{"id":915,"date":"2025-11-12T16:25:30","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T14:25:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davo1.de\/?page_id=915"},"modified":"2026-02-02T17:14:27","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T15:14:27","slug":"vorstand-beirat","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/davo1.de\/en\/home\/uber-die-davo\/vorstand-beirat\/","title":{"rendered":"Board and Academic Council"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=””]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\u2019s academic direction and strategic initiatives.<\/p>\n

The current Board and most of the Academic Council members were elected at the General Meeting on September 10, 2025.[\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2\/3″][vc_column_text css=””]<\/p>\n

Members of the Board<\/h2>\n

Christine Binzel<\/strong><\/h3>\n

President<\/strong><\/p>\n

Christine Binzel is Professor of Economics: Economy and Society of the Middle East at Friedrich-Alexander-Universit\u00e4t Erlangen-N\u00fcrnberg (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.<\/p>\n

Find out more<\/a>[\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”1020″ img_size=”” alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_circle_2″ css=””][vc_column_text css=””]<\/p>\n

Photo: Georg Po\u0308hlein<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

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Hanna Al Taher<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Vice-President<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hanna Al Taher is a political scientist, writer and researcher. She is a research associate at the chair for Political Theory and the History of Political Thought at TU Dresden, where she teaches political theory from an anti-colonial perspective. Hanna is also an affiliated researcher at the University of Kassel and Queen Mary University London and their current work focuses on state theory, borders and passports through a queer-Marxist lens and is dedicated to researching up to power.[\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”1282″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_circle_2″ css=””][vc_column_text css=””]<\/p>\n

Photo: Hawwari<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

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Benjamin Sch\u00fctze<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Treasurer<\/strong><\/p>\n

Benjamin Schuetze is Senior Researcher and Leader of an\u00a0Emmy Noether Research Group on \u2018Renewable Energies, Renewed Authoritarianisms? The Political Economy of Solar Energy in the MENA\u2019<\/a>\u00a0at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) in Freiburg. His research focuses on \u2018democracy promotion,\u2019 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\u00a0Middle East Critique<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Find out more<\/a>[\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”1016″ img_size=”” alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_circle_2″ css=””][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2\/3″][vc_column_text css=””]<\/p>\n

Hanna Kienzler<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Secretary<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hanna Kienzler is Professor of Global Health in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and Co-Director of the\u00a0ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health<\/a>\u00a0at King\u2019s 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\u00a0Refugee Mental Health & Place<\/a>\u00a0network. Methodologically, her work combines ethnography with a range of other qualitative methods, participatory action approaches and arts-based techniques.<\/p>\n

Find out more<\/a>[\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”1019″ img_size=”” alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_circle_2″ css=””][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2\/3″][vc_column_text css=””]<\/p>\n

Members of the Academic Council<\/h2>\n

Sara Ababneh<\/strong>, is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sheffield where she teaches Politics of the Middle East, Gendered Politics in the Arab World and Race and Racism in World Politics. Prior to that she was an Associate Professor at the University of Jordan\u2019s Center for Strategic Studies where she was the Chair of the Political and Social Research Unit. Ababneh earned her DPhil in Politics and International Relations from St. Antony\u2019s College, University of Oxford.\u00a0 Ababneh has published on the Arab Uprising, politics of resistance, gender and Islamism, Muslim family laws, and gendered and labour politics in the Arab World with a special focus on Jordan and Palestine.[\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”1017″ img_size=”” alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_circle_2″ css=””][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2\/3″][vc_column_text css=””]Sebastian Els\u00e4sser<\/strong>, is a senior lecturer at the department of Middle Eastern Studies at Christian-Albrechts-Universit\u00e4t and the director of the research unit \u201cGenerations of Islamic Activism\u201d (2023-2026). He received his M.A. degree in Islamic Studies, Political Science and Political Economy from Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin in 2005 and his Ph.D. degree from Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin in 2012. He was a guest doctoral researcher at the CEDEJ, a French research center for the social sciences, in Cairo between 2008 and 2011, and has been teaching Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the universities of Kiel, Hamburg and Freiburg since 2011. His research focuses on society, religion, and politics in the modern Arab world and Turkey. He has published on Coptic Christians in Egypt, divorce and family law, the ideological and sociocultural history of the Muslim Brotherhood, and non-religion and atheism in the Arab-speaking world.[\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”1015″ img_size=”” alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_circle_2″ css=””][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2\/3″][vc_column_text css=””]Nils Riecken<\/strong>, is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ERC-funded project \u201cLate Ottoman Palestinians: Social and Cultural Dynamics in an Eastern Mediterranean Society during the Age of Empire, 1880-1920\u201d (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 \u201eraison d\u2019\u00e9tat.\u201d 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 &amp; Gesellschaft, History &amp; Theory, Peripherie, and ReOrient, among others.<\/p>\n

