Outreach & Pedagogy Events
Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize Showcase & Careers Conversation
Date: Monday, 8 December 2025
Time: 15:00 - 16:30 GMT
Venue: Online
BRISMES invites you to celebrate this year’s recipients of the Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize, awarded annually to the writer of the best PhD dissertation submitted at a British university on a Middle Eastern topic in the Social Sciences or Humanities. Prize winners and runners-up will present highlights from their research and share their academic plans moving forward. Senior scholars in attendance will offer comments and career guidance, creating a space that both honours excellence and supports early-career development. This event is open to anyone interested in Middle East research, especially final-year PhD students and early-career academics looking to learn more about the prize and future pathways in academia.
Speakers
Sara Abdel Ghany (2025 Joint Winner)
Sara Abdel Ghany is a researcher, educator, and human rights defender, currently serving as an Assistant Professor of Security and Global Studies at the American University in the Emirates. She is the Founder and Director of the Global South Initiative, a project grounded in solidarity, collaboration, and ethical engagement, which partners with diverse institutions and research groups to diversify and decolonize knowledge production.
Sara brings over twelve years of professional experience in human rights and gender justice across the Arab-majority region. She holds an interdisciplinary academic background in international relations and international law, with particular expertise on the Arab-majority region.
Her scholarship has received significant recognition. Her PhD thesis was awarded the 2025 Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize by the British Society for Middle East Studies (BRISMES). In addition, the methodological chapter of her dissertation, “A Pilgrimage Back to the Self: A Journey to Auto-Ethnography,” won the Annual Early-Career Researcher Paper Prize from the Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) Working Group of the British International Studies Association (BISA) and the editors of Review of International Studies (RIS).
Asma Abdi (2025 Joint Winner)
Asma Abdi is an ESRC Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Exeter and an incoming Lecturer in Global Political Economy at the University of Manchester (from October 2026). Her research and teaching sit at the intersection of international political economy, feminist theory, and de/postcolonial approaches, with a specific focus on social reproduction, labour, and the everyday in the Middle East and Iran. Her doctoral thesis, awarded in 2024 from the University of Warwick, explores these questions in the context of Iran under the intensified regime of sanctions since 2012. Asma’s work has appeared in leading feminist journals, including International Feminist Journal of Politics, and has received multiple awards, including the 2025 Elizabeth Wiskemann Prize for the best PhD dissertation on (In)Equality and Social Justice from the Political Studies Association and the 2025 Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize (co-winner) for the best PhD dissertation on a Middle Eastern topic.
Eirik Kvindesland (2025 Joint Runner Up)
Eirik Kvindesland is a global historian of the modern Middle East, specializing in the Jewish history of Iran, Palestine and the Persian Gulf. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences. His work has appeared in journals such as Past & Present and British Journal of.Middle Eastern Studies.
Kristine L. Sheets (2025 Joint Runner Up)
Kristine L. Sheets is a researcher specializing in memory, identity, and resilience in marginalized communities, with a focus on forced migration and displacement. She examines how inherited memories shape identity, psychological well-being, and resistance in families, treating everyday actions and objects as living archives of cultural and historical memory. Her work explores how intergenerational memory influences diaspora communities, shaping identity formation, long-distance nationalism, and responses to conflict-induced displacement. Kristine earned her PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Exeter’s European Centre for Palestine Studies and holds a Master’s in Middle Eastern Studies from King’s College London.
Chairs and discussants
Dr Sabiha Allouche (University of Exeter, BRISMES Outreach & Pedagogy Committee)
Dr Wassim Naboulsi (University of St Andrews, BRISMES Outreach & Pedagogy Committee)
Prof Nicola Pratt (University of Warwick, BRISMES President)
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