Dr Neil Russell
Lecturer in Politics, Programme Leader for BA Social Sciences
Department of Social Sciences
Dr Neil Russell joined GCU in 2021 as Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Social Sciences, having previously taught at Newcastle University and the University of Edinburgh. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and took over as Programme Leader for the BA Social Sciences in 2023.
Neil’s disciplinary background is in comparative politics, with a regional focus on the Middle East and other Muslim-majority contexts. He has an MSc in Politics Research from the University of Oxford and completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh under an ESRC 2+3 studentship, which included intensive Arabic-language training.
His research interests include religion and politics, Islamist political movements, and authoritarian regimes. He is the principal investigator on the British Academy-funded research project, ‘AI Natural Language Processing and Computational Text Analysis of Arabic: Analysing Official State Islamic Sermons’, while his latest article, titled “Reconstituted authoritarianism: Islam, service provision and the state in al-Sisi’s Egypt”, is published in Democratization. Neil is currently working on two book projects: a monograph examining relations between the state and Islamist movements since 2011 in revolutionary Egypt, under contract with I.B. Tauris - Bloomsbury Publishing, and an edited volume on state control over religious institutions in Middle East states.
Neil is Module Leader on the first-year module, Politics 1: Structures and Institutions, the third-year module, International Politics: Structures, Theories, and Issues, and co-module leader on the MSc module, Politics and Practice in Global Justice.