows Program.
Mounir Saidani is Professor of Sociology at the High Institute of Human Sciences, Tunis AL MANAR University, Tunisia. He is interested in Socio-anthropology of Culture, Knowledge and Art, Socio-cultural Change in contemporary Tunisia and the Arab World. He published several books and articles in Arabic, French and English in Tunisia and abroad. He also translated books and articles in the field of his interest from French and English into Arabic. One of his latest publication is a 1418 pages Report on the Religious State in Tunisia 2011-2015, a collective work whom he is the general supervisor and the editor in chief. He is leading a multidisciplinary research unit working on “Knowledges, Cultures and Social Change”. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association. He gave lectures and presentations in A Coruña, Ajman, Ankara, Beirut, Brussels, Doha, Gottingen, Liège, Manama, Oran, Paris, Rabat, Santiago di Compostela, Taipei, Toronto and Tunis.
Lisa Taraki is a sociologist at Birzeit University in Palestine. Her current research interests lie in Arab and Palestinian urban social history. She has published in this area as well as on the Palestinian national movement, the informal justice system in Palestine, Arab Islamists and women, and Arab social science. She is currently working on a social history of the city of Ramallah. She has had the opportunity to participate in the building of a leading Palestinian institution through teaching and administrative work, including heading the Department of Sociology, directing the first Ph.D. program in the social sciences, serving as the Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies, and as Vice-President for Community Affairs at Birzeit University. She served on the Board of Trustees of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences from 2015 until 2019.
Maha Abdelrahman is a Reader in Development Studies and Middle East Politics at the Centre of Development Studies, POLIS, University of Cambridge. Her major publications include Civil Society Exposed: The Politics of NGOs in Egypt (2004) I. B. Tauris, Egypt's Long Revolution: Protest Movements and Uprising (2014) Rutledge and a wide range of academic articles. Before joining Cambridge she was an Assistant/Associate Professor of Sociology at the American University in Cairo. She is a board member of the Journal Development and Change and of the Cairo Papers in Social Science.
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.
Selection Committee (2020-2021)
Below are the Selection Committee members of the 2020-2021 Cycle of the Early Career Fellows Program.
Karim Makdisi is an Associate Professor of International Politics and Director of the Program in Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut (AUB). He was the faculty research director of the UN in the Arab World Program at AUB’s Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, where he served as Associate Director from 2009-2014. Karim was a founding member and Treasurer of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences from 2009-2013. Karim’s recent publications include The Land of the Blue Helmets: United Nations in the Arab World (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2017, ed. with Vijay Prashad); “Teaching Trump’s ‘America First’ In/From Beirut” in PS: Political Science and Politics (53:2, April 2020); and “Exploring the UN and OPCW Partnership in Syrian Chemical Weapons Disarmament: Inter-organizational Cooperation and Autonomy,”(2019, with C. Hindawi) in Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations (Vol.25, Issue 4, Dec. 2019).
Nisreen Salti is an associate professor of economics at the American University of Beirut. She is also a visiting professor of economics at Harvard University in 2019-2020. She works on development economics and political economy. Her research is on inequality and inequity in resources, access, and outcomes, with a focus on health. She is especially interested in marginalized communities, particularly refugees, including their labor market outcomes. Her work has appeared in Social Science and Medicine, the Lancet, Tobacco Control, the International Journal for Middle Eastern Studies and the Journal of Economic Studies among others. She has been an active participant in local and regional policy debates, engaging policy-makers and analysts in government and at various multilateral organizations and arms of the UN. She obtained her PhD in Economics from Princeton University in 2006, and a Masters in Public Affairs in 1999.
