Michael Battalia is a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He previously received an MA in History and a Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) from Georgetown University, and a BSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

He is preparing a dissertation entitled, “Modern Arab Intellectuals and the Making of Saudi Arabia, 1850–1950." In May 2023, he completed his general exams in the fields of Modern Islam and the Arabian Peninsula (Bernard Haykel), Modern Middle East History (Max Weiss), and Late Ottoman Intellectual History (M. Şükrü Hanioğlu). 

He is currently conducting two years of fieldwork in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) grant from the US Department of Education, and a Hyde Fellowship in the Humanities from the Princeton Graduate School.