Department of Near Eastern Studies

Elvire Corboz earned a D.Phil in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford in 2010, after obtaining degrees (BA & MA) in Musicology and Arabic from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and an M.Phil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford. She was one of the joint winners of the 2011 BRISMES Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize for the best dissertation on a Middle Eastern topic in the Social Sciences or Humanities. The dissertation, “Negotiating loyalty across the Shi‘i world: the transnational authority of the al-Hakim and al-Khu’i families,” documented the transnational political sociology of Shi‘i religious families to examine how cross-border interactions affect the construction and maintenance of clerical authority. The analysis located the relationships of authority between clerical actors and believers in situated states, confirming that transnational religious networks can affect specific localities and, equally, that situated places shape larger forms of solidarity across borders. At Princeton, Corboz will prepare her thesis for publication, write an article on Najaf and the coming of the Iranian revolution, and begin work on a new project which will focus on Iran-sponsored religious and political transnationalism among Muslim communities in the West.

Areas(s) of interest:

• Shi‘i religious leadership and Islamic movements
• Iraqi exile organisations
• Iraqi and Iranian history, politics, and society in the 20^th century
• Muslim communities in Europe