MSM’s Nora Stel awarded prestigious research grant

MSM’s Assistant Professor in Governance and Human Rights, Dr.Nora Stel, has been awarded a Niels Stensen Postdoctoral Fellowship. The fellowship – which aims to encourage talented young academics by supporting ‘outstanding researchers who recently received their PhD to enable them to gain research experience at a top university or institute abroad’ – will allow Nora to take one year of unpaid leave from her position at MSM to do research abroad.

(Photo: Dr. Nora Stel)

Building on her recently defended doctoral dissertation that explored the governance arrangements in informal Palestinian refugee settlements in South Lebanon, Nora will now study similar dynamics of local governance and public authority inside informal Syrian refugee settlements in Lebanon. More information about the project can be found here.

From 1 October 2017 onwards, Nora will join the Refugee Research and Policy in the Arab World research program of the American University of Beirut’s Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs in Lebanon for six months to conduct fieldwork. From 1 April 2018 onwards, she will spend another six months with the Governance and Local Development Program at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden to analyze fieldwork data.

During her research abroad, Nora will regularly post about her findings, impressions and experiences at her MSM weblog.