Magdalen College, University of Oxford

OX1 4AU, Oxford, UK

magd6572[at]ox.ac.uk

@BBFeuerheerd

@brunofeuerheerd.bsky.social

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 the 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.

My work has been published in journals such as Perspectives on Politics and Democratization. My PhD dissertation has been named co-winner of the Juan Linz Best Dissertation Award of the APSA Democracy and Autocracy Section and awarded 2nd place in the German Thesis Award (Körber-Stiftung).