Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize

2024 Joint Winners (£300 each) 

Tiba Bonyad (University of Manchester)

Gendered biopolitics of egg donation in Iran: Family making at the intersection of patriarchy, secrecy and reproductive work

Overall, the thesis is a great contribution to Feminist Technoscience studies of egg donation. Tina Bonyad’s thesis offers an exceptional contribution to Feminist Technoscience, through its deeply rich, ethnographic investigation into the everyday practices of egg donation within the Iranian context. Its originality and innovation are conceptual, methodological and contextual: It provides rigorous and multi-layered qualitative data about a contested practice in a context that is highly difficult to carry on ethnographic research, especially on core issues such as reproduction, gender, and religion. Researching egg donation in Iran from a gender perspective, the thesis brings back questions that may easily be dismissed in the Global North as “outdated” and not “relevant enough” such as reproductive stigma, sexualization of egg donation, and agency over one’s body and revitalize them as important political and ethical feminist issues. Theoretically, the thesis is innovative and engages a diverse range of theoretical concepts and entry points, including an exceptional overview and response to the wider field. I believe the thesis is an extremely valuable contribution that needs to be celebrated.

Morad Moazami (University of Oxford)

The Politics of Style: Ideology, Fashion, and Popular Culture in Iran from 1965 to 1979

The Ph.D. thesis authored by Morad Moazami offers a meticulous exploration of the Pahlavi’s State endeavours that sought to propel Iran towards modernity in the 1960s and 1970s through a strategic alignment with Western aesthetic principles. Its strength lies in its clear and well-defined objective, delving into the interplay between the ideological stance of the Pahlavi state, and reinforcing Euro-Americanized styles during the specified period. This focused approach, coupled with the rigorous incorporation of diverse primary and secondary sources,  allows for an in-depth and absolutely original exploration of targeted aspects of cultural transformation. Morad Moazami's work significantly enriches researchers and audiences' understanding who are interested in specific, detailed interrogations into the cultural roots of Iran's Revolution, making it a valuable contribution and resource to scholarly discourse.

2023 Joint Winners (£300 each)

Suhad Bishara (King's College London)

Land and Law in Palestine/Israel: Settler Colonial Perspective on Jewish Territorial Domination

Suhad Bishara’s thesis investigates the structures of colonial legalities in Palestine/Israel, on both sides of the Green Line. This is a first study of the legal infrastructure of the Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine as a whole, challenging the dichotomy that prevails in the existing literature that offers an analysis of the Israeli legal system on either 48’ Palestine or the OPT as two separate systems/entities. Her study weaves together existing literature of the Israeli legal system and is underpinned by rich empirical evidence from Supreme Court judgements and legislation as well as new archival material, covering the period from 1948 and until today, to offer a rigorous analysis of the consistent racial logic that guides the legal system around questions of land and territoriality since the state’s establishment. The decision to deal with the Supreme Court judgments is vital: the Supreme Court prides itself to be the guardian of Israel’s ‘democracy’ (both internally and internationally) and as an institution that provides legal recourse to address injustices suffered by Palestinians in the OPT. Here, Bishara skilfully reveals its role as fundamental tool for ensuring racially-defined Jewish territoriality (and supremacy) on both sides of the Green Line, tracing adaptation and implementation of legal technologies on different Palestinian communities through space and time, amounting for the continuities and similarities that exist in policies and practices in the OPT and within ‘Green Line Israel’. Bishara’s analysis contributes to settler colonial theory, tracing the racial logic of elimination in both its ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ aspects, and the way in which they both materialise through the law/legal system, to simultaneously replace and displace Palestinians, and construct and sustain a Jewish collectivity, as particularly manifested in the possession of Jewish-controlled land (and rights over it), which is found at the heart of the settler colonial project. While being empirically rich, the thesis is written in an accessible language to non-legal experts. I believe she is more than deserving to be awarded the Leigh Douglas Dissertation Prize.

