Research

Oxford | Kings College London | The Alan Turing Institute

Understanding how online harms shape offline harms – and vice versa – is critical to a full & pragmatic understanding of these challenges. When a terrorist group can exploit online tools to spread propaganda, radicalise & recruit foreign fighters, fundraise through cryptocurrencies, construct UAS (drones) with 3D printed components, or use LLMs to assist with attack planning or the development of CBRN weapons – it materially changes and can significantly enhance their battlefield performance in the real world. Conversely, the offline behaviours, practices, locations, ideologies, and tactics of armed groups also shape which online tools they will use & how they are likely to deploy them. When we only consider the online – or the offline – we are liable to miss half of the picture. Doing purely online research is usually cheaper & easier, and many researchers flock to it, but OSINT and statistical work behind a keyboard are often liable to be deeply disconnected from the communities, people, and outcomes observed on the ground – making

for shoddy, and sometimes dangerous, causal inference and policy recommendations. Many practitioners who have spent years on the ground in security, intelligence, and development roles are shocked to see how disconnected this purely online research ('keyboard work' as one colleague described it) is from the realities they see every day working with local communities & actors in. While it is usually much harder and more costly to do fieldwork on-the-ground, it is well worth it if accurate and reliable research is needed, particular instances where this research can affect the lives and safety of others. However, if we only do fine-grained empirical research, we are also liable to underutilise the rich empirical data collected. In some cases, this can mean missing the upstream factors that shape the downstream outcomes observed, or overlooking parallel phenomena in other contexts, much the same way that even the best empirical data in the world needs a coherent theoretical framework to unlock its meaning & generalisability. As such, this is a call for greater embrace of mixed methods and interdisciplinary work that is needed to address some of the most complex & intractable questions we face.

Online Research

Emerging Technologies & Security Threats
AI Safety/AI Security & Misuse by Malicious Actors
Enhanced Adversarial Robustness & Online Extremism & Terrorism
Terrorism and Violent Extremist Content (TVEC)
AI-enabled Information Threats & Foreign Influence Campaigns
FIMI, Disinformation, and Medical Misinformation
Classifier Models & Memory Augmented Models, Agentic Tools/Agentic AI
Sycophancy Bias/Ideological Persuasion & General Purpose AI Systems
Red Teaming Methodologies & Benchmarks & Model Evals
Social Media Platforms, Adversarial Evasion Tactics, Fuzzy Matching/Perceptual Matching
Hash-Sharing Databases and Behavioural Signals Sharing (e.g. Lantern)
Ethical Content Moderation, Protection of Free Expression & Human Rights, Privacy Preserving Tools
Minimally Invasive Approaches, Redirect Method, Downranking, Pre-Bunking
Immersive Technologies, World Models, Cyber Security
Drones, UAS, Cryptocurrency Transfers, 3D Printing, Autonomous Weapons
AI Governance, Loss of Control, AI Alignment, Trust & Safety (T&S), AI Assurance
Researcher Safety & Mental Health, OSINT, SOCINT

Geographic Focus: Global Majority; Europe and North America, Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, Sahel

Offline Research

Political Violence and Terrorism
Interstate and Intrastate Conflict, Civil Wars & Insurgencies
Inter-Rebel Competition, Insurgent Fragmentation & Consolidation
Rebel Governance & Borderlands
Revolutionary Political Ideologies and Devoted/Rational Actors
Bedouin & Tribal State Relations in the Syrian, Iraqi, and Jordanian Desert (ٱلْبَدِيَة))
Legacies of Colonial Rule over the greater Levant
Comparative Historical Research
Kharijites & Islamic Millenarian movements
Political Islam, Deobandism, Jihadism Studies
Salafism, Quietist Salafism, Sufism
Micro-Dynamics of Conflict, Jihadist Rebels in Civil Conflict
Counterterrorism and Extremism
Fieldwork & Ethnographic Methods
Quantitative Surveys & Survey Design
Computational Social Science
Behavioural Science & Social Psychology
Semi-Structured Elite and Non-Elite Interviews

