We are delighted to announce the winners of the CBRL Undergraduate Dissertation Prize 2025!

We received a number of impressive dissertations this year. Our judging panel, which includes CBRL trustees and members of the Research committee, noted the ambition, originality and excellence of the submissions.

Thanks to all who nominated dissertations for the 2025 Prize.

Winner of the CBRL Undergraduate Dissertation Prize 2025: Levantine Archaeology or History Studies

Elizabeth Eastwood Dewing

University of Leeds

Mapping the Road to Israel: The work of the PEF and the rise of British proto-Christian Zionism

“This dissertation was completed as part of my undergraduate degree in English and History at the University of Leeds. Having spent some time in Jerusalem on my year abroad, I was struck by how the ideas and debates surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict are so regularly tied to particular interpretations of the Bible. My final year at Leeds gave me the opportunity and freedom to explore this, and I set out to utilise my interdisciplinary background to examine the ideas that provided the foundations for the establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine.

With the generous assistance of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), my dissertation used the organisation’s first major project – The Survey of Western Palestine (pub. 1880) – as a lens into the swirling confluences of ideas surrounding British understandings of Palestine in the late nineteenth century. Research in this area tends to focus on the geopolitical and imperial ambitions of Britain in the Middle East, but my dissertation proposed that the biblical perspective and understanding of Palestine that the British would have held in the late nineteenth century should be reinserted into the debate. Notwithstanding its scientific ambitions, the PEF’s work continued to show aspirations of biblical archaeology, a dominance of orientalism, and theologically rooted perceptions of land. The PEF was (and is) an independent organisation, but its work provides a window to a national inability to detach a prehistoric, biblically founded understanding of the Holy Land from the contemporary land and people of Palestine.” Elizabeth Eastwood Dewing

Elizabeth graduated from her undergraduate degree in July and has remained at the University of Leeds to do a Masters of Research in Philosophy, to continue to explore nineteenth century British theological perceptions of Palestine and the rise of proto-Christian Zionism. She aims to continue this into a PhD.

CBRL Undergraduate Dissertation Prize 2025: Contemporary Levantine Studies 2025

Mariam Momen Khalaf Nasr Torres

University of Warwick

A critical investigation into Arab national liberation movements, 1952-1970

“Pan-Arabism was the movement that brought Arab nations together in the fight to liberate Palestine until 1967, as it was the movement that united Egypt with Syria under the United Arab Republic and made Cairo a hub of international solidarity. My research period covered 1952-1970 when the movement saw the height of its contestation and a broad spectrum of unity. Much has been written about the paternalism of leaders of this movement and the diplomatic manoeuvres used internationally to advance their cause. However, studies have failed to address Arab intellectual history in the aftermath of European interventionism as well as local border struggles that set the course for the most radical period in Palestine and Egypt’s modern history.

Critical border theory (CBT) is an emerging interdisciplinary approach that demystifies the border as a mere territorial frontier by analysing the social, political and economic life of the border. Putting CBT in conversation with archival materials and primary sources from Palestinian militants and Egyptian government officials, my dissertation focuses on the border to reveal the intimate role it played in developing the movements’ structures, ideologies, and activities in this critical period. It further illuminates how this colonial institution, that erased Palestine from maps and delimited the contours of Egypt, forged an insider/outsider binary notion of the national citizen, supporting the formation of territorially-confined national labour markets and political institutions that undermined the political direction of the Pan-Arabist movement post-1967. This never-before used approach in Arab studies is instructive for understanding how state nationalism came to take precedence over Pan-Arab unity and highlights understudied moments in modern Arab political history, including the United Arab Republic (1958-1961) and the Arab Nationalists’ Movement strategic alignment with Gamal Abdel Nasser.” Mariam Momen Khalaf Nasr Torres

Mariam graduated in History and Politics from the University of Warwick. After university she worked as a legal research assistant and hopes to qualify as a lawyer with an interest in public law and immigration.