Officers

Officers of the Society are the President, Vice-President, Executive Director and Treasurer.

As well as officers of the Society, there are currently 19 members of Council. Council members are elected from among the Fellows for a period of three years, or co-opted.

The current officers are as follows:

Vice President
Professor Tim Niblock
Institute of Arab & Islamic Studies
University of Exeter
The Old Library, Prince of Wales Road
Exeter
EX4 4ND
U.K.

 

Current Council members are:

Oliver Bast, University of Manchester
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Dr Oliver Bast (Dr. phil., Maître-ès-Lettres) is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Persian Studies and Modern Middle Eastern History. He is the Head of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchester's School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures. Bast read History and Persian Studies at Berlin (Humboldt-Universität), Tehran (University of Tehran), Paris (Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III) and Bamberg (Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg). He holds a joint doctorate (thèse en co-tutelle) from the universities of Paris III and Bamberg.

His research interests include the diplomatic and political history of Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran as well as questions of historiography and cultural memory in modern Iran. He is the author of Les allemands en Perse pendant la Première Guerre mondiale (Paris: Peeters, 1997) and editor of La Perse et la Grande Guerre (Tehran/Paris: IFRI/Peeters, 2002). Other publications include writings on German-Iranian relations and a number of articles on aspects of the diplomatic and political history of Qajar Iran, the most recent being "Disintegrating the 'discourse of disintegration': Some reflections on the historiography of the late Qajar period and Iranian cultural memory", in Atabaki, Touraj (ed.) Iran in the Twentieth Century: Historiography and Political Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 55-66.

Since 2004, Bast has been serving on the Council of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) and in July 2009 organised the 2009 Annual Conference of BRISMES at the University of Manchester (see http://www.brismes2009.com). In January 2009, he co-organised (with Dr Dominic Brookshaw) the 10th Workshop of the British Institute of Persian Studies (BIPS) at the University of Manchester. In June 2006, Bast was co-organiser together with Professor Manoutchehr Eskandari-Qajar, of the 6th Conference of the International Qajar Studies Association (IQSA) in Paris acting on behalf of the CNRS's Unité mixte de recherché Mondes Iranien et Indien, to which Bast is attached as a chercheur associé. Between 1995 and 1997, Bast worked as an allocataire de recherche at the Institut Français de Recherche en Iran (IFRI) in Tehran, where in March 1997, he organised an international conference on Iran and World War I, which was held as a joint venture of IFRI and the Iranian Foreign Ministry's Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS)

Francesco Cavatorta, Dublin City University
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Dr Francesco Cavatorta is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Trinity College Dublin. His research interest is the politics of the Middle East and North Africa, with a special focus on civil society activism and the role of Islamist movements. He is the author of over 30 refereed journal articles and has written one monograph, one co-authored volume and edited two books. He is currently working on a research project on Tunisian civil activism and the media.

Simon Chamberlin, MPhil Foreign Office
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Simon is a Senior Research Analyst in the Middle East and North Africa Research Group at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. His primary research focus is the Middle East Peace Process.

Katerina Dalacoura
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Dr Katerina Dalacoura is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She previously worked at the University of Essex and at the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Her main areas of expertise are in: human rights , democracy and democracy promotion, in the Middle East; political Islam; and culture and religion in International Relations. She is author of Islam, Liberalism and Human Rights: Implications for International Relations (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003) and Engagement or Coercion: Weighing Western Human Rights Policies towards Turkey, Iran and Egypt (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2003). She has published in the Review of International Studies, Millennium, International Affairs, Democratization, International Studies Notes and International Relations and has authored a number of chapters in edited books. Her book, Islamist Terrorism and Democracy in the Middle East was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011.

Mu'awiya Derhalli
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Mu'awiya was educated at the Arab College, Jerusalem and Trinity College, Dublin. In 1950 he was appointed lecturer in Arabic in Durham. In 1956 he left to take up a position within the BBC Arabic Service. In 1958 he was appointed the Personnel Manager of KOC, Kuwait where he remained until 1974 when he moved to BP in London until 1986. From 1986-1996 he was the Deputy Director of Farnham Castle. He is now a consultant on the Middle East. He has been a member of BRISMES since it was formed and has served as a Council member on several occasions. He is a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development.

