Ashrakat Elshehawy

Ashrakat Elshehawy is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the King Center on Global Development. She earned her PhD at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the Political Economy of Development and Foreign Influence on Domestic Political Economy. Her work evaluates the effects of foreign interventions on domestic politics, local governance, public service provision, and inequalities. Her methodological expertise lies in the field of Computational Social Sciences. She employs and advances methods of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning in a multilingual setting, working with a variety of Western and Arabic languages. Her work incorporates the retrieval and digitalization of historical maps, textual data, and several other sources of archival data. She is passionate about using her computational skills to generate new sources of quantitative data that reveal valuable information that would be otherwise lost in the archives.