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Dr. Dounia Mahlouly

Researcher, Academic Staff, SOAS & Founder, Middle East Research Hub

Dr. Dounia Mahlouly is the Principal Investigator of a 2020 research project on communication for resilience funded by British Council (BC), which explores the role of media capacity initiatives as a tool for communicative resilience in Tunisia and Lebanon. 

Dounia is the Lecturer and Course convenor for SOAS postgraduate courses 'Studies in Global Digital Cultures' and 'International Political Communication'. She also lectures for the MA module "Prejudice, Conspiracy and Misinformation: Understanding Media in a Post-Truth Environment", which she has specifically designed for SOAS' Media Studies curriculum. 

Dounia’s work focuses on the interplay between state and non-state actors' communication strategies in post-2011 North Africa. She completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow, in partnership with the American University in Cairo in 2015. Her PhD research (2015) analysed how social media was incorporated into the campaigning strategy of leading political actors in post-revolutionary Tunisia and Egypt. 

As the Founder of the Middle East Research Hub a non-profit association, she actively promotes the work of young analysts and freelance researchers from across the Middle East and North Africa and carries out fundraising activities to support research capacity programmes in the region. 

Before joining SOAS Centre for Global Media and Communications, Dounia conducted her postdoctoral research at King's College, London and contributed to the European Network of Excellence VOX-Pol. Simultaneously, she worked as a Senior Research Associate for The Open University (OU) on a British Council-funded study exploring perspectives for cultural diplomacy in post-revolutionary Egypt.