Claire BurkhardtUndergraduate Humanities Honors Fellow

Claire Burkhardt is a double major in Middle Eastern & South Asian Studies and Computer Science from Denton, Texas.

She loves bouldering, jigsaw puzzles, and visiting National Parks. Her thesis project traces the development of modern Syrian jihadist political movements through a micro-history of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the interim President of Syria. She examines al-Sharaa’s life story—from a childhood steeped in pan-Arab political thought, through his radicalization and detention as an al-Qaeda fighter in Iraq, to his eventual leadership of a Syrian breakaway jihadist group open to moderation—as a microcosm of the broader political and ideological transformations in Syrian jihadist movements over the past three decades. Together, the two narratives—one of an individual, one of a movement—interrogate the relationship between ideology, politics, extremism, and change.