Elizabeth Monier is an Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Studies. She specialises in the modern history and politics of the Middle East and has a particular interest in Egypt, Oman, the UAE, Iraq and Kuwait. Her work has an emphasis on examining Arabic narratives of identity and practices of inclusion/exclusion and on Christians in the Middle East. She has previously held fellowships at Cambridge, the London School of Economics and Political Science, GIGA's Middle East Institute and the University of Warwick and was a research associate at Darwin College, Cambridge. She completed her PhD in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2011. Her thesis focused on the narratives of national and communal belonging of Coptic Christians in modern Egypt, and in particular the use of the media to manage, contest and negotiate identities, notions of citizenship, and sectarian tensions.
Her current research includes a project on nations, state-building and the inclusion of minorities, focusing mainly on constitutional development in early twentieth century Egypt and Iraq. She is also developing several different projects related to the contemporary identity politics, cultural practices and history of minoritised groups in the Middle East, as well as mobilisations of the concept of tolerance and public diplomacy in the Arab Gulf states, focusing on Kuwait, Oman, the UAE and Bahrain.
Dr Monier teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the history and politics of the modern Middle East, in particular, the Arab world
Dr Monier is open to supervising research on the following topics:
The politics of the modern Arab World.
State-Society relations in Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain and Oman.
Nationalism and state-building.
Identity politics and sectarianism.
Minorities.
Regional power and inter-Arab relations.
- Identity politics and sectarianism: How ethnic, national and religious identity formations interact with the mobilisation of sectarianism and communal/minority politics.
- Contemporary history and politics of Egypt, Oman, the UAE, Iraq and Kuwait.
- Middle Eastern Christians.
- Political and conceptual history of the Middle East, especially Arabic conceptualisations of sectarianism, inclusion of 'minorities', al-Mowatana and the Arab nation/state.