Maia Holtermann Entwistle (SOAS University of London)

Fuelling Culture: Art, Race, and Capitalism on the Arabian Peninsula

Maia Entwistle’s PhD thesis about how racial capitalism and empire have enabled the creation of the UAE’s cultural infrastructure in the Arabian Gulf is a timely, urgent and much-need intervention into the study of the politics, cultures and societies of the Middle East. In particular, the thesis contributes to the study of the cultural politics that shape museum practices and contemporary arts production in the region, a field of study and practice which has grown immensely since the turn of the millennium. In recent years scholars of the region have produced a series of compelling studies on the cultural and artistic production of postcolonial nationalist cultures focused on identities, trauma, memory-making, and other forms of non-essentialist cultural practices. Loosely located in this critical body of work that reads politics from the vantage point of art and culture, Entwistle’s thesis goes a step further. It expands the conceptual and theoretical research net outwards beyond the local and the national (even while also carefully considering them) to uncover the complex of economic and racial forces at play that shape the infrastructure of an art and culture scene that has hitherto been regarded as libationary and essential in the literature and the popular imagination because of the relative dearth in globalized, heftily funded and grandiose platforms for art circulation in the region.

Yet, Entwistle’s thesis painstakingly demonstrates how building this high culture infrastructure is bound up with the logic of the market capitalism that defines global racial capitalist economies. In this framework of analysis Entwistle reveals how the notions of identity, indigeneity and decolonization-hallmarks of progressive politics in academia and the arts are in the case of the Gulf ironically employed to further a racialized and hierarchal capitalist economy of extraction. Here Entwistle’s focus on labour, both intellectual and material, as well as technologies is novel and indeed an exciting contribution to thinking around the politics of cultural production in the Gulf. It brings art and culture to the study of the global economies of labour in the Middle East while at the same time breaking with the celebratory approach in scholarly work on the Gulf that has read the infrastructure build-up as either a typical example of global identity and nation-building or as a decolonial answer to western art hegemonies. Methodologically, conceptually and theoretically Entwistle’s contribution is sensitively and intricately executed and relayed in her weighed analysis. Throughout Entwistle is respectful of her research subjects while showing delicately and with intricate detail just how art and racial capitalism are bound up in the Gulf, as elsewhere in the world. I recommend this outstanding thesis for an award without any reservations.

2023 Honourable Mention (£100 book token)

Elizabeth Marteijn (University of Edinburgh)

Between Ruins and Remnants: Religious Reinvention and Renewal among Palestinian Christians in West Bank Palestine

Elizabeth Marteijn’s PhD on Palestinian Christianity identifies social, political and religious questions concurrently. She does not interpret Palestinian Christianity simply as a social science; rather, she gives equal weight to various aspects of religious practice and the biblical text together with social and anthropological considerations, coming out of her own field work. This methodology, in my view, is to be commended and deserves to be supported. In line with the claim that truth is constituted by story and experience, Marteijn’s thesis takes seriously the idea that Palestinian Christianity is best seen as a set of interpretive resources and practices that is, unlike what is often claimed, far more significant for the broader good of Palestinian society. Her anthropology begins with how individuals and communities grapple with the Christian resources in context and shape their practices in meaningful ways. In this way, she looks at how people draw on textual traditions to inform social practices. This allows her to develop a couple of analytical strategies. First, she engages with what could be called intentions, understandings and emptions surrounding specific practices such as saint veneration and national identity, biblical text, and ancient belonging. Second, she relates her research to contemporary political developments in Palestine and the significance of the Palestinian Christian community in that society. One need not labour the point about the ancient roots of Christianity in Palestine. But it is worth exploring a bit about the role that they have played in various contexts in the Middle East. The thesis tried to create greater and renewed awareness of that Christian presence. She spells out how Palestinian Christianity has been a broker of cultural goods within the wider society, keeping alive certain sorts of intellectual understanding and challenging political narratives. The author does not ignore texts here, but is interested in how people see these texts, not simply how they have been read in traditional scholarly debates. There is a good deal of freshness in this, full of insights and originality.

2022 Runner Up (£150)

Joshua Rigg

A Resounding No: Contentious Politics in Tunisia 2015-2019
(SOAS, University of London)

The thesis is about activists in post-2011 Tunisia, and it makes an important pitch for the work that refusal does, a refusal that is also an affirmation. This is the central paradox around which the thesis is constructed. Drawing on Rosa Luxemburg, Michel Foucault, and Antonio Negri among others, the thesis explores the ‘resounding no’ as in some sense politically constitutive, where ‘the state is refused rather than captured’. It focuses on the work of Tunisian activists who were engaged in ‘a ceaseless movement as they sought to refuse any single, fixed definition of the limits and end-goal to resistance after the revolution’. Their refusals were part of this constitutive power, a refusal of the state, a rejection of the hegemony of liberal transition, a refusal which re-defined the boundaries of the political. The thesis has many strengths. It is clearly a contribution to knowledge at the appropriate level; it masters an important and wide-ranging scholarly conversation; it is based on a substantial period of fieldwork; it draws on an appropriate, well-justified, and clearly articulated methodology; it is consistently well-argued and well-written, exposing a rich seam of fieldwork and drawing on direct evidence with considerable skill, clarity and insight; it is clearly structured; it makes a distinctive argument about the importance of political refusal in post-2011 Tunisia, reading this ‘resounding “no”’ from diverse activist sectors to ‘liberal transition’ as not only negative and destructive, but also as positive and constitutive of alternative forms of horizontalist politics. The thesis enjoys an overall coherence of purpose, and reveals a sophisticated and in-depth understanding of the issues at stake in this debate. It shows a high degree of reflexivity and conceptual precision. The thesis is publishable, or will be publishable, depending on how the candidate wants to deploy the material, in whole or in part. It makes a vital contribution to ongoing debates about popular struggle and contentious mobilization in the contemporary Middle East, and sets the candidate up for a promising academic career.

2021 Joint Winners (£300 each)

Hannah Elsisi Ashmawi

Mu'taqal Machine: Power, Gender and Identity in Egypt’s Political Prisons, 1948-1981
(Merton College, University of Oxford)

This is a very impressive thesis that makes a novel contribution to the field of Middle East studies in a number of ways. First, the thesis is based on a huge wealth of primary materials in Arabic, English, Italian and French, which includes private and public archives, published and unpublished audio of interviews, some 100 original interviews and published memoirs. The thesis also contains various images, such as layouts of prisons and letters written by political prisoners on cigarette papers. In this regard, the thesis constitutes a unique archive of the lives of political prisoners in Egypt, (re-)presenting their stories and sacrifices and ensuring that their names are written into the country’s history. Second, the thesis fills an important gap in the study of the Middle East through a focus on the prison machine, its history and development, deepening our understanding of the prison as a mechanism of governance in contemporary Egypt. Third, the thesis develops an original argument about the significance of gender in structuring the power of the prison and shaping prisoner subjectivities and resistance to the prison machine. Specifically, the thesis demonstrates how prison authorities sought to demoralise and ‘deactivate’ political prisoners by undermining their gender identities and, in turn, political prisoners reconstituted themselves, in particular by differentiating themselves from ‘ordinary criminals’, through the reassertion of particular gender identities of female respectability and manhood. The thesis also demonstrates how the gendered power of the prison extends beyond the prison walls and is also exercised and resisted in relation to prisoner families. Overall, this is an extremely rich piece of work. It is beautifully written and a joy to read. This will undoubtedly become a key reference in the study of political prisoners in the Middle East.

