Early Career Fellows (2023-2024)

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.

Cycle 10 Early Career Fellows Program (2023-2024)

Selection Committee

Lisa Taraki is a sociologist and Co-Editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly, a journal published by the Institute for Palestine Studies. Her current research interests lie in Arab and Palestinian urban social history and contemporary social and class dynamics. She is currently working on a social history of the Palestinian city of Ramallah. Taraki has had the opportunity to take part in the building of a leading Palestinian institution, Birzeit University, through involvement in research groups and teaching, and through 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. She served on the Board of Trustees of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences from 2015 until 2019.

Suhad Daher-Nashif (MSc. Health Sciences, PhD Sociology and Anthropology) is a medical anthropologist who has been dedicated to dismantling the intersectionality between biomedical, sociocultural, political, and bureaucratic structures, and the way it structures health and death practices in the MENA. Her main research fields are post-mortem practices, mental health, and medical education. She worked in several academic and research institutions in the Arab region, most notably in the College of Medicine at Qatar University (2017-2022), and currently working as Lecturer in Sociology of Health in the School of Medicine at Keele University-UK. From September 2023 she will be acting as the director of MSc. Program in Global Healthcare Leadership at the same institute. Suhad is an academic editor in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed international journal published by the Public Library of Science, and an active author and reviewer in many Q1 and Q2 journals. Daher-Nashif is also a member in several scientific committees of international and regional conferences on health, society, and health education.

Walid Marrouch is a Professor of Economics and the Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies & Research at the Lebanese American University (LAU). He served as the Associate Chairperson of the Department of Economics at Adnan Kassar School of Business between 2012 and 2018. He first joined LAU in 2009 as Assistant Professor of Economics. Between 2007 and 2009, he was part-time lecturer at HEC Montréal, from which he received his Ph.D. in Economics in 2009. He also holds an M.A. in Economics from Concordia University. His main research interests are in environmental and resource economics, energy economics, development economics, and applied game theory.

Below are the fellows in the 2023-2024 Cycle of the Early Career Fellows Program.

Ashraf  Bader

Postdoctoral Affiliation: Institute for Palestine Studies

Project Title:التحولات والتناقضات في منظومة الاستعمار الاستيطاني الإسرائيلي: الأيدي العاملة الفلسطينية نموذجاً 1967-1977

Translation: Transformations and Contradictions in Israeli Settler Colonialism: Impact on Palestinian Workforce 1967 – 1977

Nationality: Palestinian

Biography: He holds a PhD in social sciences from Birzeit university in  2022; MA in Israeli studies from Jerusalem university in 2014; lecturer at Birzeit university Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies 2019-2022

Basil Farraj

Postdoctoral Affiliation: Northwestern University in Qatar

Project Title: Carcerality on the Move: The Circulation of Violence and Confrontation Practices across Israeli and Colombian Prisons

Nationality: Palestinian

Biography: Farraj is a Palestinian Anthropologist interested in questions of violence, carcerality, resistance and the mobility of carceral practices. He has long been thinking about these questions in multiple forms and across different geographies. Following his graduation from Earlham College, he was awarded the year-long Thomas J. Watson Fellowship during which he followed the paths members of the Palestinian diaspora had taken following 1948 and afterwards.

Cyma Farah

Project Title: From the Grand Serail to the Great Revolt: constitutionalism and revolution in Lebanon

Postdoctoral Affiliation: The American University of Beirut

Nationality:Lebanese

Biography: Cyma Farah is a cultural and legal historian of the Middle East with special interest in Palestine and Lebanon. Her interests are driven by an exploration of the gap between knowledge production and the reality they claim to represent. Her last two projects have focused on the (mis)representations of maps and state constitutions, and the popular violence that their inaccuracies may engender. While she completed her award-winning doctoral dissertation on the Lebanese constitution of 1926 at Rice University, her professional career began as a social studies teacher in Beirut. She holds a BA and MA in History from the American University of Beirut.

Helmi Ghazouani

Postdoctoral Affiliation: University of Tamanrasset

Project Title:المدن الحدودية بين التطوّر الحضري وإشكالية التهميش: دراسة مقارنة للفضاء الحضري بمدينتي سوق الأربعاء في تونس وتامنغست بالجزائر 1910 و1954

Translation: Border cities between urbanization and marginalization: A comparative Study of Souq Al Arbi’aa in Tunisia and Tamanrasset in Algeria – 1910-1954

Nationality:Tunisian

Biography: He holds a PhD in History and Heritage with focus on contemporary history from Manouba university in 2021; MA from Tunis April 9 University 2014. Title of his PhD dissertation is: the Municipality and the Urban Space in Souq Al Arbi’aa between 1881 and 1956.