Dr Bruno Schmidt-Feuerheerd
Subject: Politics
Academic position: Fellow by Examination in Political and Development Studies
Background
I joined Magdalen as a Fellow by Examination in Political and Development Studies in October 2025. Before that, I completed a PhD in Political Science at Trinity College, Cambridge, an MSc in International Relations of the Middle East and Advanced Arabic from the University of Edinburgh and a BA from Zeppelin University, Germany.
Research
I specialize in the fields of comparative politics and international relations with a focus on the states and societies in the Arab Middle East. Particularly, I am interested in contemporary politics in Saudi Arabia and the other Arab Gulf monarchies.
In my PhD research, I explore how grassroots movements and ideologies shape society and politics in authoritarianism, with a particular focus on questions of political legitimation and nationalist mobilization. I use both qualitative and computational methods to study Arabic-language sources. I evaluate around 100 original interviews with Saudi nationalists and patriots, archival work covering some 30,000 pages of a cultural magazine dating to the 1970s, and social media data that I collected over several months of field research in Saudi Arabia.
Publications
I have published articles in journals such as Perspectives on Politics, Democratization, and the Journal of Arabian Studies. A full list of my publications can be found here. My CV is available on my website.
