2023 Early Career Development Scholarship Winners Announced
We are delighted to announce that Dr Kaoutar Ghilani and Dr Altea Pericoli have been selected as the winners of the 2023 BRISMES Early Career Development Scholarship. This award was established in 2021 to support activities geared toward strengthening the academic profile and CV of an early career scholar.
Dr Kaoutar Ghilani
From the Committee: Kaoutar Ghilani’s project is anchored in an original and powerful piece of scholarship, with a clear contribution to Middle East Studies in its challenge to dominant narratives on postcolonial nation-building, exceptionalism, and legitimacy in North Africa. Its focus on language/Arabisation politics (and its failings) in Morocco is complex, centring local interlocutors as agents of postcolonial political landscapes. The proposal itself was comprehensive, thoughtful and concrete in demonstrating how the prize would contribute to both the field and their career journey. We were particularly impressed by Dr. Ghilani’s commitment to the politics of knowledge production and specifically to thinking about how their work can be accessible to his project interlocutors. This award will enable them to distil their PhD into two distinct book projects: One for an academic press and one for a trade press in Morocco, that will be translated into both Arabic and French. The project contributes to new pathways for changing the landscape in which we do academic research, wherein scholarship on the region is intentionally made accessible to a general audience in the region.
Dr Altea Pericoli
From the Committee: Altea Pericoli's proposal combines doing new research with the arduous process of transforming their PhD into a book manuscript for an academic press. Their work pushes at the boundaries of a still under-explored field of study, in its intersection of Gulf Studies, Foreign Aid and Intervention and the project of Syrian reconstruction. It is an opportunity to rethink the Gulf’s prominent role in re-writing the MENA landscape, through its tracing of the different materials, capital and policies finding its way into Syria’s post-war landscape. In addition to a clear and precise plan for how they would pursue the next phase of work, Dr. Pericoli’s honest depictions of how they might grow, enrich (theirs’ and others’) knowledge and strengthen their capacity for doing research through developing the book manuscript, struck a chord with the reviewers.
Congratulations to our winners and thank you to everyone who submitted an application!