Filippo Dionigi
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Filippo Dionigi is a PhD Candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research is mainly focused on the impact of international norms on the political identity of Islamist movements. He has expertise and fieldwork experience especially on Lebanon, Jordan and Tunisia.

Dr Toby Dodge
b.t.dldge@lse.ac.uk

Toby got his PhD in Iraqi politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies. Since 2004 Toby has taught Middle East Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. His publications include:

Inventing Iraq: the failure of nation building and a history denied and Iraq's future: the aftermath of regime change.

Toby's research concentrates on the evolution of the post colonial state in the international system. The main focus of this work on the developing world is the state in the Middle East, specifically Iraq.

Toby has travelled to Iraq frequently both before and after regime change. He was last in Iraq in March and April 2008, in Baghdad, Anbar and Tel Afar and in April 2007 in Baghdad , Mahmudiyah, Latifiyah, Yusufiyah and Barsa.

To date his main research projects have looked at:

◦The shift from the colonial to the post colonial with the birth and evolution of the state in Iraq.

◦The use of coercive diplomacy in the post cold war world.

◦How the application of sanctions on Iraq transformed the state, society and the economy.

◦The Bush doctrine, the reordering of international relations and intervention in 'rogue' states.

◦The causes and consequences of regime change in Iraq.

◦The descent of Iraq into civil war.

◦The development of American Counter insurgency doctrine and its application to Iraq.

Kate Ewart-Biggs, British Council
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Jeroen Gunning, Durham University
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Dr Jeroen Gunning is Reader in Middle East Politics and Conflict Studies at the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University. His research focuses on Islamist social movements, democratisation, religion and violence in the Middle East, with a particular emphasis on Hamas and Hizballah. He is one of the founders of the Critical Middle East Studies research network.

Ronak Husni, American University of Sharjah
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Ronak Husni is a Professor of Arabic Studies. She has a BA in Arabic language and literature from University of Mosul in Iraq and PhD from St Andrews University. She is currently head of Arabic and Translation Studies at the American University of Sharjah.

Before moving to AUS in 2010, she worked in various universities in UK including Heriott-Watt University and Durham University.

She has taught a wide range of courses on Arabic language, literature and translation.. She has published two books with Daniel Newman, one of which - Muslim Women in Law and Society (a translation and study of Taher al-Haddad's seminal book Our Women in Shari'a and Society) won the prestigious Word Award for best book in Islamic studies for 2008,.
She is working on a number of projects including a monograph on the Iraqi [poet Nazik al-Malaika and a translation and study of "The Poetic Imagination of the Arabs by al-Shabbi

Hilary Kalmbach, University of Oxford

Hilary Kalmbach is the Sir Christopher Cox Junior Fellow at New College, Oxford. She is a historian whose research focuses on Islam in modern Middle Eastern communities from the late nineteenth-century through to the present, working to place changes in leadership, authority, education, and thought in wider social and cultural contexts. Previously, Hilary studied at St Antony's College, Oxford and Princeton University.

Her doctorate uses Cairo's Dar al-'Ulum teacher-training school (after 1946, Cairo University's Dār al-ʿUlūm College) and its graduates as a prism through which to view sociocultural change in Egypt, 1900-1950. Founded in 1872 as part of Khedive Ismāʿīl's efforts to expand the Egyptian government's civil-school system, the school trained top students from religious schools such as al-Azhar to be schoolteachers with strong Arabic skills. The dissertation argues that Dar al-'Ulum is best seen as a hybrid institution that mixed elements of civil and religious education, in the process furthering the development of a new type of religious education. The work as a whole shows that a major engine driving change in interwar Egypt was the agency exercised by individuals who crossed sociocultural boundaries and consciously mixed elements of local tradition and European-inspired modernity.

Hilary first researched another topic of interest, female Islamic leadership, while on a year-long Fulbright Fellowship in Damascus, Syria. Her article profiling mosque instructor Houda al-Habash, Social and Religious Change in Damascus: One Case of Female Islamic Religious Authority, won the first British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Graduate Article Prize. She recently co-organized a conference and edited volume (Women, Leadership and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority, published by Brill in 2011) bringing together analysis of this topic in countries around the world, a project that uses Islamic authority as a lens to view the changing place of women within Muslim communities. She also administers an email list connecting scholars interested in this topic.

