Academic interests
I am a postdoctoral researcher and historian based at the University of Oslo, and a senior associate researcher at the Center for International Studies (CERI), Sciences Po, in Paris. My disciplinary background is Arabic and Middle East Studies. I specialize on Palestinian history with a particular focus on religion and secular politics and its role in Palestinian armed and non-violent resistance. My PhD thesis studied the history of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). The thesis was published as a monograph by Cambridge University Press titled A History of Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Faith, Awareness, and Revolution in the Middle East and was awarded the Palestine Book Award (2021). My work has been cited in The Washington Post, Le Monde Diplomatique, and other international news outlets.
I am currently working on two book projects. The first book is a brief history of Palestinian Islamism and analyzes its evolution the last seventy-five years. The second book looks at the transformation of Palestinian religious practices the last fifty years and how the emergence of both Hamas and PIJ influenced a de-secularization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I am also interested in the advancement of the digital humanities and computational methodology, and I organize the Digital IKOS (DIKOS) research group at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, with Jacob Høigilt. The aim of DIKOS is to encourage scholars in the humanities to use computational methods and digital tools in research through themed seminars, hands-on, problem-solving workshops, and sharing through our website. We concentrate on applying R to analyze data, create visualizations, and working with text.
For my full academic CV, click here.
Background
- Postdoctoral researcher, University of Oslo (2024- )
- Senior associate researcher, Sciences Po (2022- )
- Researcher, University of Oslo (2022-2024)
- Postdoctoral researcher, Sciences Po (2020-2022)
- Doctoral research fellow, University of Oslo (2020)
- Research assistant, Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (2015-2016)
- Master's degree in Arabic, University of Oslo (2015)
- Bachelor's degree in Arabic, University of Bergen (2013)
- Palestine and Arab Studies, Birzeit University (2012/2013)
I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po in Paris where I worked with Dr. Stéphane Lacroix on the EU Horizon 2020-funded PREVEX project (Preventing Violent Extremism in the Balkans and the MENA). The overarching objective of PREVEX was to put forward more fine-tuned and effective approaches to preventing violent extremism in the broader MENA region by understanding how different drivers operate. Particular emphasis was placed on the non-occurrence of violent extremism in so-called "enabling environments".
I was also a part of the research initiative on energy transition in the Middle East (GreenMENA) where I employed computational statistics to analyze whether there had been a shift in discourse in Norway and Kuwait the last two decades related to climate change and renewable energy, and, if so, why this shift occurred and whether such a shift was caused and conditioned by the same set of variables.
Awards and scholarships
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Palestine Book Award (2021), A History of Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Faith, Awareness, and Revolution in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Appointments
- Organiser, Digital IKOS (DIKOS), (2022- )
- Editor, "Islamism" and "Militant islamism", Store norske leksikon, (2022- )
- Editor, Babylon - Nordic Journal of Middle East Studies (2017-2019)
Books
I have authored the following books: