Basileus Zeno 

Researcher

Basileus Zeno is an archaeologist and a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. He holds a BA (2006) in Archaeology and Museum Studies and an M.A. (2011) in Classical and Islamic Archaeology from Damascus University (Syria). Until summer 2012, Basileus was doing his Ph.D. in classical archaeology at Damascus University, but he could not complete his research because of the outbreak of the war. In 2013, he started his M.A. in Political Science at Ohio University, which he completed in 2015. Currently, he is finishing his doctoral dissertation, “Displacement and Identity (re)Formation in Exile: Syrian Asylum-Seekers and Refugees in the United States,” which is a political ethnography of institutional violence and racialized immigration policies in the United States.

Basileus is broadly interested in the areas of Comparative Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, and Identity Politics. His scholarly interests primarily focus on refugees and forced migration, nationalism and sectarianism, colonialism, interpretive methodology, and social movements in the Middle East.