2022-2024

Yasmina Abouzzohour (2022- 2024)

Yasmina Abouzzohour is an associate research scholar and lecturer at Princeton University’s Institute for Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East. A comparative political scientist specializing in regime persistence and transition, Abouzzohour is especially interested in employing qualitative and mixed methods to understand the impact of state-society relations on regime behavior and endurance. Much of her teaching and research lies at the juncture of politics and political economy, with particular emphasis on the Arab monarchies and Maghreb states.

Her current book project, Why Does God Save the King? How Arab Monarchs Endure and Evolve, investigates long-term durability in modern Arab monarchies. Delving into dozens of upheavals, ranging from mass protests and uprisings to coup d’états and strikes, this study uses a range of methods to shed light on the role of monarchical regimes’ interactions with opposition actors and citizens in shaping their economic and political strategies during upheavals. It advances empirical and theoretical contributions about the impact of threat perception, adaptive learning, and the interrelationship between regimes, opposition actors, and citizens on authoritarian endurance and autocratization. In other projects, Abouzzohour employs survey data to explore the determinants and implications of heightened public trust in the military in authoritarian and transitioning states and Twitter data to examine the impact of newly imposed taxes on state-society relations in rentier states. She is also interested in the shifts in regime behavior in the context of the global energy transition in the Middle East.

Her research received awards from the American Political Science Association, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Andrew Mellon Fund, the University of Oxford,  the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Project on Middle East Political Science, among others. She has presented her work at academic events at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, the American Political Science Association, the Middle East Studies Association, the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, and the American University of Beirut.

Prior to beginning her role at Princeton, Abouzzohour served as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University’s Middle East Initiative. She received her Ph.D. at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and her B.A. at the Department of Political Science and the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University

Amal Sachedina (2022-2024)

Amal Sachedina completed her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology and Middle East studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation research, now a book entitled, Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern: Dynamics of Time in the Sultanate of Oman (Cornell University Press, 2021), explores the material practices of making and reflecting on the past through examining the changing functions and roles of material objects and landscapes over the course of the 20th century at a time when the last Ibadi Imamate (1913-1959) pervaded the interior of what is now the Sultanate of Oman. It is a study of how forms of history, the re-configuration of time and the institutionalization of material heritage recalibrate the Islamic tradition to requirements of modern political and moral order as part of nation building in the Sultanate of Oman. Her current research is an exploration of development of heritage practices as well as museums in Saudi Arabia, specifically in the World Heritage site of Jeddah and the Islamic pilgrimage site of Medina, their impact amongst locals and the transformative relationship between religion and politics.  Amal Sachedina has also taught at the American University, George Washington University, George Mason University and was Aga Khan visiting professor in Islamic Humanities at Brown University. She has held postdoctoral research fellowships at the National University of Singapore, George Washington University and the American Museum of Natural History. She has been the recipient of a number of fellowships including The Fulbright (IIE), The Fulbright-Hays (DDRA), Andrew Mellon Foundation, Aga Khan Foundation, the British Foundation for Arabia and the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA). In fostering an inter-disciplinary approach to the study of material culture, Amal Sachedina earned a B.A. in archaeology from the University of Michigan and an M.Phil in Islamic Art and Archaeology from Oxford University and has been a research consultant for World Heritage advisory bodies such as ICOMOS (International Council for Monuments and Sites) and ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property).

Tyson Patros (2022- 2023)

Tyson Patros, PhD is a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University’s Transregional Institute. His research focuses on the causes, dynamics, and consequences of social and labor movements, specifically how patterns of collective action impact democracy and economic redistribution. His current book manuscript, Blueprints of Change: Social Movements and Constitutional Politics in Tunisia and Egypt, investigates the remaking of constitutions as a principle site of struggle during “the Arab Spring” revolutionary situations, using comparative-historical methods to locate the conditions that empower movements to transform socio-legal institutions. It examines what popular movements in Egypt and Tunisia envisioned as their desired democratic, egalitarian alternatives and how, if at all, they reshaped politics and society through formal constitution-making. This study draws on in-depth interviews with movement, state, and business actors, and a rich mix of legal, organizational, and policy documents. The project builds off of his dissertation, which was supported by the National Science Foundation and awarded a 2020 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Dissertation Award by the American Sociological Association. His other work focuses on the household responses to humanitarian crisis in Syria and a historical project using U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve archives on how state officials navigated the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo amid efforts to diminish the New International Economic Order. His work is published in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Labor History, and Contemporary Sociology.

Patros was previously a faculty fellow at New York University, where he was awarded the Teaching Innovation Award by the College of Arts and Sciences. He has also worked in public-policy research and with labor unions, community organizations, and nonprofit associations. He received is BA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, MA from New York University, and PhD from the University of California, Irvine in Sociology.