Fatim-Zohra El Malki (Mansfield College)

College: Mansfield College

Department: Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Thesis title: ‘Governance without Accountability: The Politics of Education Reform in Neoliberal Morocco’

Biography: Fatim-Zohra El Malki is a DPhil candidate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. Her thesis, Governance without Accountability: The Politics of Education Reform in Neoliberal Morocco, examines how participatory reform narratives have concealed deepening inequality, governance fragmentation, and the coercive restructuring of Morocco’s public education system since the late 1990s. Framed within the lens of authoritarian neoliberalism, her work explores how education policy operates simultaneously as a tool of political legitimation and social control.

Her research highlights the precarious conditions of Moroccan teachers, particularly under the rise of contractual employment, and interrogates the broader implications of education reform for state-society relations. Drawing on social movement theory and critical policy analysis, she challenges the privatisation of public services and argues for reform models rooted in equity, accountability, and local realities.

Fatim-Zohra holds a legal background and has completed advanced studies in law, public policy, and governance. She earned master’s degrees in Arab Studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service (2016) and in Violence, Terrorism, and Security from Queen’s University Belfast (2013). Her academic and professional experience spans legal analysis, policy research, and critical perspectives on institutional accountability, civic space, and the role of the state in shaping reform across North Africa.

Alongside her academic work, she served as Senior Researcher at the Rabat Social Studies Institute on a multi-country project examining decentralisation and inclusive citizenship in North and sub-Saharan Africa. She has also held research positions at the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, contributing to work on EU-Maghreb security cooperation, transitional justice, and human rights in post-uprising contexts. Her writing has featured in Jadaliyya, Sada, TIMEP, and the European Council on Foreign Relations, among others.

Research interests: State-society relations in North Africa; the politics of knowledge and reform; education as a site of contestation and governance; criminal justice reform; access to fair judicial systems in the global south.

Teal Mingledorff (Linacre College)

College: Linacre College

Department: Oxford School of Global and Area Studies

Thesis subject: The Diaspora Business of Iran-Israel Relations 

Supervisor: Professor Yaacov Yadgar 

Biography: Teal is a DPhil student in Middle East area studies. Her work examines trade and business exchanges between Israel and pre-revolutionary Iran. She is conducting fieldwork as a Sandwich Scholar at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and was previously a Kamran Djam Scholar in Iranian studies at SOAS and a Hassenfeld Fellow in Chinese studies at Hopkins. 

Previous education: 

Master’s in Iranian studies (SOAS, University of London)

Master’s in comparative and international law (The Johns Hopkins University–Nanjing University Centre for Chinese and American Studies)

Dual Bachelor’s in [French and Chinese] languages, literatures and cultures and cinema studies (Northeastern University)

Research interests: Political Economy, Resource-Rich Economies, Global Financial Crises, Investment Migration, Minority Trade, International Relations 

Abid Zaidi

College: St Antony’s College

Department: Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Supervisors: Dr Maryam Alemzadeh

Biography: Abid Zaidi is a doctoral candidate in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at St Antony’s College. His research focuses on the development of the Qom seminary in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s, and its role in organising, structuring, and supporting revolutionary activities amongst the clergy in the lead up to the Islamic Revolution of 1978–79. He is supervised by Dr Maryam Alemzadeh, and is the recipient of a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities, funded by the Wolfson Foundation.

Abid received a Distinction in his MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford (St Antony’s College), and a First Class (with Honours) in his BSc in Political Science and Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Outside his studies, Abid is an avid reader, long-distance runner in-training, and takes part in several student societies, serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Middle East Review, and President of the Oxford University Ahlulbayt Islamic Society.

Ashkan Hashemipour (New College)

College: New College

Department: Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Supervisor: Dr Maryam Alemzadeh

Biography: Ashkan Hashemipour is a doctoral candidate in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at New College. His research explores Iranian student activism during the 1960s and 1970s and focuses particularly on students’ formation of transnational networks and the influence of these networks on the Iranian guerrilla movement. He is supervised by Dr Maryam Alemzadeh and is the recipient of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) scholarship, which is partially supported by the Clarendon Fund.

Ashkan holds an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford and a BA (Hons) in Political Science and Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from the University of Chicago. As part of his undergraduate degree, he undertook a year of study at Sciences Po Paris.

Outside his studies, Ashkan is passionate about linguistics and, in addition to English, speaks Persian, French, and Spanish fluently and is research proficient in Modern Standard Arabic and Portuguese. 

Su Hyeon Cho

College: St Antony’s College

Department: Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Thesis title: ‘Saints and States in a Plastic Bowl: Tales of a Sacred Porridge in Unlikely State’

Supervisors: Professor Walter Armbrust and Professor Laurent Mignon

Biography: My ethnographic field research visits the post-earthquake space in Hatay, a province in Turkey’s southern Mediterranean region. This border region has long been marked by ambiguity, largely because it was incorporated into the Turkey’s borders only after the death of Mustafa Kemal in 1939. 

The historical trajectory of the region has influenced its demographic compositions and local historiography in distinct ways. The feasts of harisa among Hatay’s Arabic-speaking Alawite and Greek Orthodox communities, as well as Armenians of the Musa Dagh, epitomise the complex interplay of crises and the aftermaths boiled down in rites. These crises include the 1915 Armenian genocide, the 1939 annexation, the 1980 coup, the rise of neoliberalism, and contemporary minority politics.

In the wake of the devastating earthquakes in February 2023, cooking harisa has assumed an even deeper significance, symbolising unity and rejuvenation of communities. My project aims to highlight the resilience of these communities and the profound importance of food and ritual, which transcends national borders and religion and ethnicity classification.

