NES Postdoctoral Fellowships

Current Postdocs

Senem Aslan
Aslan, a second-year postdoctoral research associate, completed her dissertation at the University of Washington in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Near and Middle Eastern Studies in 2008. During her first year at Princeton she began revising her dissertation on “Governing Areas of Dissidence: Nation-Building and Ethnic Movements in Turkey and Morocco,” and she wrote two articles discussing aspects of Turkey’s policies towards the Kurds, both of which have been accepted for publication. In the spring semester, Aslan organized a panel at Princeton on “Minorities in the Middle East,” as well as a high-school teachers’ training session on the same topic, and she taught a course on the relations between the state and society in the Middle East. This year she plans on finishing the rewriting of her dissertation for publication.

Thomas Pierret
Pierret completed his Ph.D. in political science at the Institut d’Études Politiques, Paris, and the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. His dissertation, “The Ulema in Contemporary Syria: Making Tradition Relevant, Finding a Place in an Authoritarian System,” focuses on the writings and political activism of the ulema as well as their daily religious activities as teachers, educators, and social leaders. His research project at Princeton will be “‘Sufi ‘Ulema in the Saudi Hijaz: Regional Revival, Authoritarianism, and Globalization.” Examining how the Hijazi Sufi ulema managed to survive eight decades of repression resulting from the hostility of the Wahhabi ulema, Pierret will address two main theoretical issues: The functioning of authoritarian states in their relations with traditional forms of religious authority and the impact of globalization on local religious identities.

Benjamin Thomas White
A graduate of the University of Edinburgh with first class honours in Arabic, White earned his D.Phil. in modern history at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, in 2008. His dissertation, “The Nation-State Form and the Emergence of ‘Minorities’ in French Mandate Syria, 1919-1939”, studies the conditions that allowed the concept of ‘minority’ to become prominent in Syria c. 1930 and argues that this occurred because of the development of the nation-state form. At Princeton, White plans to develop a growing interest in the processes of exclusion that are an integral part of state-building in modern nation-states through a project on statelessness in the interwar Levant, including areas under British and French mandate as well as the independent nation-state of the Turkish Republic.

Former Postdocs

Lindsay Benstead (2008–2009)
Benstead earned her Ph.D. in Public Policy and Political Science from the University of Michigan, completing her dissertation, “Does Casework Build Support for a Strong Parliament? Legislative Representation and Public Opinion in Morocco and Algeria,” in 2008. While at Princeton, she significantly reframed her research to focus on political clientelism and began writing a book in which she investigates the relationships between regime type, the structure of member-constituent linkages, and the durability of authoritarian regimes. During the spring semester she taught a course entitled “Government and Politics of North Africa” and organized a workshop on the “Politics of North Africa,” as well as a teacher training workshop on the same topic. Benstead is now an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Portland State University where she teaches courses on Middle East and North African Politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, political institutions, democratization and authoritarianism, and research methods.

Henri Lauzière (2008–2009)
Lauzière completed his doctoral studies in modern Middle Eastern and North African History at Georgetown University in 2008. During his year at Princeton, he prepared a book proposal based upon his dissertation, “The evolution of the Salafiyya in the twentieth century through the life and thought of Taqi al-Din al-Hilali,” and wrote an article on the significance of the Salafiyya Press and Bookstore in Cairo. He taught one course, “Introduction to Islamic Purism,” and designed a second on the Arabian Peninsula in the twentieth century. In April he organized a panel on the “Civil War in the Arab World,” as well as a Teacher Training Workshop on the same topic. Lauzière is now an assistant professor in the Department of History at Northwestern University.

Cemil Aydın (2007–2008)
Aydın completed his dissertation in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard in 2002. The resulting book appeared in 2007 under the title The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (Columbia University Press). While at Princeton, he worked on his new book project, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Modern History, to be published by Harvard University Press, taught an undergraduate course, “History of the post-WWII Middle East: Decolonization, Cold War and Crisis of Modernization,” related to his research, and was profiled in December 2007 by the History News Network in its series “Top Young Historians” (http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/45173.html). Aydın is now the IIIT Professor of Islamic History in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the director of George Mason’s Center for Islamic Studies.

Max Weiss (2007–2008)
Weiss earned his Ph.D. in modern Middle Eastern history at Stanford. His dissertation, "Institutionalizing Sectarianism: Law, Religious Culture, and the Remaking of Shi‘i Lebanon, 1920-1947," won MESA’s 2007 Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences. At Princeton his main project was revising his dissertation for publication as a book with the title In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi‘ism and the Making of Modern Lebanon. He also completed three articles on Lebanese topics, published a prize-winning translation of an Arabic novel (B as in Beirut by Iman Humaydan Younes), organized a workshop on “Rethinking Sectarianism,” and taught an undergraduate course on minorities in the Middle East. He is now a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and in September 2010 he will take up a joint appointment as an assistant professor in the Departments of History and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton.