About

Welcome to the personal website of Dr Teije Hidde Donker.

I am currently an associate at Hughes Hall and hold a College Teaching Affiliation at St Catherine’s College, at the University of Cambridge. My academic interests stand at the intersections of political sociology, comparative politics, sociology of religion and Middle East area studies. 

My research focuses on the emergence and transformation of social movements in contentious episodes. Specifically, I am interested in how movements emerge as distinct social practices in these contexts. I investigate, for instance, how in the Tunisian transition and Syrian conflict individual biographies of activists and the historical particularities of each case shaped the ways in which political Islam developed as a distinct way of doing protest.

I completed my Msc at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), my Phd at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy), held a three year post-doc at the department of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen (Norway) and held a three year lecturer position at the department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge (UK).

For more information, see my CV and publications. Apart from this website, you can also find me on linkedin, academia.edu and ResearchGate.

And for all those wondering: “Teije” is pronounced as “tire” without the last “r” sound. And my first name is Teije Hidde, my surname is Donker. I am Dutch, the first name is Frysian. All pictures on the website are my own. They were taken in Florence, Istanbul and Tunis.