Our Council & Staff
BRISMES Council
BRISMES is managed by the Council. The officers are the President, Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer. In addition, Council members are elected or co-opted from among the membership for a period of three years. Council members are registered as Directors of BRISMES with Companies House and as Trustees of BRISMES with the Charity Commission for England and Wales.
Officers
Nicola Pratt
President
Nicola Pratt (she/her) is Professor of the International Politics of the Middle East in the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of Warwick. She teaches and researches on the international politics of the Middle East, with a particular interest in feminist, queer and decolonial approaches and a focus on ‘politics from below.’ She has written and co-edited a number of books and authored a number of articles on women and gender in the Middle East. Her most recent monograph, Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon (University of California Press, 2020), was awarded the Susan Strange Prize for the best book in 2020 by the British International Studies Association. She is also the co-curator of a digital archive examining the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath through the prism of popular culture. Between 2010 and 2013, she was the co-director of an international research partnership between Warwick and Birzeit University, Palestine, entitled, 'Reconceptualising Gender: Transnational Perspectives'. She has served as a trustee of the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) (2016-2020) as well as previously serving as a trustee for BRISMES (2018-2021), including as Vice President (2019-2021).
Sharri Plonski
Queen Mary University of London
Dr. Sharri Plonski is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. Her work, which is concerned with settler colonial relations, anti-colonial struggles, border dynamics and material infrastructures, is primarily anchored in the case of Palestine/Israel and its regional and global relations. She is currently working on a project that investigates the colonial and capitalist entanglements of Israel’s trade and transit infrastructures and the materials that undergird, sustain and advance Israel’s ‘normalisation’ project. She is the co-producer of an award-nominated podcast, Surviving Society Presents: Material Crimes, that brings 'True Crime' and academic scholarship into conversation, as it takes a deep dive into the violence of infrastructure, how it shapes the lives of colonised, racialised and marginalised communities everywhere, and how they are mobilising for different, liberationist futures. She also loves to tell stories and her most recent one is about a train.
Dr. Plonski has been part of BRISMES council since 2020, taking on key roles including as the chair of the Prizes and Scholarship Committee, where she focused in particular on cultivating space within BRISMES for early career and precarious researchers. Beyond BRISMES, she has extensive experience coordinating research clusters and working groups, including BISA's colonial, postcolonial and decolonial working group (2020-2024) and Queen Mary's 'Global Politics Unbound' research group (2021-2024).
Lewis Turner
Co-Vice President
Dr Lewis Turner is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Newcastle University. His research offers a critical exploration of humanitarianism, primarily in Jordan, and investigates questions of gender (especially men and masculinities), refugee recognition, vulnerability, labour market integration, and race and racism in humanitarianism. His work has appeared in journals including Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Mediterranean Politics, Middle East Critique, and Review of International Studies, and has received prizes from professional associations including the British International Studies Association and the Political Studies Association. From 2020-2024, he was part of the ASILE Project, an EU Horizon2020 funded project investigating the interactions between emerging international protection systems and the United Nations Global Compact for Refugees. He has been a member of BRISMES since 2015, and prior to becoming BRISMES Co-Vice President in 2024, he spent four years as a member of BRISMES Council and its Committee on Academic Freedom.
José Ciro Martínez
Secretary
José Ciro Martínez is Lecturer in Politics at the University of York. He was previously Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. José’s research explores the politics of food, welfare, drugs and state formation in the Middle East and North Africa, drawing on archival and ethnographic methods. He is committed to modes of political inquiry attentive to the seemingly ordinary and mundane. Building on more than a year working as a baker in the Jordanian capital, Amman, José’s first book, States of Subsistence (Stanford University Press, 2022), wrestles with theories of performativity to dissect the ways in which welfare provision (in the form of food) works to entrench the state in everyday life. José is currently working on a project that examines practices of government and the exercise of authority in the Western Mediterranean by way of the production and trafficking of hashish.
Waseem Farooq
Treasurer
Waseem is the Reference and Instructional Librarian at the Aga Khan Library, London. He specialises in resources related to Islam and the Middle East. Prior to that, since joining the Aga Khan University in 2005, he has been responsible for the acquisitions and collection development of the library in a variety of languages including Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Urdu. He began his career in librarianship at the British Library’s Asia, Pacific & Africa Collections in 2002 as an Arabic cataloguer and Leading Library Assistant. Education wise, he graduated from the University of Durham in 2002 with a BA Honours in Arabic with Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and completed an MA in Library and Information studies at UCL in 2012, followed by an MA in Historical Research Methods (with reference to Islam in the Middle East, India and Africa) at SOAS in 2014. He is currently the vice chair of MELCOM UK (Middle East Libraries Committee) and the treasurer at CILIP’s (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professional’s) Library and Information History Group, since 2019. He is an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy since 2022.
Council Members
Graduate Section Co-Presidents
Motasem Abuzaid
University of Oxford
BRISMES Staff
BRISMES has two part-time employees who are responsible for the day-to-day running of the Society.
Amy Brickhill
Manager
Amy manages all aspects of the day-to-day running of the Society. This includes overseeing BRISMES membership, finances and communications; providing organisational support for the Society's events; producing the monthly BRISMES newsletter; and supporting the governance of BRISMES including the work of its Council, Committees and Graduate Section. Amy joined BRISMES in November 2019 and prior to this worked in the higher education, healthcare and creative sectors in the UK and abroad. She holds a BSc with First Class Honours in Human Sciences from University College London and an MA with Distinction in Arts, Enterprise and Development from the University of Warwick.
Rosa Sansone
Conference Coordinator
Rosa was awarded an ESRC-funded PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester (2021). Her research is broadly concerned with the relationship between urban transformations and political imaginaries under the Tunisian democratic transition. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and was a Lecturer for the Sociology Department at the University of Essex and Boğaziçi University in Turkey (2022). She is currently writing her first monograph while being responsible for the organization of the BRISMES annual conference.