I am a doctoral student at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. I was recently a visiting PhD student at Yale. Before Oxford, I studied at Mannheim focusing on Advanced Quantitative Methods in Political Science. I was a pre-doc/visiting scholar at the University of Houston before starting my PhD.
My research focuses on the Political Economy of Development and Foreign Influence on Domestic Political Economy. I work on aspects related to the foreign influence on local economic development, economic history of the local development of public good provision, informal social-welfare, and the political economy of Islamic institutions, with a regional focus on the Middle East. My wider research agenda also draws on questions related to the Politics of Information and Effects of Foreign Interventions on Domestic Politics and Audiences in different geographical contexts.
Methodologically, I am very interested in generating new sources of quantitative data that reveal valuable infromation that would be otherwise lost in the archives. My work incorporates retrieval and digitalization of historical maps, textual data, and several other sources of archival data; other than that my work employs and expands methods of Computational Text Analysis and Natural Language Processing using corpora of Arabic, German, English, and French texts.
My research has been published or is forthcoming at the Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and Journal of Peace Research.
I am a former professional swimmer for the Egyptian Swimming National Team, for which I competed professionally for several years. I still find myself thinking more clearly while doing all those endless laps at the pool. I enjoy reading about Islamic Art and Architecture.
DPhil (PhD) in Politics, 2023
University of Oxford
Visiting Doctoral Student, 2022
Yale University
MA in Political Science (Advanced Quantitative Methods), 2018
University of Mannheim
BA in Political Science and Psychology, 2016
University of Mannheim
Visiting Undergraduate Student, 2015
Trinity College Dublin
I undertook the following further academic training:
The Political Economy of the Local Origins of Public Service Provision: Evidence from 19th & early 20th century Egypt
Local Provision and Development of Schooling
Alexandria: Economic History of Inequality under Colonization
watch the GIF below, for an overlay of historical maps of Alexandria in the 19th century on current geographical coordinates. Part of my project mapping the economic history of inequality 💥
Sample Teaching Evaluations [Link]