Geographic Focus: Middle East and North Africa, Sahel, Central Asia

With a background in peace and conflict studies, conducting on-the-ground fieldwork in the Middle East and North Africa, my research is driven by the recognition that what occurs online can have a significant impact on offline outcomes, and vice versa. Only examining the online or offline dimensions of political violence and contentious politics can leave significant gaps in our understanding of how conflict onset, processes, and outcomes. The existing divisions between online and offline investigations of terrorism and violent extremism are striking, but it limits the explanatory power we can bring to bear on this complex phenomenon. Monitoring jihadist groups or far-right extremists online may be a first step for many researchers, but collecting fine-grained data in the real world is essential to understand the fuller picture and validate hypotheses. While online research is more accessible for new researchers to get started with, we often need to understand on-the-ground conflict dynamics to develop comprehensive explanations of how terrorist groups and violent extremists organise, recruit, and fight.

My work seeks to bridge this gap by collecting fine-grained data both from detailed fieldwork (including subnational surveys, psychosocial measures, and elite/non-elite interviews with combatants, officials, and civilians) alongside primary source documents, including online extremist propaganda, government records, and local media reporting to reconstruct complex conflict processes from multiple sources. Using process tracing and leveraging theoretical models from political science, sociology, and development studies to validate these theories we can gain new insights into the micro-dynamics of conflict and extremism.

OxGenAI-2025-Speaker-Photo-Broderick-McDonald-LE-med-crop.jpeg

My research examines political violence, conflict, and terrorism as they occur both on-the-ground (offline) and in digital spaces (online). To account for both of these dimensions, my work is organised below in two categories: online and offline

Offline Research Projects

Conflict, Extremism, & Political Violence

Inter-Rebel Competition & Consolidation

Syria, Civil War, Jihadist Groups, Extremism

Why do some terrorist groups succeed while others fail? What makes one jihadist group or armed actor emerge as the largest rebel group in a conflict? Utilising a mixed-methods approach, my research examines how Jihadist-Salafist rebel groups compete and consolidate their control over rival insurgent groups and civil society actors during multi-party civil wars. The majority of research on conflict and extremism considers how rebel groups fight against governments, but little analysis has considered how rebel groups fight and compete with each other. This is form of intra-rebel conflict often accounts for more than half of the conflict events within civil wars and is essential to understanding conflict dynamics. Where the academic literature has considered inter-rebel conflict, it is often too narrowly focussed on fighting, ignoring a much broader typology of inter-rebel interactions which includes alliance-formation, poaching, bargaining, cooperating, and economic

coordination. While nationalist rebels have received some attention within peace and conflict studies, the consolidation practices of Jihadist-Salafist groups remain almost entirely unstudied, despite the presense of such groups in more than 50% of active conflicts around the world. My research fills some of these gaps in our understanding of inter-rebel conflict by examining the sources of inter-rebel competition and consolidation within the Syrian Civil War. The Syrian Conflict, which began with hundreds of rival rebel groups have gradually narrowed to include only a few major factions, with the role of the largest cohesive groups being occupied by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). This research seeks to examine groups such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Al-Nusra / HTS), Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIL / ISIS), Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM), and the Afghan Taliban (AT). As part of this project, multiple factors and mechanisms, including outbidding, rebel governance, media, and foreign fighters are examined in relation to rebel consolidation.

History, Evolution, & Future of Salafi-Jihadism

Salafism & Jihadism Studies

Much of my research has been particularly interested in the history and evolution of contemporary Salafi-Jihadism, or simply Jihadism, though I naturally recognise and acknowledge the problems and limitations of any term or label used here. Briefly, Jihadism risks conflating personal struggle, violent or militant Islamism risks conflation with the non-violent religion of Islam, and while Salafi-Jihadism is more accurate but is still sometimes criticised as risking conflation with non-violent, quietest Salafis. across the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, the Sahel, and increasingly, sub-Saharan Africa. I am interested in both the intellectual underpinnings of the contemporary Islamist, Salafist, and Salafi-Jihadist movements from Ibn Taymiyya to Said Qutb to Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. Similarly, though adjacent, I am interested in reading and responding to the ideas put forth by prominent Jihadist Strategists from the 1980s to 2000s, and even into the 2020s, including Abdullah Azzam, Usama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Sayf al-Adl. and finally, Abu Mohammed al-Golani. The last of these may prove to be the most consequential, both in developing a new model of militant Islamism that is more pragmatic and successful -- and which may in fact represent the end of Salafi-Jihadism as we know it.

