Current guest researchers

Vincent Engelhardt

Vincent Engelhardt is a research MA student in Middle Eastern Studies at Leiden University. Prior to joining Leiden, he worked on the reconstruction of libraries in late Ottoman Palestine. His current research project focuses on the transfer of Islamic antiquities from early twentieth-century Cairo to German museum collections.

Susanne Dahlgren

Susanne Dahlgren is a PhD and Adjunct Professor (Docent) at the University of Helsinki and acts as the Director of the Finnish Institute in the Middle East, based in Beirut. Since her early studies in Anthropology, she has focused on Southern Yemen where her interest has been on social dynamics, public moralities, politics and law. Her PhD dissertation Contesting Realities. Public Sphere and Morality in Southern Yemen was published in 2010 by Syracuse University Press. Susanne has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in southern part of Yemen since the 1980s and published her work in academic journals on law, society and anthropology as well as in edited volumes. She has specialized in Islamic law and edited among others, Special issue on Gender and Judging in Muslim Courts: Emerging Scholarship and Debates for the journal Hawwa (with Monika Lindbekk, 2020). Her textbook Changing Middle East as the multipolar world order emerges, written together with M. Lohikoski contextualizes current conflicts in the Middle East to the background of Gaza war (Atena 2025, in Finnish). A Full list of her publications is available here.

Beshouy Botros

Beshouy Botros is a PhD candidate working in the History and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies departments at Yale University. Beshouy is writing a dissertation on the histories of science and sexuality across Northern Africa that shaped trans medicine’s emergence in Cairo and Casablanca, where some of the earliest clinics offering gender-affirming surgical procedures emerged. This project dilates on the relationship between colonial modernity and the body while teasing out the conditions of possibility and the historical processes that made of trans medicine in Egypt and the Maghreb. During their time at NVIC, Beshouy will be gathering materials on mediatized cases of transition in the Arabic press and bibliographic sources.

Chada Bachri

Chada Bachri holds a PhD in Education from Gazi University in Turkey. She is currently pursuing a second PhD at the University of Bordeaux, where her research focuses on the geopolitical perspectives of Francophonie in the Middle East as a form of soft power, with a particular emphasis on Egypt. Her work examines French language education as a site of political, cultural, and educational negotiation, drawing on policy analysis, historical sources, and sociological approaches to language and education. By exploring the ways in which education policies are embedded in regional affairs, her research sheds light on how educational reforms are shaped by diplomatic and geopolitical dynamics in a context marked by shifting power relations and transnational influences.

Noa Jacobs-Latrèche

Noa Jacobs-Latrèche is a PhD candidate in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Ghent University. Her research examines how practices of friendship in Cairo intersect with spatial, gender and class dynamics. By exploring the ways friendships are embedded in the city’s urban fabric, her work sheds light on how social ties are shaped by public and private spaces, leisure practices, and discourses of intimacy in a context marked by socioeconomic inequality and a complex physical layout. She holds an MA in Middle East Studies and a BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Ghent University.

Lilly Massoud-Judge

Lilly Massoud-Judge is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago specializing in comparative political economy and Middle East politics. Her dissertation considers how ongoing economic reforms have impacted material and affective investment in the Egyptian national economy, amid a backdrop of ongoing financialization and integration into regional and international circuits of capital.