Homepage<\/a>
\nORCID<\/a>[\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”1018″ img_size=”” alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_circle_2″ css=””][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2\/3″][vc_column_text css=””]Serena Tolino<\/strong>, 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 \u201cTraIL. Tracing Labor in Islamicate Legal Traditions\u201d, the SNF project \u201cTraSIS. Trajectories of Slavery in Islamicate Societies. Three Concepts from Islamic Legal Sources\u201d, and co-director of the SNF\/DFG project \u201cThe Flow: From Deep Learning to Digital Analysis and their Role in the Humanities. Creating, Evaluating, and Critiquing Workflows for Historical Corpora.\u201d[\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”1014″ img_size=”” alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_circle_2″ css=””][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2\/3″][vc_column_text css=””]Schirin Amir-Moazami<\/strong>, is Professor and Head of the profile area Islam in Europe at the Institute of Islamic Studies at Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin and serves as a Principal Investigator at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. She studied political science and sociology in Frankfurt am Main, Marseille, Paris, and Berlin, and earned her PhD at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the European University Institute in Florence. Her research focuses on configurations of religious and cultural plurality in Western European immigration societies, critical political theory, secularism, body politics, and the politics of knowledge production. On these topics, she edited, among other works, the volume Der inspizierte Muslim. Zur Politisierung der Islamforschung in Europa in 2018. Her most recent monograph on the power-analytic dimensions of integration policies in Germany was published in 2022 by Bloomsbury Academic under the title Interrogating Muslims: The Liberal-Secular Matrix of Integration.[\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”1386″ img_size=”” alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_circle_2″ css=””][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2\/3″][vc_column_text css=””]Bj\u00f6rn Bentlage<\/strong>, 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.[\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”1355″ img_size=”” alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_circle_2″ css=””][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2\/3″][vc_column_text css=””]Aymon Kreil<\/strong>, is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures of the Faculty of Art and Philosophy of Ghent University and the codirector of the Centre for Anthropological Research on Affect and Materiality (CARAM). Kreil has graduated in anthropology in 2012, jointly at the \u00c9cole des Hautes \u00e9tudes en Sciences sociales (EHESS, Paris) and at the University of Neuch\u00e2tel. Kreil has conducted most of his anthropological research in Egypt, where he studied the topics of love, sexuality, art, and religious authority. He is the coeditor of the books Reinventing Love? Gender, intimacy and romance in the Arab World<\/em>\u00a0(Peter Lang, 2018),\u00a0Making Sense of Change: Methodological Approaches to Societies in Transformation<\/em>\u00a0(Palgrave McMillan, 2021) and\u00a0Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures: Beyond Norms and Transgression from the Abbasids to the Present Day\u00a0<\/em>(IB Tauris, 2021).[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”1278″ img_size=”” alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_circle_2″ css=””][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=””]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\u2019s academic direction and strategic initiatives. The current Board and most of the Academic Council members were elected at the General Meeting on September<\/p>\n

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