Escaping the Jihadist Paradox: The HTS Model

The HTS model developed by Abu Mohammed al-Golani (known now as Ahmad al-Sharaa) evolved gradually but significantly, and today it does not represent the global jihadism that it started out as under Jabhat al-Nusra. Instead, it developed into a much more pragmatic and popular form of political Islamism, which is capable of escaping the Jihadist Paradox and creating lasting political change. According to the Jihadist Paradox, jihadists typically form 'robust insurgencies' but they have been unable to translate this battlefield strength into lasting political victories, much like the Marxist Paradox of the Cold War. Under al-Golan and later Sharaa, HTS downshifted away from global jihadism and created something new and much more successful if this is measured by it ability to create more lasting political change than any Jihadist group in the world today. However, this new form still carries significant risks, including authoritarian and exclusionary tendencies that make it a far cry from a moderate, inclusive, and democratic form of governance. Nevertheless, it marks a significant downshift from Jabhat al-Nusra, demonstrated by actions - not just words - repeated over nearly a decade. Lest anyone doubt how far it has come, its government officials have been welcomed to the United Nations, Davos, and the White House since they marched into Damascus and ousted the tyrannical Assad regime. In truth, the change from al-Golani to al-Sharaa, or the change from Jabhat al-Nusra to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) was less of a 'road to Damascus moment' (intended), and more of a gradual evolution. Indeed, the new model developed by HTS was forged in the highly-competitive rebel landscape seen in Syria, the broader Levant (Bilad al-Sham), and Iraq between 2003 and 2025. During this period, hundreds of rebel groups of all possible ideological persuasions and variations were active, providing a laboratory of sorts for trial & error, movement-level learning, and ample incentives to differentiate. This environment led al-Golani to reflect on and learn from the mistakes of his peers during his incarceration by American forces in Iraq. There was also a parallel mechanism driving his pragmatism. At the same time, Golani would age from a young man just beyond his teenage years all the way into middle age.

Salafi-Jihadism as a Comparative Revolutionary Movement

Building on previous theorisation about revolutionary ideologies and revolutionary rebels, I argue and build on other scholars who have suggested that we can gain significant analytical leverage on Salafi-Jihadist movements today when we compare them with other forms of revolutionary ideologies and movements, including Marxism-Leninism, Ethno-Supremacy, Christian-Nationalism, Democratic-Confederalism, and even the Anarchist terrorist groups active during the early 20th century. In this light, leading scholars have framed Salafi-Jihadism as simply the latest wave or generation of revolutionary struggle. Others have noted that Salafi-Jihadism took root in the Middle East and North Africa shortly after the collapse of Marxism-Leninism or Revolutionary Socialism, both in the MENA region and worldwide as the Soviet Union collapsed and the ideology had long since stopped being a plausible vehicle for social change. As such it is possible to compare the tactics, strategies, and weaknesses of today's Salafi-Jihadist rebels and terrorist groups with their predecessors, the Marxist-Leninist rebels and terrorist groups of the Cold War. provide a useful comparative foil. Doing so is not merely an academic exercise to place Salafi-Jihadists within a coherent historical framework. It goes far beyond that in helping us to right-size the threat faced and ensure we are not over-allocating resources away from peer and near-peer rivals in Asia and elsewhere.

