Monica Marks

Monica Marks is a scholar of Islamist movements, gender, and politics in the Middle East and North Africa. Her research focuses on broad topics across the region and beyond but especially on the tensions between pluralism and state power in the two countries where she’s lived longest: Tunisia and Turkey. Prior to joining New York University Abu Dhabi, Marks was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She completed her PhD, an ethnographic study of post-2011 Tunisian politics based on over 1,200 in-country interviews, in 2018 at St Antony’s College Oxford. Marks has published her academic work and more public-facing analysis for leading North American and European think tanks and in outlets including Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, for which she also freelanced briefly as a journalist.