Staff

Dr Fiona McCallum Guiney

Director of MECACS

Dr Fiona McCallum Guiney is a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations and works on the political role of Christians in the Middle East including identity, minority rights, church-state-societal relations, Christian-Muslim conflict, interfaith dialogue, migration and the role of the diaspora. From 2013 to 2016, she was the Project Leader on a Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) collaborative grant entitled “Defining and Identifying Middle Eastern Christian Communities in Europe“. She is willing to supervise PhD studies and provide comments on topics relating to Middle East politics including minorities, political Islam and conflict; religion and international politics especially peace-making and conflict; and migration, diaspora and transnational communities.

Further details on: Academia.edu | Google Scholar | LinkedIn | ResearchGate

Dr Filippo Costa Buranelli

Dr Filippo Costa Buranelli is a Lecturer in International Relations at the School of International Relations and is interested in International Relations theory, international history, global governance, Eurasian politics, and regionalism. He is the convener of the Working Group on Regional International Societies at the International Studies Association, where he is also Chair of the English School section as well as the ECR/Precarious Representative of the BISA Working Group on Russian and Eurasian Foreign Policies. He is willing to supervise work on international norms and institutions in Central Asia, the dynamics of regionalism in the area, the role of the great powers in the region, and wider research on interstate order in the region.

Further details on: Academia.edu | Google Scholar | LinkedIn

Dr Kirill Dmitriev

Dr Kirill Dmitriev works in the field of classical Arabic literature and culture and is a Lecturer in the Department of Arabic, School of Modern Languages. He is the co-founder and alumnus of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities. From 2012 to 2018, he was the Principal Investigator in the ERC-funded project Language, Philology, Culture: Arab Cultural Semantics in Transition.

Further details on: ORCHID

Professor Rick Fawn

Rick Fawn is a Professor of International Relations and was also MECACS Director for six years. Author or editor of 14 books, he has also published numerous peer-reviewed book chapters and regularly in International Relations/security journals, such as Cambridge Review of International Affairs, International Affairs, Orbis and Review of International Studies, and in region-focused journals, such as Central Asian Survey, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, European Security and Europe-Asia Studies. His grants have included considerable, multi-year international collaborative funding from the ESRC/AHRC and from the European Commission’s FP7 and Horizon 2022, as well as others including the British Academy and the Nuffield Foundation. He has had extensive on-groundwork across Central, Southern and Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus and Central Asia, including in conflict zones. He engages regularly with governments, international organizations, and international NGOs, has authored commission policy reports, and gives frequent briefings and keynote addresses internationally.

Dr Matteo Fumagalli

Dr Matteo Fumagalli is a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations. His work lies at the intersection of comparative politics and international security and he is especially interested in ethnic conflict and violence and ethnic minority politics in the former Soviet Union (especially in Central Asia and the South Caucasus). During 2014-2016 he was involved in a project on ‘Taking Partly Free Voters Seriously, Autocratic Response to Voter Preferences in Armenia and Georgia’, supported by Academic Swiss Caucasus Net (ASCN). He is currently investigating the role of arts in conflict transformation in Myanmar’s minority areas funded by the AHRC and is involved in a Global Challenges Research Fund project ‘StAKz Hub – A research centre for strategic technological capacity building for the primary resource sector in Kazakhstan and beyond’ together with colleagues in the Schools of Earth and Environmental Science and Geography and Sustainable Development. He is interested in supervising projects on comparative authoritarianism, ethnic kins and diasporas, conflict, violence and conflict transformation, the politics of energy and natural resources, and foreign policy.

Further details on: Academia.edu | LinkedIn

Dr Jasmine K. Gani

Dr Jasmine Gani is a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations and Deputy Director of the Centre for Syrian Studies housed in the School. Her research, supervision, and teaching focus on three main areas. The first is the history of European and US empires in the Middle East, with a particular focus on US-Syrian relations. The second is Ideologies and social movements in the Middle East, particularly in Egypt and the Levant. The third is Race critique and decolonial political thought/theology. She is happy to supervise and provide commentary on these themes.

Further details on: Academia.edu | LinkedIn | ResearchGate

Professor Raymond Hinnebusch

Raymond Hinnebusch is a Professor of International Relations and Middle East politics and the founder and Director of the Centre for Syrian Studies. He has recently participated in projects on Sectarianism after the Arab uprisings; divergent regime pathways from the uprising, and proxy wars and reconstruction in Syria. His supervision specialities include Syrian politics; state formation in MENA; sectarianism and regional conflict and Foreign Policies of Middle East states.

Further details on: Academia.edu | LinkedIn | ResearchGate

Dr Hsinyen Lai

Dr Hsinyen Lai is an Associate Lecturer in the School of International Relations and specialises in contemporary Gulf politics and international relations through the theoretical lens of international historical sociology. He is currently working on a book manuscript, drawing on the insights of Antonio Gramsci aligned with the idea of Uneven and Combined Development, that theorises how geopolitical competition, late-developing capitalist state formation and dynamics of regime-civil society relations interrelated with the evolution of Arab nationalism in Bahrain and its impact on Bahrain’s alignment policy in the 1970s. He is now the managing editor of Mediterranean Politics and a member of the Foreign Policy Analysis Research Network of the Centre of Security Research (CeSeR), University of Edinburgh.

Further details on: Academia.edu

Dr Wassim Naboulsi

Dr Wassim Naboulsi is an Associate Lecturer in the School of International Relations, where he convenes the modules IR3301: Politics and State Formation in the Middle East and IR5059: Political Order and Violence in the Middle East. He is also a trustee of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES), the head of the Membership Committee, and a member of the Committee on Academic Freedoms in the society. His research interests include Syria studies, Revolution Studies, Rural-Urban Relations, Social Identity Theory, Marxism, Gramscian and Neo-Gramscian Theory, Development Studies, Discourse Analysis and Drama Analysis. He has been an opinion writer in Arab daily newspapers (al-Akhbar and The New Arab) as well as other online news outlets, and previously served as a political advisor and civil society activist in Lebanon.

Dr Adham Saouli

Dr Adham Saouli is Senior Lecturer in International Relations. His research focuses on the politics and international relations of the Middle East. He has published on state formation in the Arab world, armed political movements, and the politics of divided societies. He is now working on the Arabo-Islamic concept of Fitna.

Further details on: Academia.edu

Dr Leyla Sayfutdinova

Dr Leyla Sayfutdinova is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology and the Centre for Energy Ethics. Her current research project Turning oil into stone: oil legacies in the narratives of urban continuity and change in Baku, Azerbaijan examines the multiple ways in which oil has shaped urban space and memory in Baku, one of the earliest oil cities. Leyla has an interdisciplinary background, including Conflict studies (BA, St Petersburg State University) and Sociology (PhD, Middle East Technical University, Turkey). Leyla’s main research interest is the post-socialist transition in Azerbaijan, and her work focused on the different aspects of this transition including urban change, restructuring of professionalism, and identity construction.

Further details on: Academia.edu | ResearchGate

Dr Malaka Shwaikh

Dr Malaka Shwaikh joined the School of International Relations in January 2020 and is an Associate Lecturer. She was awarded her PhD in Middle East Politics in 2019. She has researched oral history in Palestine, refugeeism, peacebuilding, displacement in the ‘Middle East’, prison hunger strikes and their dynamics in a global context. Currently, she is working on projects that examine peace and justice from decolonial, critical and intersectional perspectives.