Podcast Episodes

Episode 4: Interview with Heather Hughes

Heather Hughes has a BA in French from Smith College, an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from University of Washington, and an MSIS from the University of Texas. She has worked as a researcher in Turkey, and as a project archivist at the Hoover Archives. She is currently Librarian for Middle East Studies at UCSB (UC Santa Barbara). Heather is also a co-editor for the Hazine blog (http://hazine.info/), a collaborative online repository for all things related to the study of the Middle East, North Africa, and Islamicate Societies. In this interview we chat with Heather about her academic trajectory and how she came to be a Middle East Librarian.

Episode 3: Interview with Nora Barakat

This week we had the opportunity to interview Nora Barakat, currently Assistant Professor of History in the Arab Crossroads Studies Program at NYU Abu Dhabi. In this episode we discuss the challenges and opportunities provided by early career teaching in the Gulf at either the national universities or at the satellite campuses.

As noted on her faculty page ,”Nora Barakat is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. Her research interests focus on the legal, economic, social, and environmental histories of the Ottoman Arab world. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Bedouin Bureaucrats: Property, Law, and Nomads in Ottoman Syria, which examines late nineteenth-century Ottoman modernization projects from the perspective of pastoral nomads. She is also working on a project on the history of credit relations and mortgage in the Ottoman Empire. She has published articles in The Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient and The Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies. ”

Episode 2: Interview with Assef Ashraf

This week we interviewed Assef Ashraf about his experience in the academic job market. Assef is a lecturer in Eastern Islamic Lands and the Persian-speaking world at the University of Cambridge in the UK. Prior to Cambridge he received his B.A. from New York University in 2005, where he received the Rumi-Biruni prize for excellence in Persian Studies. He attained his Ph.D. in History from Yale University and followed that with a Post Doctoral Fellowship at Bryn Mawr College. His academic bio can be found here –https://www.ames.cam.ac.uk/people/dr-assef-ashraf

Assef’s research interests “include the history of the Muslim world and the Middle East from the early modern to the present, comparative empires, travel literature, and the culture and economy of gift giving. His current research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Iran, state-society relations, and the construction of political authority in Qajar Iran.”

He has also helped to edit the newly published book The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere Brill (2019)

Episode 1: Interview with Lauren Banko

Our first Episode is an interview with Yale University Lecturer Lauren Banko (https://history.yale.edu/people/lauren-banko).

“Lauren Banko is a historian of the modern Arab Middle East, with a particular focus on the modern history of Palestine. She received her PhD in Near and Middle East History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, in 2014. Her first monograph was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2016, and is titled The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918-1947 (https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-invention-of-palestinian-citizenship-1918-1947.html). The book historicizes the British legislative creation of colonial citizenship and nationality in mandate Palestine, in parallel with the discursive and practical definitions and understandings of those same statuses as articulated by Palestine’s Arab residents and Arab émigrés. The themes of colonialism, post-war understandings of citizenship, nationality and race, migration, and identity formation are central to the monograph and the book relies heavily on a range of Arabic-language documentary sources and British colonial sources. It also offers a focus on Palestinian emigrants who lost and consequently fought to claim Palstinian citizenship during the mandate era. The book argues that the British crafted citizenship and nationality separately for Arabs as for Jewish Zionists in Palestine in order to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national homeland, but did not take into account the Palestinian Arabs’ own, often formerly-Ottoman understandings of the meaning of citizenship, civic identity, and nationality.”