Dr Zeina Al Azmeh

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Selwyn College
  • Teaching Associate in Political Sociology
Available to supervise masters students
Dr Zeina Al Azmeh

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About

Zeina Al Azmeh is a Teaching Associate in Political Sociology at the Department of Sociology and a Fellow of Selwyn College. Zeina's research centres on the political sociology of knowledge production, memorialisation in the context of exile, with a particular focus on the contemporary Middle East. She has also worked on themes of memorialisation, migration, revolutions, and the role of intellectuals in contexts of forced displacement.

Al Azmeh is co-founder and, since 2024, co-chair of the board of the Syrian Research and Academic Network (SARN), an organisation that fosters collaboration and support for Syrian scholars and researchers in exile. Her book Syrian Intellectuals in Exile: The Dilemmas of Revolution and the Cost of Leaving (Cambridge University Press, 2025) draws on extensive fieldwork with exiled Syrian intellectuals. She has published in journals such as Qualitative Inquiry, Theory and Society, Cultural Sociology, and the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, and has contributed chapters to edited volumes on intellectuals, cancel culture, and arts-based methods in higher education. She has also co-authored reports on Syrian higher education for organisations including the British Council and the Council for At-Risk Academics.

Before coming to Cambridge, Al Azmeh held leadership roles in higher education, including Director of External Relations and Assistant Vice President for Strategic Communications and Outreach at Qatar University, and lectured in the medical humanities. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge in 2021, with a dissertation on exiled Syrian intellectuals and the revolution of 2011.

Al Azmeh began her career in music, having studied piano performance on a full scholarship at Queens University of Charlotte (USA) and composition at the Lebanese National Higher Conservatory of Music. She later lectured in music theory and harmony at the Higher Institute of Music in Damascus, where her textbook on diatonic harmony was published by the Syrian Ministry of Culture.

Research

Research interests

  • Exile and Displacement
  • Intellectual Life
  • Political Sociology of Knowledge Production
  • Memory and Memorialisation
  • Cultural Trauma
  • Authorship
  • Cancel Culture
  • Revolutionary Movements
  • Counterrevolutions
  • Political Subjectiveness
  • Sociology of Higher Education
  • Institutional Change
  • Comparative and Transnational Perspectives
  • Qualitative and Mixed Methods
  • Digital and Narrative Approaches
  • Cultural sociology
  • Meaning-Making
  • Symbolic Power

Research Groups and Affiliations

Postdoctoral Research Associate at Christ's College, University of Cambridge (2021-2022)

Research Associate, Centre of Governance and Human Rights, University of Cambridge

Grants and Projects

  • Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Research Networking Grant: Syrian Academics and Researchers’ Network (SARN) UK, Co-PI with Dr Feras Alkabani, University of Sussex (total value: £24,794), 2024–2025.
  • British Association for International and Comparative Education (BAICE), Building Research Capacity and Networks Grant: SARN Inaugural Conference, Joint Applicant (total value: £5,000), 2022.
  • Arab Council of the Social Sciences (ACSS) with funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Early Career Fellowship (8th cycle): Dissertation to Monograph: The Cost of Leaving – Syrian Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Revolution under Globalisation, PI (total value: $36,000), 2021–2022.

 

Publications

Books

  • Al Azmeh, Zeina. Syrian Intellectuals in Exile: The Dilemmas of Revolution and the Cost of Leaving. Cambridge University Press, in print.

Journal Articles

  • Al Azmeh, Zeina. Forthcoming. Persecution Capital: Legitimacy, Trauma, and Political Authority. Cultural Sociology
  • Al Azmeh, Zeina. 2025. The Limits of Dialogue: Affective Constraints and Situational Intellectualism. Dialogues in Sociology, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/29768667251359099
  • Al Azmeh, Zeina, and Patrick Baert. 2024. ‘Trauma Work’ as Hindrance to Political Praxis During Democratisation Movements. Theory and Society 53: 395–423. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-023-09540-5
  • Dillabough, Jo-Anne, and Zeina Al Azmeh. 2024. Thinking Beyond Victim and Perpetrator: Working in the Grey Zone of the Modern Academy: The Paradoxical Problem Spaces of the Post-Colonial Scholar in Exile. Qualitative Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004241245701         
  • Al Azmeh, Zeina, and Jo-Anne Dillabough. 2024. Authorial Power, Authoritarianism, and Exiled Intellectuals: Syria and Turkey. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 37: 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-023-09455-0
  • Al Azmeh, Zeina. 2022. The Right to Meaning: A Syrian Case Study. Cultural Sociology 16(3): 402–422. https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755211052361
  • Al Azmeh, Zeina, Jo-Anne Dillabough, Olena Fimyar, Colleen McLaughlin, et al. 2021. Cultural Trauma and the Politics of Access to Higher Education in Syria. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 42(4): 528–543. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2020.1715922
  • McLaughlin, Colleen, Jo-Anne Dillabough, Olena Fimyar, Zeina Al Azmeh, et al. 2020. Testimonies of Syrian Academic Displacement Post-2011: Time, Place and the Agentic Self. International Journal of Educational Research Open. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedro.2020.100003
  • Dillabough, Jo-Anne, Olena Fimyar, Colleen McLaughlin, Zeina Al Azmeh, et al. 2018. Conflict, Insecurity and the Political Economies of Higher Education: The Case of Syria Post-2011. International Journal of Comparative Education and Development 20(3/4): 176–196. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCED-07-2018-0015
  • Al Azmeh, Zeina. 2014. Nomadic Feminism: Four Lines of Flight. European Scientific Journal 10. https://test.eujournal.org/index.php/esj/article/view/3698

Book Chapters

  • Al Azmeh, Zeina, and Patrick Baert. 2025. Stop the Performance! Intellectuals in the Context of ‘Cancel Culture’. In Dramatic Intellectuals, edited by Javier Pérez-Jara and Nicolás Rudas. Palgrave Cultural Sociology Series. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-89909-6
  • Al Azmeh, Zeina. 2023. Exilic Narrations: From a Politics of Being Perceived to a Politics of Perceiving. In Silence, Voice and the In-Between: Exploring a World in Flux, edited by J. Parpart and A. Khalid. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003349945
  • Al Azmeh, Zeina, and X. Du. 2018. Arts and Medicine: Connecting the Arts and Humanities to Professional Education. In Arts-Based Methods and Organizational Learning, edited by T. Chemi and X. Du, 213–240. Palgrave Macmillan Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63808-9_10

Reports

Other Publications

Teaching and supervision

Available to supervise masters students

Teaching Career

  • SOC8: Empire, Revolution, and Exile (paper coordinator)
  • SOC1: Introduction to Sociology: Modern Societies I
  • SOC2: Social Theory
  • MPhil: Political and Economic Sociology

Graduate Supervision

Zeina is available to supervise MPhil students and to co-supervise PhD students in the following areas: contemporary social movements, sociology of intellectuals, sociology of migration, cultural sociology.

 

Awards

  • Centenary Research Fellowship, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge (2021–2024)
  • Early Career Fellowship, Arab Council of the Social Sciences (2021–2022)