Humeyra Biricik (Pembroke College)

College: Pembroke College

Department: Department of Politics and International Relations

Supervisors: Dr Scott Williamson and Professor Neil Ketchley

Biography: Humeyra Biricik is a doctoral candidate in Politics at Pembroke College. Her research focuses on the relationship between political speech, populism, and democratic backsliding in Turkey, Hungary, India, and Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern countries. She primarily employs large language models and text analysis, along with other econometric analyses, to conduct her studies.

She is the recipient of the joint studentship between Pembroke and the Department of Political Science and International Relations, as well as the Pembroke Senior Studentship for the academic year 2023-2024, granting her a place in the Senior Common Room alongside esteemed faculty members. In conjunction with her SCR membership, Humeyra formerly served as the President and the Academic Representative of Pembroke Middle Common Room, leading the college’s peer-reviewed academic journal, termly academic symposium, and the 3CR talks where the members of the undergraduate and graduate community present their research with the faculty across all disciplines. As part of her role, Humeyra advocated for increased accessibility to affordable housing for graduate students, with a particular focus on those from Global South backgrounds. She also serves as a lead mentor in the JCR/MCR mentorship program, designed to provide professional assistance and support to undergraduate students. As a part of her scholarship, Humeyra coordinated a series of politics talks at Pembroke College, on a wide array of topics, including local British elections, the housing crisis, regulation of AI and democracy, and machine learning methods used in political science. She is currently working on organising writing workshops for undergraduate students in politics, to support women and ethnic minority undergraduates at Oxford University.

Humeyra currently serves as a student representative in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford. In this role, she routinely attends multiple termly meetings with senior administration to advocate for the interests of DPhil students in Politics. Her advocacy focuses on addressing inequalities in research funding among colleges across Oxford and reducing graduate student fees. Additionally, she organises termly formal dinners and various social events for the entire department. She is also affiliated with the Middle East Centre, and she co-organised the Middle East Politics Seminar Series and the Women’s Rights Research Seminars with Professor Maryam Alemzadeh for the academic year 2023-2024. She was also the co-organiser of the 2024 Oxford Language Models for Social Science Workshop, which brings together machine learning scientists, leading researchers, and industry practitioners to provide comprehensive training to social scientists. For questions related to the 2024 Oxford LLMs Workshop, Middle East Politics Seminar Series, Women’s Rights Seminar Series, Pembroke Academic Symposium, or Politics at Pembroke talks, contact Humeyra via email.

Currently engaged with several academic collaborations, Humeyra was invited to present her work at several academic conferences, including the American Political Science Association (APSA), European Political Science Association (EPSA), Society for Political Methodology (PolMeth), the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES), Middle East Studies Association (MESA), International Studies Association (ISA), and New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data (TADA).

She currently teaches Middle East Politics and Comparative Political Economy to undergraduate students at New College and Pembroke College. She also formerly taught at St Catherine’s College, Keble College, St Anne’s College, and St Edmund’s College and conducted admissions interviews for the upcoming Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) students during the 2022-2023 admissions cycle.

Before Oxford, Humeyra obtained an MPhil Degree from the University of Cambridge in Economic and Political Sociology. Her MPhil dissertation titled “Resurrecting God: Analyzing Wartime Desecularization in France, the Soviet Union, and Turkey” was awarded the Cambridge Department of Sociology Polity Prize, as well as the Wolfson College Jennings Prize for the best dissertation and the best overall mark. She earned her BA in Government, Economics, and Sociology with a focus on Comparative Politics from Georgetown University and successfully defended her honors dissertation, receiving a distinction and a department prize.

Ziad Kiblawi

College: St Antony’s College

Department: Faculty of History

Thesis subject: Modernity, Reason, and Critique in 20th Century Arab Materialist Thought

Supervisors: Professor Faisal Devji and Professor Mohamed-Salah Omri

Biography: I am an intellectual historian and a translator of modern Arab social and political thought. My research centers on Arabic critical theory, and the logico-historical conditions necessitated by the category of critique. Mainly, I look at the transformations of the analytic categories of critique between the 1950s and 1980s—from Arab Existentialism and Neo-Kantian culturalism in Arab Nationalism to the Marxist and psychoanalytic tendencies in historical thought.

I completed my Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts at the American University of Beirut. My graduate dissertation, Reading, Repeating, and Working Through: On Mahdi Amil’s Theoretical Practice, examines the relationship between literature (Sufism, German romanticism, surrealism), anti-colonial thought (Fanon), science (Ibn Khaldūn, Freud), and philosophy (Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Bachelard, Althusser) in the thought and concept formation of Lebanese intellectual Mahdi Amel.

I am interested in conceptions of modernity and modernization; historiography of critical theory and modern art in the Middle East; historical practices of translation (and the ‘Arabization’) of German idealism, historical materialism, French structuralism, and psychoanalysis into Arabic; and the history and theory of intellectual history.

I am a member of the Beirut Institute of Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) and the Aref El Rayess Foundation. I recently co-curated (with Natasha Gasparian) Je suis inculte !: The Salon d’Automne and the National Canon.

