Institute’s Resident Scholar Program gives researchers an opportunity to pursue their academic research. The program, which was launched in spring 2021, is for Lebanon-based and Lebanese scholars. During the residency, the researcher can pursue their own academic research without any administrative duties as a full member of FIME’s small collegial work community in Beirut. The researcher will have their own workspace as well as access to other resources FIME provides for its staff including small library, technical equipment, and seminar room. As well as conducting their own research, the resident scholar will organise an activity aimed at the academic and/or general audience (e.g. a small academic or cultural event, popularising their own research in the form of writing or a podcast).
How to apply
The application period for the 2025 resident scholar has has not started.
Current Resident Scholar
Sana Tannoury-Karam (2024)
Sana Tannoury-Karam is an assistant professor of history in the Lebanese American University (LAU) and a historian of the modern Middle East and global history. She is working on the history of the political left, themes of internationalism and nationalism, the sociology of intellectuals, and the intellectual and social history of the Arab Middle East. Tannoury-Karam is also interested in themes of memory and forgetting, exile, and belonging.
Currently she is working on a book that chronicles the political organization and activism of a group of Arab Marxists who advocated for social justice, the international solidarity of the working class, the ills of capitalism, universal suffrage, and conjoining the class struggle and the anti-imperialist struggle.
Previous Resident Scholars
Mariam Al Hasbani (2023)
Mariam Al Hasbani is a researcher and faculty member at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Balamand in Lebanon. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the Lebanese University in 2019, where her doctoral research delved into “The Interrelationship between Gender and Lebanese Social Scientists’ Educational Migration Determinants and Effects on Employment in Academia”. Al Hasbani worked at various universities in Lebanon, including the Lebanese American University and the American University of Beirut. Throughout her career, she has led and collaborated on numerous research projects alongside interdisciplinary teams of researchers. She has also undertaken research residencies at distinguished institutions such as the Center for Population and Development and Aix-Marseille University in France, and participated in many local, regional and international conferences and seminars. Her research interests include, but not limited to the following areas; sociology of education, academic mobility, gender and migration studies.
Dima Smaira (2022)
Dr Dima Smaira is a part-time lecturer at the Political Studies and Public Administration Department at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and an independent researcher. She was a post-Doctoral Research Associate at Durham University’s Geography Department and a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. Smaira is interested in the spatial and everyday turns in International Relations and Peace & Conflict Studies. She uses both traditional qualitative and participatory ethnographic methods, including digital storytelling and mapping. Her research is looking into youth and citizenship in deeply divided societies and on everyday peace and security in Lebanon, particularly across Beirut’s Southern Suburbs (known as Dahiyeh). Smaira is also a member of Khaddit Beirut (Beirut Shake-up), an initiative for reform and recovery launched following the Beirut 2020 port explosion.
Vana Kalenderian (2021)
Vana Kalenderian is an osteoarchaeologist who studies ancient mortuary practices in the Near East, with a focus on Roman Lebanon. Kalenderian has been involved in multiple excavation projects both in Lebanon and abroad. She continues to work closely with the Lebanese archaeology teams under the jurisdiction of the Lebanese Directorate General of Antiquities. In addition to field work, Kalenderian is passionate about advancing local archaeological research and public outreach in Lebanon, and more broadly in the Middle East.
In addition to the archaeological sciences and exploring ancient health and lifestyles, her research interests include themes of imperialism and colonialism; migration and mobility; sociocultural change; expressions of individual and group identity; and ancient rituals and belief systems. Kalenderian also runs a history and archaeology blog where she publishes articles aimed towards general audiences.
Rima Majed (2021)
Rima Majed is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies Department at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Her work focuses on the fields of social inequality, social movements, sectarianism, conflict, and violence. Majed has completed her PhD at the University of Oxford where she conducted her research on the relationship between structural changes, social mobilisation, and sectarianism in Lebanon. She was a visiting fellow at the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University in 2018/19.
Majed is the author of numerous articles and op-eds. Her work has appeared in several journals, books and media platforms such as Social Forces, Mobilization, Routledge Handbook on the Politics of the Middle East, Middle East Law and Governance Journal, Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East, Global Dialogue, Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology, Al Jumhuriya, OpenDemocracy, Jacobin, Middle East Eye, CNN and Al Jazeera English.