Mattin Biglari 

Refining Knowledge: Expertise, Labour and Everyday Life in the Iranian Oil Industry, c.1933-51
(SOAS University of London)

This is a truly outstanding piece of research. Its theoretical sophistication is far beyond that customarily encountered in PhD theses and shows not only an understanding of, but an active and confident engagement with recent trends in the history and historiography of modern Iran, of the oil industry in the Middle East and of the rapidly expanding field of Energy Humanities. Particularly welcome is its successful integration of subaltern actors into its analysis, giving full recognition to their roles in an area dominated by state-centred paradigms. It is entirely convincing in its reading of the oil nationalization in Iran in 1951 as a turning point not only for Iran and the wider Middle East but for the history of decolonisation across the Global South. The thesis makes use of a range of material either unused or under-used to date, archival material from Iran, the UK and US, and oral histories, memoirs and newspapers. The bibliography and footnotes demonstrate the astonishing range of secondary sources consulted. The thesis is beautifully written, the clarity of exposition is first class, jargon is avoided and the organization of the material assists the reader to a degree rare in unpublished work. This thesis is undoubtedly a major contribution to the fields it addresses. We have nothing in studies of the Iranian oil industry which approaches it in terms of originality, of theoretical depth and solid empirical research.

Honourable Mention (£75 book token)

Haya Al-Noaimi

The ‘Protectors of our Nation’: constructing masculinities between protection and in/security in Qatar and the UAE
(SOAS University of London)

This is a very strong dissertation that expounds a lucid and compelling argument about the gendered nature of conscription in Qatar and the UAE. It is beautifully written and manages to contribute to a host of literatures including feminist work, scholarship on masculinities, and the rather broad field of security studies. Through interviews and archival work, the thesis sets out to explore five interconnected logics of ‘protection’. It is successful in delineating these logics, as well as demonstrating the ways in which colonial violence has afterlives in the form of postcolonial security arrangements. The dissertation also evinces a sophisticated and self-reflective approach by laying out the difficulties in, and limits of, research methods including archival work, participant-observation, and discourse analysis. As such, it situates the author as a subject in the dissertation leading to a very mature and thought-provoking set of conclusions about the nature of research. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, the focus on ‘Gulf masculinities’ is both highly original and full of insight. By looking at an oft-neglected field of study – accounts of ‘gender’ in the Middle East are overwhelmingly concerned with Muslim women, and less often dedicated to masculinity in non-Gulf Arab countries – this thesis makes a convincing case for analysing how local experiences of ‘security’ and ‘protection’ stemming from violent state building endeavours are inextricable from colonial constructions of military masculinities. The final chapter makes an especially strong argument about how the Bedouin were made insecure by their incorporation into the colonial lexicon of ‘martial races’. In sum, this is an impressive and erudite thesis that makes a significant contribution to the field of International Relations (broadly understood) by highlighting the nexus between colonial and local instantiations of insecure masculinities in Qatar and the Emirates.

2020 Runner-up (£150)

Adélie Chevée

The Emergence of Syrian Grassroots Intellectuals: Critique and Political Commitment in the Revolutionary Press (2011-2017)
(SOAS University of London)

Adélie Chevée’s study about the emergence of grassroots intellectuals in the Syrian revolution is a creative and insightful. She compares the post-2011 generation of intellectuals to the one that dominated the socio-political scene before the revolution. The study is important in more than one way. It provides innovative tools to explore knowledge production in the context of the Syrian revolt. It sheds light on intellectuals who have an ability to communicate effectively through revolutionary media and who were able to build cultural (and revolutionary) capital through grassroots activism. Chevée proposes an original framework combining Gramscian and Bourdieusian theories to explore the role of the intellectual in revolutionary Syria. On the one hand, she proposes a sophisticated framework that builds on an extensive literature about traditional and organic intellectuals during political crises. On the other hand, she engages with Arab and Syrian scholarship about the role of critical intellectuals since 2011. This allows the author to formulate a solid critique of Western knowledge production about the region. Chevée debunks popular Orientalist tropes about cultures in the Middle East and the Arab regions. Finally, Chevée conducted interviews with key grassroots intellectuals in Beirut, Gaziantep, and Istanbul. This multi-sited study provides a nuanced account of the cultural field in Syria and the diaspora since 2011. It explains the tensions between older and newer generations of intellectuals and the evolution of the cultural field in the past decade. Ultimately, the study makes important contributions in several fields, including studies of nationalism in the Levant; knowledge production in the MENA region; as well as the history of the cultural sphere in Syria.