Behavioural Science in Conflict & Terrorism

Behavioural Science & Social Pyschology

My research team at Kings College's London's XCEPT Research Programme applies novel methodologies from behavioural science & social psychology through on-the-ground fieldwork in Syria & Iraq with foreign terrorist fighters and armed combatants. This research is both quantitative and qualitative in nature, collecting hundreds of detailed psychometric surveys & long-form semi-structured interviews with fighters from both designated terrorist groups, and non-designated insurgents. We employ a mixed methods approach to data collection and analysis by combining large-N psychological surveys which include both psychometric measures and demographic information about the sample group, alongside ethnographic fieldwork methods including long-from semi-structured interviews with researchers or research assistants who embedded on the ground. We leverage computation social science methods to analyse all of this data and comparatively analyse it alongside comparable large-N datasets and interviews that members of our research team have previously collected from surveys and fieldwork in Columbia, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkiye. This work is deeply interdisciplinary & novel, directly blending behavioural science with political science to not only formulate abstract theories but directly explain outcomes observed on-the-ground in fast moving conflicts. We have also translated the quantitative and theoretical insights from this data into specific and practical policy recommendations that we have delivered in writing and policy documents to the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO), Home Office (HO), Cabinet Office (CO), Ministry of Defense (MoD), Wilton Park (FCDO), Chenomics International, and the Government of Office for Science. External informal engagaments have provided advise to

Our research explains why individuals join armed groups, and what can cause them to leave. In greater detail, we explain why some individuals participate in political violence & armed conflict, while other individuals within the same demographic group do not. We also explain why some combatants disengage from fighting, through past rounds of data collection which have interviewed & surveyed military officers who defected from their posts, and well as rebel fighters who have left their previous armed group and demobilised. In addition, we consider the drivers of fragmentation and consolidation amongst armed groups. In doing so we explain not only why some individuals leave their particular armed groups, but also why some of these also leave the battlefield entirely, and in some cases, renounce political violence all together. To make sense of our data and enhance its generalizabilty across contexts, we leverage existing theoretical frameworks from behavioural science & political science. Specifically, we utilize past research conducted on Revolutionary Rebels and Revolutionary Ideologies, and their closest counterparts within the behavioural science literature, including Devoted Actors and Rational Actors. We have also leveraged past research on moral injury, political ideologies, micro-dynamics of conflict, justice sensitivity, and complex trauma to explain phenomena observed on the ground. We have delivered practical & actionable policy recommendations to government stakeholders that have helped shape & improve our foreign policy, international development, and disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR) efforts in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon. Through this interdisciplinary & mixed methods approach, we explain what drives individuals to take up arms, die for their cause, and in some cases, join terrorist groups that are proscribed by the UN, US, UK, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, NZ, and Singapore.

Online Research Projects

Preventing AI Misuse by Terrorist Actors, Organized Crime, & Foreign Adversaries

AI Safety & National Security Threats

My research on AI security within The Alan Turing Institute's Centre for Emerging Technology & Security (CETaS) and Oxford's Emerging Threats Group explores the potential of open-source and closed source AI systems to enable terrorist attack planning, propaganda creation, procuring and developing CBRN Threats, recruitment and radicalisation. I have also examined broader threats from criminal actors and state-level threats, including coordinated infrastructure attacks, automated bot networks, information threats during crises and security events, personalised phishing attacks at scale, Much of my work on these issues focuses on improving the adversarial robustness of model evaluations, benchmarks and red teaming with SME to ensure that our evaluations reflect the real-world conditions they will be stress-tested in after release. Lastly, my most recent work has also examined model failure and risks from unsecured agents & agentic tools, hallucinations & false information, memory augmented models, para-social bonding, LLM sycophancy bias and its impact on ideological confirmation (particularly amongst youth attackers and Nihilistic extremists), and well as loss of control and escalation within military AI. While we must study these threats first, I am also interested in new & novel technical solutions which can capture the positive side of dual-use technologies like AI. These can include automated fact-checking & personalised delivery, enhanced hash-sharing and behavioural signals sharing, as well as proactive safeguarding around security events, riots, elections, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, interstate and intrastate conflicts.

