May Darwich is Associate Professor of International Relations with specialization the Middle East at the University of Birmingham. Her research attempts to bring Middle East cases to debates within International Relations theory with research interests including threat perception and alliance politics, identity and foreign policy, and sectarian politics in the international relations of the Middle East. She is author of Threats and Alliances in the Middle East: Saudi and Syrian Policies in a Turbulent Region (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Her current research also focuses on cross-regional interlinks between the Middle East and Africa through the lens of port infrastructures. I was PI of the Carnegie-funded project Port Infrastructures, International Politics, and Everyday Life: From the Arabian Gulf to the Horn of Africa.

Her research has appeared in internationally renowned journals, namely Foreign Policy Analysis, the Journal of Global Security Studies, Democratization, Mediterranean Politics, Global Discourse and in volumes on the international relations of the Middle East. My research was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, British Academy, Leverhulme, the Arab Political Science Association, and Open Society Foundation.

Prior to the University of Birmingham, she was Assistant Professor at Durham University (2016-2019) and a Research Fellow at GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies (2014-2015). She holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Edinburgh (2015), an MA in International Politics from SciencePo Bordeaux (2010), and a BA in Political Science from Cairo University (2009). 

She served on the Steering Committee on the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS), a collaborative network designed to enhance the broader field of Middle East political science. She serves on the Steering Committee of the APSA MENA Workshops, an annual fellowship opportunity for PhD students and early-career political science faculty from the Arab MENA region. She is member of the Committee on Status of Engagement with the Global South of the International Studies Association. Between 2019-2020, she was Director of the Arab Political Science Network (APSN), a scholarly collaborative initiative that seeks to support, enhance and increase scholars’ research and teaching outputs in the study of political science, and its sub and related fields in the Arab world. She also served as Trustee of the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL), a British Academy Institute aimed at enhancing and supporting research in the Levant (2018- 2020). She is co-editor of the series ‘Identities and Geopolitics in the Middle East’ at Manchester University Press.