2019 Joint Winners (£300 each)

Veronica Ferreri

A State of Permanent Loss. War and Displacement in Syria and Lebanon
(SOAS)

This thesis chronicles the trajectory of displacement of a Syrian community from al-Qusayr and its countryside to Lebanon. Based on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews and the collection of oral histories, the work dissects Qusayris’ tasharrud, a term used by the community to define its own displacement and war. Veronica Ferreri has produced an outstanding piece of research, brilliantly laid out and evocatively drawing the reader into a compassionate understanding of the terrible loss which Syrians face in their displacement in Lebanon not only since 2011 but sometimes commencing decades earlier. Ferreri’s study is both original and persuasive. The redefinition of the term tasharrud as a state of permanent loss rather than the dictionary definition of homelessness, or vagabondage was both original and deeply convincing. The originality of this work lay in the manner in which Ferreri peeled back the meaning of tasharrud to show that is was a three-fold loss: loss of physical space; loss of social status; and loss of official documents. Ferreri’s clarity of exposition was faultless and she wrote with a warmth and approachability that gave the study great moral depth. The use of quotations was beautifully integrated into the discussions, supporting the analysis and not appearing as ‘anecdotal’ statements. Overall this manuscript makes a significant contrition to the field setting out the complexity first of the difficulty in distinguishing between forced and voluntary migration, and secondly in unpacking the significance of loss – as physical displacement, loss of social status as mutasharriduun, and what is so often overlooked, loss of legal documentations attesting to one’s citizenship, ownership, education, and other aspects of social and political belonging.

Shiva Mihan

Timurid Manuscript Production: The Scholarship and Aesthetics of Prince Bāysunghur’s Royal Atelier (1420-1435)
(University of Cambridge)

Shiva Mihan’s thesis puts the study of classical Persian painting in its early 15th-century golden age on an entirely new footing. The thesis is beautifully laid out and very well structured and is simply magisterial and mature beyond the years of its author. Its scholarship is profound, wide-ranging and all-encompassing, and that scholarship is the bedrock of the entire – and boldly ambitious – text itself. That text is, so to speak, the visible tip of the iceberg. The bulk of the iceberg, in other words the raw data which provides the basis for some 275 pages of closely-focused discussion, comprises a further 117 pages. Mihan meticulously examines and analyses the the physical state of these manuscripts: bindings, doublures, frontispieces, carpet pages, shamsas, ‘unwans, colophons, illumination, paper, calligraphy, seals, signatures and inscriptions. In other words, codicology in its fullest sense. No earlier scholar has come close to this breadth and depth of solid information for any period of Persian painting; a huge achievement, and a challenge for all future scholars. This is not to say that Mihan avoids speculation – she knows the scholarly literature, both Western and Persian, inside out, and has her own theories about it – for example, she takes issue very convincingly with the purpose of these manuscripts, the role of the patron, the detailed workings of his atelier, the intended audience of these manuscripts, their meaning, their distinctive style and why they developed it. Altogether, this as an absolutely outstanding thesis which is ready for publication more or less as it stands.

2019 Honourable Mention (£75 book token)

Gizem Tongo

Ottoman Painting and Painters during the First World War
(University of Oxford)

This study focuses on the Ottoman art world during the First World War and explores how the war changed the conditions of art production, its agents, and the art itself between 1914 and 1918, a topic that has remained peripheral to international cultural histories of the First World War and modern art more generally. This is an excellent thesis. Its subject is a tightly focussed study about art, art institutions and artists during the period of the First World War. Set against the political backdrop of the last half century of the Ottoman Empire, with a concise and highly readable narrative it explores, within a clear chronological framework, the institutions, the key actors, and topics such as the relationship with western painting, how art was brought into the service of the state, the fate of Armenian artists as a result of the genocide, how the arts in fact benefited during the war and much else. Well illustrated, and with an extensive use of source material, this is an extremely rich story that has been largely overlooked. While focussing on art production in all its forms from academic painting to propagandist posters, it touches also in major on social history and the place of art in society. There has been some literature on this subject, but nowhere near as detailed and multi-facetted as this. In my view, this is a highly original contribution to scholarship.