DAVO is governed by a Board consisting of the Chair, Deputy Chair, Secretary, and Treasurer. Board members are elected for a three-year. In addition to the Board, DAVO has an Academic Council, whose members are also elected for a three-year term. The Academic Council serves in an advisory capacity, supporting the Board in shaping the association’s academic direction and strategic initiatives.

The current Board and most of the Academic Council members were elected at the General Meeting on September 10, 2025.

Members of the Board

Christine Binzel

President

Christine Binzel is Professor of Economics: Economy and Society of the Middle East at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). Her research covers topics in development economics, economic history, and political economy. She has a particular interest in questions related to social mobility, social cohesion, and social and religious movements. For her research, she draws on available microdata, digitizes historical data, and collects her own data through surveys, lab-in-the-field experiments, and field experiments. Christine is a Faculty Fellow at the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and a member of the Research Committee on Development Economics of the German Economic Association.

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Foto: Georg Pöhlein

Hanna Al Taher

Vice-President

(Information will follow shortly.)

Benjamin Schütze

Treasurer

Benjamin Schuetze is Senior Researcher and Leader of an Emmy Noether Research Group on ‘Renewable Energies, Renewed Authoritarianisms? The Political Economy of Solar Energy in the MENA’ at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) in Freiburg. His research focuses on ‘democracy promotion,’ the politics of intervention, transregionally connected authoritarian practices, and contemporary energy politics. In particular, he explores the intersection of climate breakdown, efforts at expanding renewables, the global reconfiguration of authoritarian power and the emergence of new forms of resistance in Morocco, Tunisia and Jordan. He is an elected member of the BRISMES CAF, alumnus of the Young Academy for Sustainability Research at FRIAS and member of the International Editorial Advisory Board of Middle East Critique.

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Hanna Kienzler

Secretary

Hanna Kienzler is Professor of Global Health in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and Co-Director of the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health at King’s College London. She investigates how systemic violence, war, and complex emergencies intersect with health and mental health outcomes in the occupied Palestinian territory, Kosovo, and, among refugees, in the UK. She conducts research on the mental health impacts of war and trauma on survivors; on what it means for persons with severe mental illness to live and participate in their respective communities; and on humanitarian and mental health interventions in fragile states. She is also co-founder of the Refugee Mental Health & Place network. Methodologically, her work combines ethnography with a range of other qualitative methods, participatory action approaches and arts-based techniques.

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Members of the Academic Council

Sara Ababneh, PhD, Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sheffield and Assistant Professor at the University of Jordan.

Sebastian Elsässer, PhD, Privatdozent in Islamic Studies at Christian Albrecht University and Head of the DFG Research Group “Generations of Islamic Activism.”

Nils Riecken, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ERC-funded project “Late Ottoman Palestinians: Social and Cultural Dynamics in an Eastern Mediterranean Society during the Age of Empire, 1880-1920” (LOOP) at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum. Previously, he was a research associate at the Leibniz Center for Modern Orient and substituted for the Chair of Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin. His research and teaching combine Arabic and Islamic studies, historical, critical, and political theory, postcolonial studies, intellectual history, and social history. His fields of work include late Ottoman statehood in Palestine, contemporary Arab philosophy (especially the work of Abdallah Laroui), Islam and modernity, historicity and temporality, postcoloniality, criticism, universalism, and subjectivity, as well as knowledge production in Arabic and Islamic studies in the context of „raison d’état.” In his forthcoming book he interprets the contemporary Moroccan intellectual, historian, and novelist Abdallah Laroui (*1933) as a theorist contributing to local, regional, and global debates. His work has been published in Democratic Theory, Der Islam, Geschichte & Gesellschaft, History & Theory, Peripherie, and ReOrient, among others.

Homepage: https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/islamwiss/personen/nilsriecken.html.en

ORCID https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0009-0000-5167-2278

Serena Tolino, Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Unit Middle East and Muslim Societies at the University of Bern, PI of the SNF Starting Grant “TraIL. Tracing Labor in Islamicate Legal Traditions”, the SNF project “TraSIS. Trajectories of Slavery in Islamicate Societies. Three Concepts from Islamic Legal Sources”, and co-director of the SNF/DFG project “The Flow: From Deep Learning to Digital Analysis and their Role in the Humanities. Creating, Evaluating, and Critiquing Workflows for Historical Corpora.”

Schirin Amir-Moazami, Professor of Islam in Europe, Institute of Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin, PI at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies at the Free University of Berlin.

Björn Bentlage, PhD, is a post-doc researcher and lecturer for Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Bern and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. My research interests include early modern Arabic travel literature, the entangled histories of the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and contemporary legal developments and prison literature.

Aymon Kreil, Professor of Middle Eastern Anthropology at Ghent University.