Postdoctoral Fellows (2015-2017)
The ACSS Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is a 9-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. There is a special interest in attracting foreign-trained Arab scholars back to the region. The ACSS postdoctoral 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.
Fellowships are awarded competitively to junior scholars who are citizens or nationals of an Arab country and show high-quality academic credentials and promise. There is a special interest in attracting foreign-trained Arab scholars back to the region. The ACSS postdoctoral 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.
Below are the Selection Committee members and postdoctoral fellows of the 2015-2017 cycles.
Selection Committee (2015-2017)
Ghassan Dibeh is a professor of economics and the chair of the Department of Economics at the Lebanese American University. He holds a BA in Physics as well as an MA and PhD in Economics from the University of Texas. He is the editor of the journal Review of Middle East Economics and Finance published by De Gruyter Press. His research appeared in journals such as Physica A, Review of Political Economy, Energy Economics, Computational Economics, Journal of International Development and Middle Eastern Studies, as well as in edited books. He served as senior economic advisor at the Ministry of Labor in Lebanon, and held consultancy positions in projects related to economic development in Lebanon.
Amany Massoud El-Hedeny is Professor of Political Science at Cairo University. She received her joint PhD degree from Cairo University and the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), the Hague, Holland in 1999. She worked as a lecturer in Nebraska Wesleyan University in USA in academic year 2003/2004 and as a Fulbright scholar in Winona University in Minnesota, USA in 2005 where she aimed at breaking the stereotypes about Islam and Muslims by addressing serial of public lectures and taught four courses on Muslim women in politics, Islamic paradigm and civilization, poverty and violence, and political Islam in the Arab World. Between 2011 and 2013, she was a director of the Center for the Study Developing Countries (CSDC) that is affiliated with Cairo University, where she mentored training courses in female participation, gender and poverty and effective mass media in the transitional period. She is co-author of The Middle East between Digital Democracy & Digital Society: Egypt as a Case-Study, Sept 2011, RMIT University, Melbourne,The Dramatic Change in the Political Culture in the Arab World: From Subject to Participant Culture: Is it Possible?, University of Bihac, Bosnia, 2013andSocial Justice between Slogans and Implementation: Egypt as a Case Study, Bath University, England, 2014.
Driss Maghraoui is an associate professor of history and international relations with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. His publications are found in international academic journals and edited books. Driss Maghraoui is the co-editor of Reforms in the Arab World: the Experience of Morocco, Mediterranean Politics and the editor of Revisiting the Colonial Past in Morocco by Routledge. His most recent publications include “Searching for Normalization: The Party of Justice and Development in Morocco”, in Julie Chernov and Mecham Quinn Mecham (Ed.) Strategies and Behavior of Islamist Political Parties: Comparative Lessons from Asia and the Middle East, University of Pensylvenia Press, 2014 and “The Moroccan ‘Effort de Guerre’ in the Second World War” in Judie Byfield (Ed.) Africa and The Second World War, Cambridge University Press, April 2015.
Tariq Tell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the American University of Beirut. He has degrees from St. Antony’s College (Oxford University), the Institute of Development Studies (University of Sussex) and the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has previously taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), American University in Cairo, and the University of Manchester (UK). He has also held research posts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, and in Amman at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherche sur le Moyen Orient Contemporain (CERMOC) and the Royal Scientific Society. Tell has edited Village, Steppe and State: The Social Origins of Modern Jordan (I.B. Tauris, 1994) and The Resilience of Hashemite Rule: Politics and the State in Jordan before 1967 (Cahiers du CERMOC, 2001). His book, The Social Origins of Middle Eastern Monarchy: The Moral Economy of Hashemite Rule in Jordan was published by Palgrave in 2012. His current research interests include focus on the comparative political economy of development and the historical sociology of the Middle East. They also include the comparative politics of Arab monarchies and the relationship between food sovereignty, empire and popular protest in the Middle East.
El Hadi Bououchma
Postdoctoral Affiliation: Sidi Belabs University
Research Project: The Role of the City in Tribal Societies: Patterns of Exclusion and Inclusion
Biography: El Hadi Bououchma is a professor at Sidi Belabs University (Algeria), and an associate researcher at the National Center for Research in Social and Cultural Anthropology (CRASC) in Oran. He is also a member of the review committee at the Journal of the Association of Arab Colleges, Institutions, and Divisions for Social Work in Beirut, Lebanon. Bououchma holds a PhD in Cultural Sociology from the University of Oran (2015). He collaborated on a number of books both locally and in the larger Arab world and published several papers in Algerian journals. His research projects have covered a range of topics, including traditional Mediterranean bathhouses and Waada practices, tribal rites, identiy, religiosity, and violence from a sociological and anthropological point of view.
