Welcome! I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. I received my PhD in Political Science from MIT and will join Yale University’s Department of Political Science as an Assistant Professor in July 2025. My research focuses on autocratic and contentious politics, with a focus on the contemporary Middle East and North Africa. I am currently working on a book about the activism and organizations of state workers in the region.

My scholarship combines insights from immersive qualitative research with analysis of self-collected administrative, network, geo-spatial, and survey data. I am a Junior Fellow at AALIMS and am affiliated with GOV/LAB at MIT. My research has been published at Nature Human Behavior and the Journal of Politics and has received honors from the American Political Science Association's sections on Middle East Politics, Democracy and Autocracy, Labor Politics, and Education Politics.

Before beginning my PhD, I worked for several years as a journalist, researcher, and analyst focused on Syria's civil war. I also completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Jordan and graduated with a BA from Hamilton College and an MA from Johns Hopkins SAIS. I regularly make use of my Arabic proficiency in my research. Though my given name is Elizabeth, most people call me “Biff,” a name that translates exceptionally poorly out of English. You can call me whichever name you’d prefer.

You can download my CV here or say hello at elizabeth.parker-magyar at yale.edu.