See here for more information.
The CMES Environmental Studies of the Middle East Speaker Series presents
“Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire” with Faisal Husain, Assistant Professor of History, Department of History, College of the Liberal Arts, Penn State
“Rivers of the Sultan” offers a history of the Ottoman Empire’s management of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the early modern period. During the early sixteenth century, a radical political realignment in West Asia placed the reins of the Tigris and Euphrates in the hands of Istanbul. The political unification of the longest rivers in West Asia allowed the Ottoman state to rebalance the natural resource disparity along its eastern frontier. It regularly organized the shipment of grain, metal, and timber from upstream areas of surplus in Anatolia and the Jazira to downstream areas of need in Iraq. This imperial system of waterborne communication, the book argues, created heavily militarized fortresses that anchored the Ottoman presence in Iraq, enabling Istanbul to hold in check foreign and domestic challenges to its authority and to exploit the organic wealth of the Tigris-Euphrates alluvium. From the end of the seventeenth century, the convergence of natural and human disasters transformed the Ottoman Empire’s relationship with its twin rivers. A trend toward provincial autonomy ensued that would localize the Ottoman management of the Tigris and Euphrates and shift its command post from Istanbul to the provinces. By placing a river system at the center of analysis, this book reveals intimate bonds between valley and mountain, water and power in the early modern world.
February 28, 2024
5:00pm to 6:30pm
CMES, Rm 102
38 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
Link: https://cmes.fas.harvard.edu/event/rivers-sultan-tigris-and-euphrates-ottoman-empire
Contact: Liz Flanagan<mailto:[email protected]>
For more information, see here.
Book talk: “Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire”
Date: Wednesday, February 14, 2024, 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Location: CMES, Rm 102, 38 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
The CMES New Works in Middle East Studies series presents
Nora Barakat
Assistant Professor of History, Stanford University
In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman government sought to fill landscapes they legally defined as “empty.” Both land and people were incorporated into territorially bounded grids of administrative law. Bedouin Bureaucrats examines how tent-dwelling, seasonally migrating Bedouin engaged in these processes of Ottoman state transformation on local, imperial, and global scales. As the “tribe” became a category of Ottoman administration, Bedouin in the Syrian interior used this category both to gain political influence and to organize community resistance to maintain control over land.
Narrating the lives of Bedouin individuals involved in Ottoman administration, Nora Elizabeth Barakat brings this population to the center of modern state-making, from their involvement in the pilgrimage administration in the eighteenth century and their performance of land registration and taxation as the Ottoman bureaucracy expanded in the nineteenth, to their eventual rejection of Ottoman attempts to reallocate the “empty land” they inhabited in the twentieth. She places the Syrian interior in a global context of imperial expansion into regions formerly deemed marginal, especially in relation to American and Russian empires. Ultimately, the book illuminates Ottoman state formation attempts within Bedouin communities and the unique trajectory of Bedouin in Syria, who maintained their control over land.
Link: https://cmes.fas.harvard.edu/event/book-talk-bedouin-bureaucrats-mobility-and-property-ottoman-empire
Contact: Liz Flanagan<mailto:[email protected]>
Applications for the CMES Visiting Researcher Program<https://cmes.fas.harvard.edu/vr-program> are due January 15.
CMES is currently accepting applications for unpaid Visiting Researcher positions for the 2024-25 academic year. The main appointment categories are Visiting Scholar, for tenured and tenure-track faculty members on paid leave from other institutions, and Visiting Fellow, typically specialists in the region who work outside of academia.
The support of a CMES-affiliated Faculty Sponsor<https://cmes.fas.harvard.edu/potential-faculty-sponsors> must be arranged prior to completing the application.
Applicants should propose a project to be completed in person at Harvard University that explores one or both of the following themes:
1. Environment/Climate
2. Palestine
A description of application requirements and a link to the portal can be found here<https://cmes.fas.harvard.edu/vr-programs/applications>.
Please contact Jesse Howell ([email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> ) with questions.
The Center for Middle Eastern Studies offers a study excursion to Tunisia in January 2024. This year’s expected dates are January 2 – 19. A predeparture meeting for accepted students will be held during reading week.
This three-week itinerary, based in the city of Tunis, focuses on thehistory and culture of Tunisiaand how they intersect with landscape and urbanism. The field-based programis intended for students whose primary focus is on North African and Middle Eastern Studies. The program is open to graduate students across Harvard’s schools. Undergraduates who are concentrating on fields relatedto North Africa and the Middle East are also eligible to apply, with priority given to students in their junior or senior year. Participants must be enrolled as students at the time the program takes place.
One letter of reference, a transcript/grade report, and a one-page statement of purpose are required. The reference letter should come from a Harvard faculty member, ideally one whose work relates to the MENA region.
Lodging, food, airfare, and meals will be covered by CMES.
In order to comply with Tunisian regulations, all students must be fully vaccinated. Non-US citizens are responsible for arranging any needed visas.
This winter excursion to Tunisia is available to full-time, registered Harvard graduate students and upperclassmen. Preference is given to graduate students with MENA interests.
One letter of recommendation, transcript (unofficial accepted), and personal statement required.
The deadline for applications is November 17, 2023.
For more information, visit here.
Date: Tuesday, November 28, 2023, 5:00pm to 6:30pm; Location: CMES, Rm 102, 38 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
The CMES Disaster Studies Initiative presents Nasser Rabbat Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, MIT
Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. His interests include Islamic architecture, urban history, heritage studies, Arab history, contemporary Islamic art, and post-colonial criticism. He teaches lecture courses on Islamic architecture, the architecture of Cairo, and Islamic architecture and the environment and seminars on Orientalism and colonialism; Issues in Islamic Urbanism; Historiography of Islamic Architecture; Late Antiquity and the foundation of Islamic architecture; Reading Ibn Khaldun; (Re)constructing Memory; Urbicide; and Balancing Globalism and Regionalism in the Arabian Gulf cities.
Professor Rabbat has published more than a hundred scholarly articles and several books on topics ranging from Mamluk architecture to Antique Syria, 19th century Cairo, Orientalism, and urbicide. His most recent books are Writing Egypt: Al-Maqrizi and His Historical Project (2022); ‘Imarat al-Mudun al-Mayyita (The Architecture of the Dead Cities) (2018), and an online book, The Destruction of Cultural Heritage: From Napoléon to ISIS, co-edited with Pamela Karimi (2016). His co-edited book, Construction as Destruction: The Case of Syria will be published in 2023 by AUC Press. He is currently editing a book on the cultural history of Syria to be published by Edinburgh University Press. His next book project is a history of Mamluk Cairo, which is under contract with AUC Press.
For more information, visit here.
Date: Wednesday, November 29, 2023, 6:00pm to 7:30pm; Location: CMES, Rm 102, 38 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
The CMES Environmental Studies of the Middle East Speaker Series is pleased to present Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor of History, Family Dean’s Faculty Fellow in Studies of the Middle East, Vanderbilt University
Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University, is an environmental historian of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East, with interests in agriculture, disease, and science. He teaches courses in the Department of History and as part of the Climate Studies major.
His first book from Cambridge University Press is entitled Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (June 2023). The book offers a new account of the end of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the states of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey grounded in the ecology of the Jazira region, its mobile people, and distinctive locusts. It unearths what borders meant in the lives of not only locusts but also Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees. His next project is an environmental history of the microbe in the late Ottoman Empire. It is concerned at once with new treatments and spatial controls established against ailments like phylloxera, rabies, and rinderpest—which devastated the empire’s grape vines, street dogs, and cattle—as well as the way the language of germs infected the language of politics in the empire’s final years.
Dolbee’s scholarship has appeared in the American Historical Review, Past & Present, and International Journal of Middle East Studies. He has also contributed chapters to edited volumes on the history of food and disease, respectively. He is the editor in chief of Ottoman History Podcast.
Prior to coming to Vanderbilt, Dolbee was a lecturer on History & Literature at Harvard. He previously held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale’s Program in Agrarian Studies, Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center, and Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. Dolbee completed his PhD at New York University in the joint program in History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, and has an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a BA in History and International Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
For more information, visit here.
Date: Wednesday, November 15, 2023, 6:00pm to 7:30pm; Location: CMES, Rm 102, 38 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
The CMES Disaster Studies Initiative is pleased to present Aleksandar Shopov, Visiting Scholar, CMES; Assistant Professor, History, SUNY Binghamton University.
For more details, visit here.
From the CMES website:
Date: Monday, October 23, 2023, 6:00pm to 7:00pm; Location: Wasserstein 1010, Harvard Law School campus
Join the HKS Carr Center for Human Rights Policy for a book talk with author Nathan Thrall as he discusses his latest book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, with Carr Center Senior Fellow, Kenneth Roth.
Milad is five years old and excited for his school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem, but tragedy awaits: his bus is involved in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, rushes to the chaotic site, only to find Milad has already been taken away. Abed sets off on a journey to learn Milad’s fate, navigating a maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must face as a Palestinian.
Interwoven with Abed’s odyssey are the stories of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and pasts unexpectedly converge: a kindergarten teacher and a mechanic who rescue children from the burning bus; an Israeli army commander and a Palestinian official who confront the aftermath at the scene of the crash; a settler paramedic; ultra-Orthodox emergency service workers; and two mothers who each hope to claim one severely injured boy.
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a deeply immersive, stunningly detailed portrait of life in Israel and Palestine, and an illumination of the reality of one of the most contested places on earth.
Nathan Thrall is the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, Guardian, New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was Director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College, New York. He lives in Jerusalem.
Kenneth Roth is the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading international human rights organizations, which operates in more than 90 countries. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch in 1987, Roth served as a federal prosecutor in New York and for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington, DC. A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigations and missions around the world. He has written extensively on a wide range of human rights abuses, devoting special attention to issues of international justice, counterterrorism, the foreign policies of the major powers, and the work of the United Nations.
This event is co-sponsored by the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative (Harvard Divinity School), Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy (Northeastern), Human Rights Program (Harvard Law School), the Program in Law and Society in the Muslim World (Harvard Law School), and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (Harvard University).
For more details, visit here.