Jamil Mouawad
Postdoctoral Affiliation: Institut Français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo) – Beirut
Research Project: The Negotiated State: State-Society Relations in Lebanon
Biography: Jamil Mouawad holds a PhD in politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). His doctoral thesis entitled, “Lebanon: The Negotiated State”, examines the production of the state in Lebanon and the role of the ruling elite in developing networks of negotiations that ultimately guarantee state resilience despite its ostensible weakness. He also worked as a researcher at the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS) (2005-2009). In 2011, he was the recipient of the New Paradigm Factory Fellowship Award from the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS). His publications include a book chapter on the 2009 parliamentary elections in Lebanon, which examines the transformation of political leadership in Jbeil. He is the guest co-editor of a special issue for the Arab Studies Journal that seeks to further understand the state in Lebanon (Fall 2015). He is also a regular commentator on Middle Eastern and Lebanese politics, and his articles appear in Jadaliyya, OpenDemocracy, and Al-Hayat, among others.
Suhad Daher Nashif
Postdoctoral Affiliation: Birzeit University
Research Project: The Vitality of Death and the Dying in Palestinian Society: Twenty years in the Palestinian Institute of Forensic Medicine
Biography: Suhad Daher Nashif holds a doctorate in social sciences received in 2012, specializing in social-medical anthropology. She wrote her dissertation on “The Vitality of Death and the Dying in Palestinian Society: Twenty years in the Palestinian Institute of Forensic Medicine. She is an independent researcher and lecturer at The Al-Qasemi Academic College of Education in the 1948-occupied Palestinian territories. During the past three years, she has been the program coordinator for women’s studies at the Mada al-Carmel Center (Arab Center for Applied Social Research-Haifa). Her research interests focus on a number of issues, notably practices surrounding the dead in Palestinian society and the structure of living of female Palestinians in 1948-occupied territories. She has a number of other studies, most recently on sexual and physical violence imposed by the Israeli colonial-settler on Palestinian women, youth attitudes towards the killing of women in Palestinian society, the practice of killing women in Palestinian society, and the accessibility of justice for the Palestinian woman. She has a number of publications in Arabic and English, most recently “The sexual desires of the Israeli colonial-settler apparatus” in Issue 106 of the Journal of Palestine Studies, Fall 2015.
Toufic Haddad
Postdoctoral Affiliation: Al Azhar University
Research Project: The Political Economy of Siege and Resilience: The Gaza Strip
Biography: Toufic Haddad (PhD) is a Palestinian-American scholar and author of the forthcoming book Palestine Ltd.: Neoliberalism and National Liberation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Center for Palestine Studies, SOAS & I.B. Taurus, 2016). He completed his PhD in Development Studies at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London in 2015, where his doctoral research focused on the political economy of neoliberal approaches to conflict resolution and state-building in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) from 1993-2013. Before his doctorate, Haddad worked in various capacities across the OPT, including as a journalist, researcher, editor, and publisher. He is the co-author of two additional books, while his other writings have been featured in an assortment of books, print, and online media both academic and popular. His research interests include political economy, development, social movements, and cultural production in Palestine and the broader Middle East region.
Idriss Jebari
Postdoctoral Affiliation: American University Beirut
Research Project: Maghribi thought and Mashriqi Reception: The Unexplored Center-Periphery Dynamic
Biography: Idriss Jebari completed his doctorate on the history of the production of critical thought in Morocco and Tunisia at the University of Oxford in 2015. He is now studying the dynamics of intellectual and cultural exchanges between the Maghrib and the Mashriq in contemporary Arab thought. He has published on the intellectual projects of several North African intellectual figures and on the engagements of intellectuals in public affairs from a theoretical and practical point of view.
Marwa Sharafeldin
Postdoctoral Affiliation: American University in Cairo
Research Project: Mixing Islamic Law with Human Rights: Egyptian Women’s Rights NGOs’ Advocating for Muslim Family Law Reform
Biography: Marwa Sharafeldin is a scholar-activist working on women's rights in Egypt. She has a PhD from Oxford University’s Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. The title of her doctoral dissertation was “Personal Status Law Reform in Egypt: Women’s Rights NGOs Navigating between Islamic Law and Human Rights.” Her research lies at the intersection between Islamic law, international human rights law and feminist civil society activism in the Muslim world. Sharafeldin has published three separate chapters in academic books, the most recent of which was “Islamic Law Meets Human Rights: Reformulating Qiwama and Wilaya for Personal Status Law Reform Advocacy in Egypt” in Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition. Sharafeldin is also the co-founder of several women's rights NGOs and networks in Egypt and the Arab world. She is currently a Board Member in the Musawah global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family.
