Our Council & Staff
BRISMES Council
BRISMES is managed by the Council. The officers are the President, Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer. In addition, Council members are elected or co-opted from among the membership for a period of three years. Council members are registered as Directors of BRISMES with Companies House and as Trustees of BRISMES with the Charity Commission for England and Wales.
Officers
Nicola Pratt
President
Nicola Pratt (she/her) is Professor of the International Politics of the Middle East in the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of Warwick. She teaches and researches on the international politics of the Middle East, with a particular interest in feminist, queer and decolonial approaches and a focus on ‘politics from below.’ She has written and co-edited a number of books and authored a number of articles on women and gender in the Middle East. Her most recent monograph, Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon (University of California Press, 2020), was awarded the Susan Strange Prize for the best book in 2020 by the British International Studies Association. She is also the co-curator of a digital archive examining the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath through the prism of popular culture. Between 2010 and 2013, she was the co-director of an international research partnership between Warwick and Birzeit University, Palestine, entitled, 'Reconceptualising Gender: Transnational Perspectives'. She has served as a trustee of the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) (2016-2020) as well as previously serving as a trustee for BRISMES (2018-2021), including as Vice President (2019-2021).
Sharri Plonski
Co-Vice President
Dr. Sharri Plonski is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. Her work, which is concerned with settler colonial relations, anti-colonial struggles, border dynamics and material infrastructures, is primarily anchored in the case of Palestine/Israel and its regional and global relations. She is currently working on a project that investigates the colonial and capitalist entanglements of Israel’s trade and transit infrastructures and the materials that undergird, sustain and advance Israel’s ‘normalisation’ project. She is the co-producer of an award-nominated podcast, Surviving Society Presents: Material Crimes, that brings 'True Crime' and academic scholarship into conversation, as it takes a deep dive into the violence of infrastructure, how it shapes the lives of colonised, racialised and marginalised communities everywhere, and how they are mobilising for different, liberationist futures. She also loves to tell stories and her most recent one is about a train.
Dr. Plonski has been part of BRISMES council since 2020, taking on key roles including as the chair of the Prizes and Scholarship Committee, where she focused in particular on cultivating space within BRISMES for early career and precarious researchers. Beyond BRISMES, she has extensive experience coordinating research clusters and working groups, including BISA's colonial, postcolonial and decolonial working group (2020-2024) and Queen Mary's 'Global Politics Unbound' research group (2021-2024).
Lewis Turner
Co-Vice President
Dr Lewis Turner is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Newcastle University. His research offers a critical exploration of humanitarianism, primarily in Jordan, and investigates questions of gender (especially men and masculinities), refugee recognition, vulnerability, labour market integration, and race and racism in humanitarianism. His work has appeared in journals including Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Mediterranean Politics, Middle East Critique, and Review of International Studies, and has received prizes from professional associations including the British International Studies Association and the Political Studies Association. From 2020-2024, he was part of the ASILE Project, an EU Horizon2020 funded project investigating the interactions between emerging international protection systems and the United Nations Global Compact for Refugees. He has been a member of BRISMES since 2015, and prior to becoming BRISMES Co-Vice President in 2024, he spent four years as a member of BRISMES Council and its Committee on Academic Freedom.
Wassim Naboulsi
Co-Secretary
I am an Associate Lecturer in International Relations at the University of St Andrews, where I teach undergraduate and postgraduate modules on the Middle East and North Africa. My teaching and research focus on state formation, authoritarianism, political violence, identity, rural–urban relations, cultural production, and the political and social dynamics of the contemporary Middle East.
I received my PhD in International Relations from the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex in 2022. My doctoral research examined rural–urban relations in Syria, exploring how these relations shaped—and were themselves transformed by—the 2011 uprising and the conflict that followed.
Before pursuing postgraduate study in the United Kingdom, I studied law at the Lebanese University in Tripoli and qualified as a lawyer with the Tripoli Bar Association. I established my own law practice in Lebanon in 2005 and was also active in local politics. My experience in legal practice, civil-society work, political engagement, and political commentary continues to inform my academic approach to institutions, power, inequality, and conflict.
I have written political commentary for Lebanese and Arab publications, including Al-Akhbar and The New Arab, with a particular interest in Pan-Arabism, political Islam, identity, and regional politics.
Sabiha Allouche
Co-Secretary
I am Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter (UoE) and specialises in the study of gender and sexuality with reference to South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA). My work is featured in myriad “Middle East” peer-reviewed journals and book chapters. I am a member of MERIP’s Editorial Committee. When not attending to my institutional duties at UoE, I support the editorial work of Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research. I have served on BRISMES’ council for the past 4 years and supported several of its committees. I filled the position of Chair of its Outreach and Pedagogy committee (2024-2026).
Council Members
Amira Abdelhamid
Council Member
Graduate Section Co-Presidents
Motasem Abuzaid
University of Oxford
BRISMES Staff
BRISMES has two part-time employees who are responsible for the day-to-day running of the Society.
Amy Brickhill
Manager
Amy manages all aspects of the day-to-day running of the Society. This includes overseeing BRISMES membership, finances and communications; providing organisational support for the Society's events; producing the monthly BRISMES newsletter; and supporting the governance of BRISMES including the work of its Council, Committees and Graduate Section. Amy joined BRISMES in November 2019 and prior to this worked in the higher education, healthcare and creative sectors in the UK and abroad. She holds a BSc with First Class Honours in Human Sciences from University College London and an MA with Distinction in Arts, Enterprise and Development from the University of Warwick. Amy is on maternity leave until October 2025.
Rosa Sansone
Manager (2024-2025) and Conference Coordinator
Rosa is currently BRISMES manager and conference coordinator. She is a social anthropologist and was a Lecturer for the Sociology Department at the University of Essex and Boğaziçi University in Turkey (2022). She is independently writing academic and creative texts while being responsible for the running of BRISMES.