Michael completed his PhD in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He also holds an MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge. He has been an LSE Fellow and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS.

He is currently undertaking research on the history and politics of policing in twentieth-century Egypt, with an eye to the ways in which discourses and practices of policing have been implicated in the maintenance and refashioning of social, political and economic order.

Michael has also written on Saudi state-funded Islamic missionary work in the twentieth century, addressing themes of Salafism, Islamic education, religious transnationalism and religious economies. His book on this subject, Circuits of Faith: Migration, Education and the Wahhabi Mission (Stanford University Press, 2016), received an honourable mention in the International Studies Association's Religion and International Relations Book Award. His work has also appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

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Research

• Islam and politics
• Crime, policing and prisons
• Political violence
• History and politics of the modern Middle East (particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia)

Teaching

• The Politics of the Contemporary Middle East
• Islam, Politics and Society
• Rethinking Political Islam
• Research Methods

PhD Supervision

Michael is interested in supervising PhD theses that stand to make an original contribution in any of the following areas:

• Sociology of Islam (including but not limited to Salafism, Islamic education and religious transnationalism)
• Crime, policing and prisons
• Political violence
• History and politics of the modern Middle East (particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia)