Middle East Centre Emirates PhD Award Winners 2016-17

Andrew Delatolla, Department of International Relations

Thesis title: The Rise of the State in the Non-West: State Formation and State Building in Lebanon and Syria, 1800-1944

Andrew is a final year doctoral candidate in the department of International Relations at the LSE. He holds an MA in Intelligence and International Security from King’s College London, a BA in Political Science from Concordia University in Montreal, and a BFa in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University in Toronto. His research interests include sociological perspectives on state formation, state building, and development with particular focus on 19^th and early 20^th century Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria.

Andrew can be contacted at: a.delatolla@lse.ac.uk

Harry Pettit, Department of Geography & Environment

Thesis Title: Living in hope: youth, unemployment, and the promise of a middle-class life in Cairo

Harry is a final year PhD candidate in the Department of Geography & Environment at LSE. His thesis explores the lives of Egypt’s increasing numbers of educated unemployed youth, a population Asef Bayat has recently termed the “middle-class poor”. He exposes both how this group has been historically fashioned, and thereafter how they both experience and negotiate their marginal lives. He particularly focuses on the importance of hope as an affection of marginal living, exploring its social life over time, as well as its politics. His broader research interests include: urban marginality, youth, affect theory, global middle classes, and social theory. 

Moritz Schmoll, Department of Government

Thesis title: The Politics of Tax Collection in Egypt

Moritz is a PhD candidate at the Department of Government at LSE. He holds an MSc in Comparative Politics from Sciences Po Paris. His research interests include the state, the political economy of taxation and state-society relations in the MENA region and the wider developing world. His research explores tax collection in Egypt from historical, ethnographic and political economy perspectives. It aims at contributing to emerging strands of literature focused on the empirical study of “states at work” and on the politics behind the widespread discrepancies between laws on paper and in practice