About

“Somewhere during my ten days in Paris (and Brittany) I received an illumination of some kind that seems to’ve changed me again, towards what I suppose’ll be my pattern for another seven years or more: in effect, a satori: the Japanese word for ‘sudden illumination,’ ‘sudden awakening’ or simply ‘kick in the eye.'” Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris.

I am an Associate Professor/Maitre de conférences of Sociology at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis and a member of CRESPPA-LabToP. I received a dual Ph.D. in Political Science from the Universities of Lausanne (Switzerland) and Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (France) in 2018. My research explores contentious politics and protest dynamics in North Africa and the Middle East, with a particular focus on Egyptian politics.

Before that, I was a Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University (Waltham, Massachusetts) and a postdoctoral researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), serving as a core-researcher for the DREAM European Project, and was affiliated with the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin (Germany) and the Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains in Paris (France). I am still a member of the ERC-DREAM and within it I supervise, along with Dr. Amin Allal, a project entitled Protesting Today in the Arab Mediterranean. I also am an associate researcher at the CEDEJ, in Cairo.

Between 2011 and 2016, I was a graduate assistant at the Institute of Political Studies at Lausanne University and spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies, at Columbia University, New York. I hold a BA and Master from Sciences Po Paris, and before that I studied Law at Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University and Cairo University.