Zeina Al Azmeh is a Teaching Associate in Political Sociology at the Department of Sociology and a Fellow of Selwyn College. Zeina's research centres on the political sociology of knowledge production, memorialisation in the context of exile, with a particular focus on the contemporary Middle East. She has also worked on themes of memorialisation, migration, revolutions, and the role of intellectuals in contexts of forced displacement.
Al Azmeh is co-founder and, since 2024, co-chair of the board of the Syrian Research and Academic Network (SARN), an organisation that fosters collaboration and support for Syrian scholars and researchers in exile. Her book Syrian Intellectuals in Exile: The Dilemmas of Revolution and the Cost of Leaving (Cambridge University Press, 2025) draws on extensive fieldwork with exiled Syrian intellectuals. She has published in journals such as Qualitative Inquiry, Theory and Society, Cultural Sociology, and the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, and has contributed chapters to edited volumes on intellectuals, cancel culture, and arts-based methods in higher education. She has also co-authored reports on Syrian higher education for organisations including the British Council and the Council for At-Risk Academics.
Before coming to Cambridge, Al Azmeh held leadership roles in higher education, including Director of External Relations and Assistant Vice President for Strategic Communications and Outreach at Qatar University, and lectured in the medical humanities. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge in 2021, with a dissertation on exiled Syrian intellectuals and the revolution of 2011.
Al Azmeh began her career in music, having studied piano performance on a full scholarship at Queens University of Charlotte (USA) and composition at the Lebanese National Higher Conservatory of Music. She later lectured in music theory and harmony at the Higher Institute of Music in Damascus, where her textbook on diatonic harmony was published by the Syrian Ministry of Culture.