Beyond this AI Safety work, I study less-invasive approaches to content moderation which preserve human rights such as freedom of expression, while avoiding the undue and unnecessary amplification of false, borderline, and divisive content on a voluntary basis (these include methods such as warning labels, community notes, automated fact-checking, down-ranking, and the redirect method) The approaches I am most interested in are those which preserve freedom of speech, not freedom of reach. In addition this this and my previous work on AI Safety and societal resilience, I am interested in media literacy, education, and informational inoculation methodologies. commercially-available targeted advertising technologies to address online extremism and disinformation. In particular it is focussed on how to best identify individual users who are interested in extremist content or disinformation and offer a different and more reliable source of information. While much of the existing research understandingly focusses on explaining how and why extremist groups exploit online harms, much less has considered the positive interventions that online tools can offer in countering extremism. The technology itself remains neutral whiles its applications determine the net impact. Redirect methods offer compelling and targeted approaches to tailor our message to reach users who are vulnerable to extremism, but there is still limited data and analysis on the best practices and long-term impact of this methodology. The primary research focus of this project centres on users who are only beginning to explore extremist content as opposed to long-term consumers of this content and therefore less likely to be responsive to online treatments. While click-through rates remain relatively low when compared with commercial advertising, even low engagement can lead to lower risks of violent extremism. Future research in this field will centre on the role of empathy, humour, and psychology in developing redirect tools that meet users where they are and engage them with social support networks beyond simply counter-messaging.

Terrorist & Violent Extremist Content (TVEC), Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference (FIMI), Scams & Organized Crime

Preventing Online Harms on Social Media

My research with the Global Network on Extremism & Technology (GNET), the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), and my work at the Oxford Advisory Group with projects on social media companies, industry associations, startups, and governmental agencies, seeks to counter terrorist & extremist actors (including Jihadist, Far-Right, and Nihilistic extremist groups) exploit new online platforms and AI systems to recruit, organise, and spread propaganda which results in offline harms. This work has also expanded to include disinformation, foreign influence campaigns, and preventing online scams, phishing attacks, and novel cybersecurity threats. My current research examines how these extremist groups increasingly use encrypted social media platforms (Rocket.Chat, Telegram, TamTam Messenger Signal) to communicate privately, and seeks to measure the response and regulatory policies of these technology firms. While the online eco-system has become a lot more challenging for extremist actors over the past 10 years, there remain significant gaps in online security which allow these actors to keep leveraging major platforms as well as alternative sites. This research with the Oxford Disinformation & Extremism Lab (OxDEL) takes advantage of the large data sets publicly available to generate insights into the views of individual extremists and broader extremists groups surrounding major debates playing out in the public discourse (stretching from pandemics to elections to military interventions). Lastly, my research addresses the constantly evolving methods and loopholes employed by extremists to use evade detection and community standards on major social media platforms. The methods evading automated moderation include leetspeak, broken text posting, image obscuration, fuzzy matching, and secondary indicators to reduce false positives and identify extremist content more accurately at scale.

About

Broderick McDonald is an academic researcher at Oxford University, The Alan Turing Institute, and Kings College London with a decade of experience across government, academia, and civil society. His research focuses on countering global security threats from terrorism, extremism, and disinformation across ideologies and contexts. Broderick's writing and commentary has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Globe and Mail amongst others. Alongside his research, Broderick provides expert analysis for a range of international news broadcasters including ABC News, BBC News, BBC America, CBC News, PBS, Good Morning America, France24, and Al Jazeera News.

Broderick McDonald is a Research Fellow at Kings College London's XCEPT Research Programme, a Research Associate at the Oxford Emerging Threats Group, and a Visiting Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute's Centre for Emerging Technology & Security (CETaS). Prior to this, he served as an Advisor in Parliament and as a researcher with the All Party Parliamentary Group for Genocide Prevention. Previously, he was a Fellow with the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and the Royal Society of the Arts. He previously lived in the Middle East and conducted extensive interviews with armed combatants and foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs) and combatants from ISIS, HTS, and other armed groups. Broderick has conducted fieldwork across the Middle East and Central Asia, including Jordan, Lebanon, Türkiye, Uzbekistan and organised Large-N quantitative and qualitative research projects. His research has been funded by the University of Oxford, the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), UK International Development, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Kings College London, and the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). He currently serves on the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT)'s Independent Advisory Committee, the Aspen Institute UK's RLF Advisory Board, and the VOX-Pol Leadership Team. Alongside his research, Broderick has advised government departments, NGOs, law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, international prosecutors, parliamentarians, AI Security Institutes, frontier AI labs, and social media companies on security threats and emerging technologies

Broderick McDonald's research focuses on countering global security threats from terrorism, extremism, and disinformation. Over the past decade, his work has covered both the online and offline aspects of these international security challenges using quantitative and qualitative methods ranging from computational social science, to behavioural science, and ethnographic fieldwork

