As of October 1st, Manal Daddah has joined the LeidenGlobal team as a Project Assistant. Project Assistants play a vital role at LeidenGlobal, contributing to a wide range of initiatives such as the graduate courses, Leiden City Worldwalks, Current Affairs lectures, and many other activities. Manal introduces herself:
Hi! My name is Manal Daddah, and I am joining LeidenGlobal’s organisational team as a project assistant starting in October 2025.
As a student of the Middle East, Political Science, and Macroeconomics, I have always been fascinated by a wide array of disciplines that aim to understand and explain the workings of the world we live in. Through my personal interests in graphic novels of the Middle East, subaltern literature, poetry, fostering cultural connectivity through dialogue, and “dark history” (the intentionally un(der) exposed past), I aspire to contribute to LeidenGlobal’s mission of opening up the vast amount of knowledge held in the small city of Leiden to a broader public. In doing so, I aim to devote my efforts to the facilitation of increased mutual understanding.
Other interests of mine that I engage in as part of my leisure time are volunteer work with children and students with a refugee background, dancing, crocheting, swimming, and kayaking. Some of these bleed into my academic mission of creating a safer and more inclusive world, through a guide I made for instance on how to create a safer Latin dance space. Besides these points, I believe that my social background, coming from an environment in which I occasionally felt unwanted in the country I grew up in, intrinsically motivates me to contribute to the establishment of social and cultural mutual understanding.
Manal Daddah
October 2025