Our Team

Irene Fernández Ramos is a Digital Cultural Studies scholar. Her work sits at the intersection of digital cultures, folklore studies, queer and affect theory. Her current book project examines how tradition and folklore function as affective infrastructures for navigating political, ecological and social crisis in contemporary Spanish music. She completed her PhD at SOAS as a La Caixa fellow, where her dissertation Performing Immobility: The Individual-Collective Body and the Representation of Confined Subjectivities in Contemporary Palestinian Theatre examined how restrictions on movement reshape representations of individual and collective identity in theatre and performance. This work informs her ongoing interest in how cultural forms mediate relationships to the past and enable the articulation of collective futures in contexts of crisis. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Intercultural Studies, Jerusalem Quarterly and Commonwealth Essays and Studies, among other journals. Irene has also served as an expert in cultural innovation for the Creative Europe programme (2018-2020) and as a research evaluator for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (2021–present). She worked as a project associate on the UNESCO EU-funded initiative supporting evidence-based policy making to enhance the contribution of creative sectors and industries to sustainable development. She is a member of the Association of Women in Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies (WISPS) and has been part of the Memory Studies Association and the Centre for Palestinian Studies (SOAS), as well as a member of the AHRC-funded research project “Imagining Jerusalem”.

Hanan Natour is a German-Palestinian scholar of Arabic and Comparative Literature, specialising in modern Arabic literature from the Maghreb and Palestine. In the academic years 2025-27, Hanan was an affiliated Fellow of the programme Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME). She obtained her PhD in Arabic and Literary Studies with a thesis on modern Tunisian fiction from Freie Universität Berlin in 2024, co-supervised at the University of Oxford, and completed her first Postdoc at the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective, Freie Universität Berlin (2024-25). Her monograph The Tunisian Novel – Narratives of Liberation, Emancipation and Decoloniality is forthcoming (Edinburgh University Press). Together with Mohamed-Salah Omri (University of Oxford) she co-edits the volume Tunisian Literatures – Multilingual Realities, Genealogies, Testimonies (Bloomsbury, 2026). During her PhD, Hanan served as Research Associate to the ERC-funded Digital Humanities project PalREAD – The Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present where she explored literary networks between the Maghreb, Mashrek and Europe. Her current research builds on this work and explores literary entanglements between Iberia and the Maghreb, adopting a transhistorical approach to narratives of loss and empowerment between Granada and Kairouan.

Abdenour Padillo-Saoud is a scholar in Arabic and Islamic Studies. He holds a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Granada. In 2025, he served as a postdoctoral research assistant on the Digital al-Andalus project, examining video games and history. He was previously a pre-doctoral researcher for five years at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and completed his PhD at the University of Granada. His research focuses on the ways historical narratives are constructed and represented, with particular attention to the Islamic West (Iberian Peninsula and Maghreb). His current work explores the intersection of premodern historiography and contemporary mass media, with a special interest in historical narrative frameworks in modern media and their evolution over time. His publications appear in academic journals and collective volumes, and he actively contributes to knowledge dissemination through conferences, scholarly events, and outreach activities.