I am currently based in Turkey for fieldwork as a doctoral scholar at the Orient Institut Istanbul (OIIST), splitting my time between Istanbul and Hatay. 

I am curating an edited volume with colleagues under the working title Foodways to the Divine. 

Selected publications:

Cho, Su Hyeon. (2019) ‘The Evvel Temmuz Festival: Cooking and Consuming Identity’. Heritage Turkey 9 (December): 10–11. https://doi.org/10.18866/biaa2019.06.

Cho, Su Hyeon. 2023. ‘Recipes for Sacred Porridge in Post-Earthquake Turkey.’ The Recipes Project. October 24, 2023. https://doi.org/10.58079/tddt.

Cho, Su Hyeon and Daniel Thorpe. 2024. ‘Celebrating Evvel Temmuz in Post-Earthquake Hatay.’ Bianet. July 19, 2024. https://bianet.org/yazi/celebrating-evvel-temmuz-in-post-earthquake-in-hatay-297630.

Jamshid Jamshidi

College: St Antony’s College

Department: Oxford School of Global and Area Studies

Biography: Jamshid Jamshidi is currently pursuing a DPhil in Area Studies (Middle East) at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA) at the University of Oxford. He is affiliated with St. Antony’s College, and his research focuses on the convergence of democratisation, authoritarian persistence, and identity politics in the Middle East. Jamshidi was awarded the prestigious Ali Pachachi Studentship funding in 2023 to support his doctoral studies. Prior to his doctoral program, he earned an honors degree in political science from the University of Tehran, where his studies centered on Middle Eastern politics, with a particular focus on the evolution of institutional structures and the shifting interplay among political actors in contemporary Iran.

Jamshidi’s research interests underscore the complexities of state-building within the Iranian context, exploring the dynamic interplay between local politics and national processes. His scholarly work delves into the nuanced role of local governance structures and patronage networks in shaping the stability and resilience of the Iranian state. Through rigorous analysis, Jamshidi aims to elucidate how the synergy between local politics and national governance mechanisms functions as a critical instrument for garnering political support and bolstering the longevity of the state apparatus in Iran.

Sacha Mouzin (Keble College)

College: Keble College

Department: School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography

Thesis title: ‘Shepherds in the shadow: Lebanese pastoralism in a context of eco-systemic crisis’

Supervisors: Professor Morgan Clarke and Professor Dawn Chatty

Research interest: Environmental anthropology (anthropology of farming, human-animal relations, climate change, the commons, autonomy/self-sufficiency) anthropology of the Middle East, mobility, modernity, ethics

Dominic Gerhartz

College: St Antony’s College

Department: Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Thesis subject: Middle Eastern and Central Asian politics and international relations

Supervisor: Professor Edmund Herzig

Karolin Tuncel

College: St Antony’s College

Department: Oxford Department for International Development

Thesis title: ‘Negotiations of Gender Norms in Everyday Life – Empirical insights from young couples in contemporary Turkey’

Supervisors: Professor Jörg Friedrichs and Professor Masooda Bano

Biography: Karolin Tuncel is a DPhil candidate at the Oxford Department of International Development (ODID), investigating everyday negotiations of gender norms among young couples in Turkey. Her project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) through the Heinrich Böll Foundation. 

Alongside her doctoral research, Karolin has held several teaching positions at the University of Oxford. She has also worked for the Dahrendorf Programme, researching discursive shifts in Turkey’s relation with Europe. 

Before starting her DPhil research, Karolin worked as a Carlo Schmid Fellow with the UN Liaison Office for Peace and Security (UNLOPS) in Brussels. Previously, she gained work experience at the Global Public Policy Institute, the German Embassy in Canada, and the Administration of the German Bundestag, among others.

As scholar of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, Karolin studied Political Science and International Relations in Berlin (BA), Cairo, Reims, and Cambridge (MPhil with Distinction).

Selected Publications:

Tuncel, Karolin I. M., and Tobias Müller (forthcoming). “Is religion a problem for intersectional theory? Muslim women, feminism, and varieties of patriarchy.” Contemporary Political Theory.

Tuncel, Karolin. 2025. “‘It’s Not About Sex, It’s About Fıtrat’: Exploring Turkey’s Politics of Gender through a Religious Concept.” In Embracing Faith and Desire: Queer and Feminist Engagements with Islam and Christianity as Lived Religions, edited by Viola Thimm and Ferdiansyah Thajib, 1st edition, 15– 30. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003590880-6.

Tuncel, Karolin. 2021. Turkey’s New Emigration Wave and Its Implications. Manara Magazine 2021/1. https://manaramagazine.org/2021/03/turkeys-new-emigration-wave-and-its-implications/.

Tuncel, Karolin. 2021. 20 years of Women, Peace and Security: How we argue for participation matters. London School of Economics and Political Science Centre for Women, Peace and Security. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/wps/2021/01/21/20-years-of-women-peace-and-security-how-we-argue-for-participation-matters/.

Josiane Matar (Worcester College)

College: Worcester College

Department: School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography

Thesis title: ‘Governing Displacement in the Absence of the State: Who Fills the Gap? – Reflections from Lebanon’

Supervisor: Professor Loren Landau

Biography: Josiane is a DPhil candidate in Migration Studies and has been awarded the Rhodes scholarship for Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine. Her research intends to move beyond a state-centric view of migration control to highlight the importance of non-state actors in migration management and local-level policymaking.

Josiane holds a master’s degree in International Public Management from the Paris Institute of Political Studies – Sciences Po and a bachelor’s in Political Science and International Affairs from the Lebanese American University. Prior to joining Oxford, Josiane has volunteered and conducted field research in several refugee camps across Lebanon. She has also worked as a consultant for the research division at the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) and as an events and media coordinator at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center.