Hilary's current research looks at the emergence and development of grassroots social and religious associations in multiple Middle Eastern countries. For further information, please see: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sant1959/

Beverley Milton-Edwards, Queen's University, Belfast

Beverley is Professor of Politics and Director of the MA Violence, Terrorism and Security

Her main teaching areas are on Political Islam, Middle Eastern Politics, National and Ethnic Conflict management incl - Comparative Ethnic Conflict, Religion and Peace-building, Deeply divided societies - including Middle East, Africa and Northern Ireland.

Beverley's main area of research has concentrated on two interrelated themes: dimensions of politics in the Middle East and Islamic politics. In the past this has led her to research and write on Islamists in the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its applicability in relation to issues relating to divided societies/ethno-national conflict. More recently her research has diverged in three main areas: contestation of assumptions about the relationship between Islam and political violence, policing in the Middle East and societies in transition; and dimensions of ethno-national conflict at a comparative level. She is also interested in the motivations behind current scholarship on radical Islam and the perspectives that inform the debate about 'Writing Islam'. Beverley has a keen interest in e-learning, conflict resolution and critical pedagogy. In 2004 she was awarded an 'Oscar of Higher Education' – a National Teaching Fellowship. I was awarded THES/LTSN E-tutor of the year 2002.

Beverley is located at Queen's University Belfast. Her work focuses on the contemporary politics of the Middle East region with special reference to political Islam. She is a NTF Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Ian Netton, University of Exeter and Editor of   the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies
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Professor Ian Richard Netton is the Sharjah Professor of Islamic Studies in the University of Exeter and Deputy Director of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. He was formerly Professor of Arabic Studies in the University of Leeds, head of that University's Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies and, at one point, Director of the University of Leeds' Centre for Medieval Studies. Professor Netton is the author or editor of 19 books. His principal research interests are medieval Islamic philosophy, theology and sufism, medieval Arab travellers and semiotics.He is the current General editor of "The British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies" and the Series editor of the Routledge Culture and Civilization in the Middle East Series, the Routledge Sufi Series and the Edinburgh History of the Islamic Empires Series.

Daniel Newman, Durham University
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Daniel Newman is Professor of Arabic at Durham University. Within the University, he is Special Advisor to the Islamic Criminal Justice Project in the Centre for Criminal Law and Criminal Justice.

Daniel's is also a member of the Translation/linguistics/pedagogy research group. His research interests include Arabic geographical and travel literature (with special focus on Arab travellers to Europe in the 19th century); Arabic phonology and phonetics; The Tunisian and Egyptian Nahda movements and Translation and Linguistics.

His most recent publications include:

2008 (co-authored with Husni, Ronak) Modern Arabic Short Stories: A Bilingual Reader - Twelve Stories by Contemporary Masters from Morocco to Iraq, Saqi Books.

2008 (co-authored with Husni, Ronak) Muslim Women in Law and Society, Routledge.

Dr MA Ramady, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals
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Dr Ramady is currently a Visiting Associate Professor, Finance and Economics, at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. He specializes on regional geo -political risk assessment and the Saudi Economy, Energy, as well as Money and Banking, globalization and WTO. He has authored "The Saudi Arabian Economy: Policies, Achievements and Challenges", Second Edition, 2010, published by Springer, as well as being an Editor of a forthcoming book on the "GCC Economies: Stepping up to Future Challenges ", to be published by Springer in April 2012.

Dr Ramady has held senior level positions in banking, finance and investment, and was Project Manger to establish the guidelines for Saudi Arabia's WTO Centre for the Saudi Chambers of Commerce. He was also a Vice President with Citibank where he was posted in Europe and the Middle East and seconded to the Saudi American Bank. He has held senior executive positions with Chase Manhattan, First City Texas Bank, Qatar National Bank, and Qatar International Islamic Bank. Dr Ramady obtained his BA and PhD in Economics, at the University of Leicester, UK, a Postgraduate Masters Degree in Economic Development, University of Glasgow, UK. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Bankers, UK and a Council Member of BRISMES - British Society for Middle Eastern Studies.

Dr Lloyd Ridgeon
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Dr Lloyd Ridgeon is Reader in Islamic Studies in the University of Glasgow. A specialist in Persian Sufism, he has published widely in this and other areas of Islamic Studies. His most recent book is Jawanmardi: A Sufi Code of Honour (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming, 2011).