Aziza Moneer
Postdoctoral Affiliation: The American University in Egypt, the Research Institute for a Sustainable Environment (RISE)
Research Project: “Coal for Them, the Bill on Us”: Non-Governmental Organizations, Alternative Media and Egypt’s Anti-Coal Movement
Biography: Aziza Moneer holds a PhD in Environmental Politics (with honors) from the Chair of Forest Policy/ Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources/ Freiburg University in Germany. The PhD’s main objective was to examine the intractability of environmental conflicts in protected areas in Egypt and explore how different actors perceive and try to influence the use of natural resources in these protected areas (i.e. Wadi el Gemal Protected Area). A point of departure was that people’s perceptions of the conflict are significant in their policy options and attitudes in the conflicts. Her research interests mainly focus on environmental politics, environmental communication and discourse and framing studies. Beyond the researcher’s research accomplishments, she has a solid teaching expertise. She has numerous years teaching experience, serving as teaching assistant at Suez Canal University’s Faculty of Tourism from 2005 to 2011. In the winter of 2013, she was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Social Ecology at Alpen Adaria University in Vienna.
Adila Laïdi-Hanieh
Postdoctoral Affiliation: Institute for Palestine Studies
Research Project: Rearticulating the Aesthetic and the Nationalist in Contemporary Palestinian Cultural Practices
Biography: Adila Laïdi-Hanieh received her PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University, and her MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Her doctoral dissertation was titled “Rearticulating the Aesthetic and the Nationalist: The Un-decidable Politics of Contemporary Palestinian Artistic Practices.” Laïdi-Hanieh received scholarships and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies, the Open Society Institute and Georgetown University. From 2006 to 2008, she taught modern Arab intellectual history and the first course on Palestinian arts at Birzeit University. She served as the founding director of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre in Ramallah from 1996 until 2005. Her research focuses on theories of ideology, and postcolonial studies. Laïdi-Hanieh is the author of Fahrelnissa Zeid: Painter of Inner Worlds (Art/Books, 2017), and the editor of the collection Palestine : Rien ne nous manque ici (Éditions Cercle d’Art & Université Libre de Belgique, 2008). Her articles and essays have been published in the Arab Studies Journal, l’Art-Même, Contemporary Practices, Jerusalem Quarterly, the Journal of Palestine Studies, and in Weghat Nazar.
Chafika Ouail
Postdoctoral Affiliation: Makassed University
Research Project: On the Ethics of the Margin: Production of ‘the Masses’ in Islamic Heritage and its Impact on the Arab Present
Biography: Chafika Ouail is an Algerian researcher with a doctorate in Arabic language and literature from the American University of Beirut. Her research interests focus on heritage, literature, and religious, particularly Qur'anic studies, Sufism, and epistemic studies, in addition to research on contemporary Arabic poetry. Her dissertation titled “Language, Experience, and Text” presents an onto-semantic reading of al-Nifarri: She inquired about heritage reading instruments in general and the Sufi experience in particular regarding building an appropriate reading system for al-Nifarri. Her approach explored possible ontological dimensions emitted by connotations in the cultural context of the experience. Her latest publications are an article titled "Darwishian Poetry”: A reading of the Wadi Al-Naml Diwan by poet Jamal Al-Salayi in light of the intersection of the two visions of Sufi conduct and Deleuzian travel in Al-Mashriq (2014) and another titled “Problems in Ibn Faris’s Craft Vision” in the Journal of Arabic Linguistics (2015). She is currently preparing a second doctoral dissertation in Qur’anic studies.
Lamia Moghnieh
Postdoctoral Affiliation: American University of Beirut
Research Project: The Psychological Reconstruction of Lebanon: a Social History of Humanitarian Intervention, Psychiatry and Violence
Biography: Lamia Moghnieh is an anthropologist and social worker. She has a PhD in Social Work and Anthropology from the University of Michigan. She also holds an MA in Social Science from the University of Chicago and an MA in psychology from the American University of Beirut.