Recent Publications

Winning the Deployment Race

The Stimson Center (Washington DC)

Broderick McDonald, Lisa Klaassen

Access: https://www.stimson.org/2026/america-is-running-the-wrong-ai-race/

America Is Running the Wrong AI Race

The National Interest

Lisa Klaassen, Broderick McDonald

Access: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/america-is-running-the-wrong-ai-race

Middle Powers Must Win the AI Deployment Race

The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)

Broderick McDonald, Connor Attridge, Alexandra MacEachern

Access: https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/middle-powers-must-win-ai-deployment-race

Historical Research Interests

These reflect much broader historical, archeological, and archival interests developed as general intellectual interests over the past two decades. They tend to cluster around topics related to the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia in most cases, but they span from Seleucid to Ummayyad to Ottoman and French Mandate periods. Despite being interesting discussion topics, many of them are largely if not entirely disconnected from my direct academic work. They are included here only as a broader list of questions and issues in case they are of interest to other researchers who have read about different aspects of them. I will decline long conversations about them unless it is over a formal dinner or sitting in the King's Arms in Oxford.

The emergence of contemporary Salafism and Quietist Salafism
The emergence of Wahabbism and Deobandism
Salafi-Jihadism ('Jihadism') and armed Islamist insurgencies
The rise and decline of Pan-Arabism, Arab Socialism, and Baathism
The rise of Jihadist governance in the Sahal and West Africa
Twelver Shi'iism, Shia Islamism in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria
Isma'ilism, Fatimid Caliphate, Nizari Ismaili State at Masyaf (Syria)
Sufism and the Bektashi and Khalwati orders in particular
Statehood & Gender in Democratic Confederalism, Abdullah Ocalan, Rojava
Kurdish armed groups including the YPJ/YPG, SDF, and Peshmerga forces
Historical understandings of statehood in Bilad al-Sham and greater Levant
Byzantine, Ottoman, and Kemalist History and Architecture
Islamist or Jihadist thinkers, strategists, and political actors: Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, Zawahiri, Saif al-Adel, Abu Bakr Naji, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Ahmad al-Sharaa (Abu Mohammed al-Jolani), Ibn Taymiyyah, Abul A’la Maududi
Ethno-religious minorities in the Levant and Turkiye, including Alawite, Alevi, Druze, Kurdish, Yezedi, Syro-Uyghur, Zoroastrian, Jewish, Roma, and Circassian communities

Manuscripts & Archives

The Herculaneum Papyri (Vesuvius Challenge)
The Newton Papers (Cambridge University Library)
The Keynes Papers (Department of Economics/Keynes Library, Kings College Cambridge)
The Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection (Cambridge University Library)
The Qumran Manuscripts (Jordan/Israel/France/Private collectors)
Oxyrhynchus Papyri (The Ashmolean/Bodleian Library Special Collections)
The Leabhar Dearg (Red Book) and Leabhar Dubh (Black Book) (National Museum of Scotland)

Historical Interests and Archaeological Sites

Peleset Archeology in the Philistine Pentapolis confederacy
The al-Mudun al-Mayyita (the so-called 'Forgotten Cities') near Idlib, Syria
Phoenician colonies and trade in the Mediterranean basin and mid-Atlantic
Phoenician and Hellenistic trade, exchange and philosophical diffusion from 320 BCE to 270 BCE
Seleucid Archaeology in the Decapolis (particularly Jerash, Philadelphia, and Umm Qais), Palmyra, and Dura-Europos
Jordan Site Visits: Umayyad Palace, Qasr al-Azraq, Qasr Kharana, Quseir Amra, Krak des Chevaliers, Karak Castle, Ajloun Castle, Shobak Castle, Wadi Faynan, Wadi Rum/Jebel Rum, Wadi al-Hasa, Mamluk Castle (Aqaba Port)
Nabataean Archaeology in Raqmu (Petra), Hegra (Mada'in Salih), Bostra (Bursa), Ghazza (Gaza), Ayla (Aqaba)
Roman Archeology in the South Eastern frontier provinces, including Syria Phoenice (Tyre), Syria Coele (Antioch-on-Orontes), Syria Palaestina & Iudea (Caesarea Maritima), Arabia Petraea (Hegra), Arabia Felix (Farasan Islands), and Aegyptus (Berenice Troglodytica)
Timurid Architecture and competition between the Khanate Of Khiva and the Khanate of Bukhara/Samarkand
Greco-Bactrian settlements and archeology in India, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan
Greco-Bactrian (Ionian) settlements and cross-cultural trade in the Ferghana Valley
Greco-Buddhism and its later influence on Mahayana Buddhism in Central Asia

