Status Audio Magazine

Dr. Basileus Zeno is Karl Loewenstein Fellow and Visiting Lecturer in Political Science at Amherst College. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in September 2021.

His academic publications include articles in Nations and Nationalism; Middle East Law and Governance; and Digest of Middle East Studies.

Basileus is strongly committed to public engagement and applied research. He is a co-editor of the Syria Page at Jadaliyya, and a co-founding member of Security in Context. He also served as a consultant and a researcher at several international organizations such as the Carter Center’s Conflict Resolution Program, The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UN-ESCWA), and the LSE Policy research project "Legitimacy and Citizenship in the Arab World".

Twitter: @BasileusZeno

Nadya Sbaiti specializes in the social and cultural histories of the modern Middle East. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled "Gender, Education, and Nation in Mandate Lebanon," (forthcoming), which examines the central role of education to the formation of multiple national narratives and the production of history in Lebanon under French mandate.

Additional research interests include spatial manifestations of colonial and national projects, colonial methods of social control through prisons and asylums, the production of history as both discursive and material practice, tourism and heritage, and contemporary popular culture (music, film, game shows and reality television).

Sbaiti has served as co-editor of the peer-reviewed Arab Studies Journal since 2005, and she helped produce the acclaimed documentary film About Baghdad (2004).

Cat graduated from Baylor University in 2019 as a University Scholar with concentrations in Arabic and Middle East Studies and Poverty and Social Justice Studies. Her undergraduate thesis explored the connection between Islamophobia and the racialization of Arab Americans. On campus, she served on the Baylor Migration Project Team, developing local projects to assist unaccompanied minors from Central America. Additionally, she took time away from school to volunteer in refugee communities in Greece, Jordan, and Palestine. After undergrad, Cat worked in the Texas State Senate and served as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in the West Bank. Cat is a Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellow and will enter the U.S. Foreign Service as a political officer upon graduation from MAAS.

Brahim El Guabli is an academic whose work and research interests encompass the Maghreb, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. He probes questions of trauma and memory, and the way aesthetics enable various forms of coming to terms with violent pasts. Brahim’s articles have appeared, among others, in Arab Studies Journal, The Journal of North African Studies, Francosphères and Jadaliyya. He is also the co-editor of the two-volume special issue of The Journal of North African Studies entitled “Violence and the Politics of Aesthetics: A Postcolonial Maghreb Without Borders” (2017). Brahim is the co-editor of Jadaliyya Maghreb page.

Manijeh Nasrabadi is a writer, educator and activist based in New York City. Her essays and articles have appeared in the Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, Scholar & Feminist online, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Comparative Studies of South Asian, Africa, and the Middle East, Social Text online, jadaliyya.com, and Callaloo. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective.