Middle East Political Economy Summer Institute Network
SUMMER INSTITUTE PARTICIPANTS
2022 Workshop: Educators
Ziad Abu-Rish
Ziad Abu-Rish is Visiting Associate Professor of Human Rights at Bard College, where he also directs the MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts. His research explores state formation, economic development, and popular mobilizations in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Lebanon and Jordan. He is co-editor of both the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya e-zine.
Max Ajl
Max Ajl is a postdoctoral fellow at the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University and an
associated researcher at the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. He
is an associate editor at Agrarian South. His articles have been published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Review of African Political Economy, and Globalizations. He is currently working on a manuscript on the Tunisian peasant war and decolonization. His book, A People’s Green New Deal, was published in
2021 with Pluto Press.
associated researcher at the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. He
is an associate editor at Agrarian South. His articles have been published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Review of African Political Economy, and Globalizations. He is currently working on a manuscript on the Tunisian peasant war and decolonization. His book, A People’s Green New Deal, was published in
2021 with Pluto Press.
Bassam Haddad
Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School for Policy and Government and a core faculty member in the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics program at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and Co-Editor of Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (Pluto Press, 2012). Bassam serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal, a peer-reviewed research publication, and is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of a critically acclaimed film series on Arabs and Terrorism, based on extensive field research/interviews. Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and the Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute, an umbrella for five organizations dealing with knowledge production on the Middle East. He serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Magazine.
Julia Elyachar
Julia Elyachar is an Associate Professor at Princeton University, based in the Department of Anthropology and at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She is an anthropologist broadly trained in economics, history of political and economic thought, political economy, social theory, Middle Eastern Studies, and Arabic language. Her research revolves around a set of problems at the intersection of political economy, social theory, and anthropology. Her primary research site is Egypt, where she studied and conducted ethnographic research for four and a half years in the 1990s, and where she continues to conduct research for shorter periods to this day. Her research is also informed by her work at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and by research experience in Israel/Palestine and former Yugoslavia, mainly in Slovenia.
Muriam Haleh Davis
Muriam Haleh Davis is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests focus on questions of political economy, racial classification, and postcolonial studies in Algeria. She is the coeditor, with Thomas Serres, of North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions and Culture (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
Adam Hanieh
Adam Hanieh is Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of International and Area Studies (IIAS) at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. His current research focuses on issues of political economy, oil, and capitalism in the Middle East. His most recent book is Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which won the 2019 British International Studies Association, International Political Economy Group Book Prize.
Shana Marshall
Shana Marshall is Associate Director of the Institute for Middle East Studies and Assistant Research Faculty member at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. She is a board member of the Middle East Research & Information Project as well as the Political Economy Project. Her research focuses on the global arms industry, US foreign policy, and the political economy of militaries in the Middle East. She is also a member of the Forum on the Arms Trade and overseas the Financialization & Militarization working group with the Security in Context project. Her work has been published by The Middle East Report (MERIP), The International Journal of Middle East Studies, Middle East Policy,Jadaliyya, the Carnegie Middle East Center, and various edited volumes.
Kareem Rabie
Kareem Rabie is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The University of Illinois, Chicago. His work focuses on privatization, urban development, and the state-building project in the West Bank, and he is the author of Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank, which came out May 2021 from Duke University Press.
Previously he was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC; Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago; and Marie Curie Fellow/Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS).
Kareem spent 2020-2021 on research leave supported by the ACLS, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Graham Foundation for Advancement in the Fine Arts, and was a visiting fellow at CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics; and Committee on Globalization and Social Change.
Previously he was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC; Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago; and Marie Curie Fellow/Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS).
Kareem spent 2020-2021 on research leave supported by the ACLS, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Graham Foundation for Advancement in the Fine Arts, and was a visiting fellow at CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics; and Committee on Globalization and Social Change.
Sherene Seikaly
Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She held the Qatar Postdoctoral Fellowship at Georgetown University and the Europe in the Middle East Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Seikaly was Director of the Middle East Studies Center at the American University in Cairo (2012-2014), where she was awarded an Excellence in Teaching Award in 2014. Seikaly's Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores how Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used economy to shape territory, nationalism, the home, and the body. Her forthcoming book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine focuses on a Palestinian man who was at once a colonial officer and a colonized subject, an enslaver and a refugee. His trajectory from nineteenth century mobility across Baltimore and Sudan to twentieth century immobility in Lebanon places the question of Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession. Seikaly is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Academic Senate, the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Harold J. Plous Award at UCSB; and the UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship. She currently serves as co-editor of Journal of Palestine Studies and co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya.
Rafeef Ziadeh
Rafeef Ziadah is a Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy in the Department of International Development, King's College London. Her research focuses broadly on political economy, maritime infrastructures, gender and race, with a particular focus on the Middle East and East Africa. She holds a PhD in Politics from York University, Canada. Previously she was a Lecturer in the Politics and International Studies department, SOAS University of London and an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Rafeef is co-editor (with Brenna Bhandar) of the book Revolutionary Feminisms (Verso press 2020). Her research on infrastructures and maritime politics has appeared in the journals Politics; Antipode; Conflict, Security & Development; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; among other venues.