Modern Political History of the Middle East & North Africa

Legacies of colonial rule over the Levantine political systems and georgraphic borders
The French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon (1923–1946)
The Hanunu Revolt (1919-1921) in Idlib and the Great Syrian Revolt (1925-1927)
The Hashemite States in Transjordan (Abdullah) and Iraq (Faisal I and II), and the Hijaz (Hussein)
The development of Jordanian, Israeli, Qatari, Saudi, Emirati, and Singaporean national identities
British and Hashemite forces in Syria and the Hijaz during WWI
British Administration of Mandatory Palestine & the Balfour Declaration
The History of the Early Yishuv and organized migration from Europe
Armed Groups active in the Early Yishuv and their impact on government policy
Weapons transfer from Czechoslovakia and elsewhere to the new state
The history and social impact of the Hashemite, Al-Thani, Saud, Maktoum and Nahyan families
The history and social impact of the Safra, Sassoon, and Kandoorie families
Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Ashkenazi relations in Israel

Islamic, Jewish, and Christian History

The Development of the Gemara and Babylonian Talmud
The Babylonian Exilarchs, Hasmonean, and Herodian Dynasties
Jewish communities and movements in the Byzantine and later Ottoman empires
Jewish communities and movements in North Africa and Crete in 1st Century CE
Jewish communities in the Mediterranean basin from 2nd Century BCE to 3rd Century CE
The Development of Early Christianity & Post-Temple Judaism in 1st Century CE
Saul as a political and historical figure in shaping the Christianity during Early Church History
Heterodox, revolutionary, and millenarian movements in Roman Palestine from 63 BCE to 135 CE from the Essenes to Galilean movements such as the Simon Bar Kokba Revolt
The Sephardim in Turkiye and the Balkans
Mizrahi and Sephardic music, liturgy, and traditional forms of religious practice
Millenarian movements in Early Modern Europe, such as the Fifth Monarchists, Camisards, Sabbateans, Muggletonians, Taborites
The Second Great Awakening in the United States (1790-1840) and the emergence of new heterodox Christian movements including Latter Day Saints (Mormonism), Seventh-day Adventists (Millerites), Shakers, Disciples of Christ, African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), and rapid growth in Baptists and Methodists organizations
Broader Islamic Thinkers: Al-Walid I, Abd al-Rahman I, Imam Bukhari, Al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Rumi, Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Ibn Khaldun, Shah Waliullah Dehlawi, Muhammad Iqbal, Naguib Mahfouz
Broader Jewish Thinkers: Rabban Gamaliel, Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki), Rambam (Moses Maimonides), Ari (Rabbi Isaac Luria), Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz, The Vilna Gaon (The Gra), Besht (The Baal Shem Tov), Rav Soloveitchik
The emergence of Hasidism and the Baal Shem Tov as a pivotal historical figure
Modern Hasidic Movements, ranging from the legacy of the Labvitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson (RaMaSh) in Crown Heights and Kfar Chabad with its 770 replica, all the way to the Satmar dynasty in Williamsburg and Kiryas Joel
The Lubavitcher Mishichists (Messianists) and the role of the Rebbe as MH"M (Melech HaMoshiach) or King Messiah for adherennts
Bukharian Mizrahi Judaism and the Islamic Madrassas of Bukhara
Rivalry and competition between the Khanate Of Khiva and the Khanate of Bukhara/Samarkand (earlier Timurid Empire)
Soviet Influence (Sovietisation), secularism, and revivalist movements in Central Asia
Hiking and climbing memoirs from Central Asia, the Tian Shen Mountains, and the Himalayas