Status Audio Magazine

Paola Cossermelli Messina is Associate Producer and Post-Production Manager of Status / الوضع  Audio Magazine. As an audio producer and writer born in Brazil, her research interests fall at the intersections between music, culture and gender in the Middle East. She previously worked as a producer and reporter at a radio station in her home country.

Paola has a B.A. in Music and Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.A. in Media Studies from The New School. She was awarded the Middle East Studies Assocation's  Graduate Student Paper Prize for her research on Iranian women musicians. Her written works have been published by Reorient, Mashallah News and O Estado de São Paulo newspaper. She has also been credited as a sound designer and editor in several short narrative and documentary films.

Twitter: @ICanHearPaola

Dr. Basileus Zeno is Karl Loewenstein Fellow and Visiting Lecturer in Political Science at Amherst College. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in September 2021.

His academic publications include articles in Nations and Nationalism; Middle East Law and Governance; and Digest of Middle East Studies.

Basileus is strongly committed to public engagement and applied research. He is a co-editor of the Syria Page at Jadaliyya, and a co-founding member of Security in Context. He also served as a consultant and a researcher at several international organizations such as the Carter Center’s Conflict Resolution Program, The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UN-ESCWA), and the LSE Policy research project "Legitimacy and Citizenship in the Arab World".

Twitter: @BasileusZeno

Publication director of Orient XXI. A specialist in the Near East, he is the author of several books, including De quoi la Palestine est-elle le nom ?, Les Liens qui libèrent, 2010 and et Un chant d’amour. Israël-Palestine, une histoire française, with Hélène Aldeguer, éditions La Découverte, 2017.

Mouin Rabbani is a researcher and analyst specialising in the contemporary Middle East and Co-Editor of Jadaliyya. He has previously served as Principal Political Affairs Officer with the Office of the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Head of Middle East with Crisis Management Initiative/Martti Ahtisaari Centre, Senior Middle East Analyst and Special Advisor on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group, and Project Director with the Association of Netherlands Municipalities. He is Senior Fellow with the Institute for Palestine Studies, Contributing Editor of Middle East Report, Associate Fellow of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and Policy Advisor to Al-Shabaka - The Palestinian Policy Network. A graduate of Tufts University and Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Rabbani has published, presented and commented widely on Middle East issues, including for most major global media.

Naveed Mansoori is a political theorist interested in media and religion with a focus on the intellectual history of modern Iran. He received a PhD in Political Science from UCLA in September 2019. He is currently an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow in the University of Virginia's Religion, Race, and Democracy Lab. His current book project, After Prophecy: Propaganda and the Politics of Truth in Contemporary Iran, examines how literary, aural, cinematic, televisual, and digital media ecologies have emerged as informal pedagogical spaces and as sites of subject-formation. After Prophecy begins with Shi’a intellectuals in the interwar period who popularized a narrative of decline where modernity signaled the culminating end of the prophetic tradition. Shi’a intellectuals saw in propaganda the potential to revive prophecy. The book project tracks the afterlife of this discourse through the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the founding of the Islamic Republic to the 2009 Green Movement. It demonstrates that in moments of crisis concerning national identity, propaganda restored faith in the world and enacted it anew. His writing has appeared in Comparative Islamic Studies, Society & Space, and The Guardian. He has a forthcoming article in Theory & Event on political silence in the two decades leading up to the Islamic Revolution of Iran, a forthcoming contribution to L’esprit and Liberation: An Ali Shari’ati Reader, and is co-editing a handbook on the lived experience of ideology for The Routledge Handbooks on Political Ideologies, Practices and Interpretations book series. From 2017-2019, he held the Elahé Omidyar Mir Djalali Fellowship for Excellence in Persian Studies. Before coming to University of Virginia, Mansoori was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Political Science at San Francisco State University.