Seong Hyun Kim (Hertford College)

College: Hertford College

Department: Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Thesis subject: Empire building and imperialist policies of the Egyptian Khedivate (19th century)

Supervisor: Professor Eugene Rogan

Kamila Akhmedjanova

College: St Antony’s College

Department: Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Thesis title: ‘A study of Ahmad Dānish’s legacy within the context of late 19^th-century Persian-speaking intellectual trends’

Supervisors: Professor Edmund Herzig and Professor Dominic Parviz Brookshaw

Biography: Before coming to the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, I completed my BA and MPhil degrees at the University of Oxford, having previously specialized in Italian literature and general linguistics. I also hold an MSt in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford.

I took part in various academic conferences, including, most recently, conferences of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (ASPS), the Association for Iranian Studies (AIS), the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) and of the Italian Association for the Study of Central Asia and the Caucasus (ASIAC). I published several academic articles, covering topics related to the 19th-century Persian-speaking intellectual trends, as well as to the methodology of teaching Tajik dialect of Persian. My first article was dedicated to the study of double past participle forms in the Sicilian dialects, while my most recent published article is dedicated to the interplay of literature and politics in the works of Sadriddin Ayni, a famous Soviet Tajik writer. In addition, one of my forthcoming articles explores the image of Persia in Russian literature, while my forthcoming book chapter is dedicated to the question of the influence of Ayni and Lahuti on the creation of modern Tajik national and cultural identity in the 20^th century.

I have experience of teaching Tajik dialect of Persian to undergraduate students, as well as of co-supervising undergraduate dissertations. I also taught classes dedicated to Ahmad Dānish’s texts and lectures on both pre-modern and modern Persian literature. I act as a Teaching Assistant for the MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation at the University of Oxford.

Research interests: My current academic interests mainly include late 19^th-century Persian-speaking intellectual trends, and I am particularly interested in connections between different parts of the Persian-speaking world (especially between Iran and Central Asia). My other research interests lie more broadly in the history of the Persian-speaking world and Persian literature (including works produced in both Tajik, i.e. Cyrillic, and Persian scripts).

Selected publications:

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2026. ‘The Image of Persia in the Works of Ivan Bunin, Nikolaǐ Gumilëv and Sergeǐ Esenin’. Forum for Modern Language Studies (forthcoming).

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2026. ‘Sadriddīn ‘Aynī’s and Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī’s Influence on the Creation of Modern Tajik National and Cultural Identity in the 20^th Century’. In The Tajiks: History, Culture and Identity, edited by Dagikhudo Dagiev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) (forthcoming).

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2026. ‘Central Asian Progressive Thinker of the End of the 19^th Century: Analysis of Ahmad Dānish’s Intellectual Legacy’. Studies on Central Asia and the Caucasus (forthcoming).

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2025. ‘Literature and Politics in Early Soviet Central Asia: Case Study of Sadriddin Aini’s Odina and Margi sudkhūr’. The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 52.1, pp. 98-124, DOI: 10.30965/18763324-bja10112.

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2024. ‘Trends in Intellectual Life in Central Asia in the 19^th Century (Based on the Works of Nādira, Dilshād Barnā and Ahmad Dānish)’. Oriens, 1, pp. 210-221.

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2023. ‘Reanalysis of the Role that Western Ideas Played in the Development of the Ideology of Progressive Persian-speaking Philosophers of the 19^th Century’. History of Oriental Studies: Traditions and Modernity, 2, pp. 60-69.

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2021. ‘Teaching Tajiki language to Undergraduate Students with a Prior Knowledge of Farsi’. The Magic of Innovation: Language and Language Teaching in a Changing Environment, pp. 271-276. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘MGIMO-Universitet’.

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2020. ‘Double Past Participle Forms in the Sicilian Dialects’. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters, 3.1, pp. 11-33.

Translations and projects:

Arnaldi, Marta. 2024. ‘Новый переводческий подход к нарративной медицине: исследование книги Маргериты Гвидаччи Neurosuite’ [‘The Translational Turn in Narrative Medicine: A Study of Margherita Guidacci’s Neurosuite’]. Translated by Kamila Akhmedjanova. Encounters in Translation, 2, DOI: 10.35562/encounters-in-translation.609.

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2022. ‘Translation of Duchêne (Tajikistan)’. Soviet Central Asia in 100 Objects.

Joseph DeRosa (Wadham College)

College: Wadham College

Department: Faculty of History

Preliminary thesis title: ‘For Shaikh and Country: Policing the Deserts of the British Mandate of Iraq (1920-32)’

Supervisor: Professor Eugene Rogan

Biography: Joseph DeRosa is a 4^th-year DPhil student in history. His research focuses on the policing and administration of nomads through the establishment of governmental camel corps in the British Mandate of Iraq (1920-32). The desert police forces that took shape through fits and starts in the 1920s gradually came to appropriate important aspects of shaikhly power (e.g. security, livelihood, redress), introducing new and newly intrusive forms of governance through familiar idioms and ultimately reshaping the societies they came to police. The system of desert policing that emerged in Iraq also enjoyed a long life as it spread throughout the British empire in the Middle East, taking root in: Transjordan (1930s), Hadhramaut (1940s), and Trucial Oman (1950s). The project raises important questions about nomad-state relations, colonial mediators, indirect rule, and indigenous forms of knowledge.

Before beginning his doctoral research, he spent 5+ years working in the private sector in the Middle East. He also holds an MA/MSc in international and world history from Columbia University / The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), funded in part through a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, and a BA in history from Wake Forest University, where his undergraduate thesis received the Richard Worden Griffin Research Prize in History.