Jan Claudius Völkel

AGYA’s multidisciplinary environment has offered me unique insights, opportunities for involvement and access to networks that have tremendously enriched my academic engagement with the Arab world.

As an AGYA member from 2015 to 2020, I was involved in a number of projects with the Working Group ‘Transformation’. Particular highlights included conferences on ‘Populism in Europe and the Middle East’ (Leipzig, 2016) and ‘Reconciliation in Post-Conflict Countries: Lessons from Bosnia-Herzegovina’ (Sarajevo and Srebrenica, 2018), as well as a study trip to the European Union in Brussels (2018). During my AGYA tenure, I contributed to the edited volume ‘Academia in Transformation: Scholars facing the Arab Uprisings’ (2018), and am currently co-editing the forthcoming AGYA book ‘Arab Countries and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Impact, Implications, and Future Prospects’ (2021). Within AGYA, I served as the member in charge of the ‘Transformation’ Working Group in 2018 and on the ‘Equity’ Task Force. Upon joining the AGYA Alumni network in late 2020, I was elected to be co-speaker for the year 2021, along with Prof. Henda Mahmoudi.