Lloyd's main academic interersts include Sufi history and theology, covering faith and practice, both pre-modern and contemporary. Other of interest areas include Iranian history and culture, as well as Islamic studies in general.

Dr Ewan Stein, University of Edinburgh
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Ewan Stein is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World. His research interests include ideas and foreign policy in the Middle East, Egyptian politics and foreign policy, political Islam, and the relation between International Relations as a discipline and the study of the Middle East. From 1 May , 2011, he will be lecturer in International Relations in the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh.

Professor Barbara Allen Roberson
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Professor B. A. Roberson is Research Professor at the Global Policy Institute which is part of the Department of Governance & International Relations at London Metropolitan University. Formerly member of Politics & International Studies department at Warwick University & Fellow of the Centre of Ethics Relations. Member of Clerical Authority in Modern Shi'ism Project Management steering Committee of the British Academy. External Examiner for Arab & Islamic MA Degrees at Exeter University and the International Relations Department and MA in Diplomacy at the University of Malta. Selected publications:
‘The Shaping of the Current Islamic Reformation', in The Shaping of the Current Islamic Reformation, edited by B. A. Roberson, Special issue of Mediterranean Politics, Summer 2003. Hardback and paperback by Frank Cass, 1-19 & Glossary, viii-xxv.
B. A. Roberson, ‘Law, Power and the Expansion of International Society' in Cornelia Navari, ed, Theorising International Society: English School Methods, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009.
B.A. Roberson, 'Islamic Law and International Order: Agents and Institutions in North Africa' in Yongjin Zhang, ed, Before the Arrival of the Anarchical Society: A Study of International Order, 1492-1792, to be published in 2012.
Shaheen Ali & B.A. Roberson, eds, Re-imagining the Global Shari'a : Theory, Practice and Muslim Pluralism at Play, forthcoming 2012.
B.A. Roberson, Judicial Reform and the Expansion of International Society: The Case of Egypt, provisional book title in series, History and Society in the Islamic World, Oxford: Taylor & Francis, forthcoming 2012/13.

Gareth Stansfield, University of Exeter
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Gareth Stansfield is Professor of Middle East Politics, Director of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter

Gareth gained his BA, MA and PhD degrees at the University of Durham, with his PhD being awarded in 2001. His thesis addressed the political development of the de facto Kurdish state that had emerged in Iraq in 1991. Gareth's career in Exeter started in 2002 when he won a Leverhulme Special Research Fellowship to look at the possibilities for the rehabilitation and reconstruction of Iraq following the sanctions regime. For this research, he continued with investigating the Kurdish aspects of Iraqi politics, and also focused upon the dynamics of Shi'i parties and organizations and the overall posture of the 'Iraqi opposition'. He was then appointed to a Lecturership in Middle East Politics upon completion of the Leverhulme Fellowship in 2004, and was promoted to a Readership in 2005 and a Personal Chair in 2007. Gareth is also an Associate Fellow of the Middle East Programme at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs), and an Associate Fellow of the Program on Ethnic Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania.

His current research is on the political development of post-2003 Iraq and particularly the interaction of religious and ethnic groups and conceptions of nationalism and federalism. He has also developed other research activities, including in Gulf Security, UK foreign policy toward the Middle East (supported by an ESRC grant obtained with Professor Tim Dunne), radicalization in North Africa (supported by an ESRC grant obtained with Dr Jonathan Githens-Mazer, Dr Lise Storm, and Professor Martin Thomas), conflict management in Kirkuk (supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship), and a five-year project to establish and develop a research cluster and centre (Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies) focusing on 'ethnopolitics in a globalized world' (supported by a £738,000 grant from the Leverhulme Trust).

Dr Frédéric Volpi, University of St Andrews
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Dr Frédéric Volpi (PhD Cantab) is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. Dr Volpi's research focuses on the interaction between Islamism, democratization and civility. He investigated the construction of political Islam in pseudo-democratic contexts in North Africa and its implication for European foreign and multicultural policy. Dr Volpi's latest work is an examination of the ‘western' social sciences'
approaches to political Islam, and their policy implications. He is currently researching the grassroots mode of construction of civility between Muslim and non-Muslim civil society associations in Europe and the Middle East.

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