Her dissertation "Humanitarian Psychology in War and Postwar Lebanon" examines the processes of psychologizing suffering in Lebanon, from Israel’s invasion in 1982 to the Syrian Refugee crisis in 2012. It is an ethnographic study of the psychological interventions introduced by humanitarian organizations as a response to war and violence in Lebanon. By tracing the aid ecologies that make specific kinds of subjects possible, this dissertation offers a rethinking of suffering as a subject position contingent on aid and violence in Lebanon.
Her current research focuses on the early and entangled history of psychiatry and humanitarianism in Lebanon.
Muzna Al-Masri
Postdoctoral Affiliation: American University of Beirut
Research Project: Football, Contestation & Elite Formation in Beirut
Biography: Muzna Al-Masri holds a PhD in Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London. Based on fieldwork in Beirut with members and fans of Nejmeh, Lebanon’s most popular sports club, her dissertation examined the relationship between political elites and their constituencies, and the formation of an emerging form of entrepreneurial elite in post war Lebanon. She is currently working as a researcher and consultant to several UN and international organizations, implementing conflict analysis and examining linkages between social cohesion and humanitarian intervention. Her recently published research reports include analysis of the conflict contexts in various Lebanese regions, and examination of the impact of social policy on Syrian-Lebanese relationships locally and has a forthcoming book chapter on “Electoral Theatre and Democratic Fantasies” in Lebanon. Her research interests include political anthropology, elite politics and formation, everyday political practice, conflict and violence, anthropology of sports, and sensory research methods.
Samy Ayoub
Postdoctoral Affiliation: Alexandria University Law School, Alexandria University
Research Project: Islam and Public Law: Liability and Remedies in Islamic Law
Biography: Samy Ayoub earned his PhD in Islamic law from the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies and the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. He earned a B.A. in Islamic jurisprudence from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, in 2006, where he received systematic instruction in Ḥanafī jurisprudence. He also received an MSc. in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, UK, in 2008. Dr. Ayoub’s research interests cover the history of the early modern Ottoman Empire, contemporary Arab legal regimes. His dissertation and current book project, “We’re Not in Kūfa Anymore: The Construction of Late Ḥanafism in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, 16th – 19th Centuries CE,” won the 2015 Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award. It is currently under review with Oxford University Press.
Weeam Hammoudeh
Postdoctoral Affiliation: Institute of Community and Public Health, Birzeit University
Research Project: Palestinian Health Sector
Biography: Palestinian scholar Weeam Hammoudeh obtained her PhD in Sociology from Brown University, in May 2016, with concentrations in Social Demography and Development and Political Economy. She holds an MA in Sociology from Brown University (2012), an MPH from Birzeit University (2008), as well as a BA in Anthropology/Sociology from Florida International University. Before beginning her doctoral studies, she worked in the NGO sector in the occupied Palestinian territory, and at the Institute of Community and Public Health as a research assistant/employee for over three years. She has broad research interests in the social and political determinants of health, population health and wellbeing, gender, and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding population and health dynamics in context. She has published in various peer-reviewed journals, and is currently in the process of working on publications from her dissertation titled: “(Re)Producing The Citizenry: Reproduction And The Palestinian (Quasi) State-Building Project.” She has received various awards and fellowships, including accolades from the Hewlett Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Palestinian American Research Center, and the Margaret McNamara Foundation. She is a member of the Lancet Palestinian Health Alliance, the Reproductive Health Working Group, the Public Health in the Arab World network, the American Sociological Association, the Population Association of America, the Asian Population Association, and the International Union of the Scientific Study of Population.
Yasmine Moataz Ahmed
Postdoctoral Affiliation: American University in Cairo
Research Project: Encountering the Egyptian Nation-State in Revolutionary Times: A rural Perspective
Biography: Yasmine Moataz Ahmed is a social anthropologist based in Egypt. She holds an MA from the Department of Sociology-Anthropology at the American University in Cairo (2007), and has recently completed her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge (2016). Her doctoral research, which is based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork among rural dwellers in and outside the village of Al-Ab`adiyya Wālī Mizār in Fayyūm governorate, Egypt, traces the ways in which ordinary citizens imagine and experience it during periods of rapid political transformation. Her research interests are centered upon the study of the state, law, bureaucracy, elections, political change and government. She has extensive fieldwork experience in rural Egypt. Prior to her PhD, she worked as a researcher at the Social Research Center of the American University in Cairo, investigating issues related to access to resources in rural Egypt and Tunisia, and has done consultancy work for various organizations, including the International Organization for Migration. Her recent publications include “Reform from Gift to Right” (2015); “Rural Egypt and Electoral Counting” (2013); and “Recording Technologies in Revolutionary Times” (2013).
