Iraqi Studies: Past, Present, and Future
February 28-29, 2020

This two-day conference brings together a diverse group of established and emerging scholars working on the history of modern Iraq from the Ottoman period to the present to interrogate Iraqi studies; taking stock of its past, reflecting on the present, and looking towards its future. Studies of modern Iraq have grown qualitatively and quantitatively in recent years. There is now a critical mass of innovative scholars in the US, Europe, and the Middle East who work on Iraq and are exploring new lines of inquiry in a number of different directions. It is common to see Iraq-themed panels and round tables at international conferences. Given this volume of scholarly activity connected to modern Iraq, it is an opportune time to critically reflect on and examine Iraqi studies and its status as a burgeoning sub-field of Middle East Studies.

We aim to discuss research trends, to identify promising new questions and sources, to exchange experiences and insights, and to encourage networking across period-specializations and field boundaries. Each panel will comprise a discussant and several speakers. A keynote panel of senior scholars will critically reflect on the state of Iraqi studies. Confirmed speakers for the Keynote Panel: Dr. Dina Khoury (George Washington University); Dr. Orit Bashkin (University of Chicago); Dr. Eric Davis (Rutgers University); Dr. Sara Pursley (New York University).

Among the questions we seek to explore are: How do we define Iraqi studies? What various methodological approaches inform our study of Iraq? Is Iraqi studies an inherently nationalist endeavor? How do different frameworks support or break with nationalist conventions? How has Iraq’s recent turbulent history affected how scholars access sources to study the country, its geography, its people, its history, its literature, etc.? How can we move past the sectarian and ethnic narratives of understanding the Iraqi past and present?

Organisers:
Zeinab Azarbadegan (Columbia University)
Amnah Almukhtar (Columbia University)
Natasha Pesaran (Columbia University)

Sponsors:
Department of History
Center for International History
Center for the Study of Muslim Societies
Seminar on Ottoman and Turkish Studies
Department of Art History and Archaeology
Middle East Institute (MEI)
Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies
The Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP)

In order to attend and to be added to our mailing list for updates related to the conference, please register here.

Saturday

10:00- 11:30      Panel 5: State Power and Natural Resource Development

Discussant: Natasha Pesaran (Columbia U.)

Dale Stahl (U. of Colorado, Denver), The Third River: Oil, Water, and the Iraqi Development Board

Tiffany Floyd (Columbia U.), “He who saw the Deep:” Petromodernity, Deep Time, and Dia Al-Azzawi as Gilgamesh

Isacar Bolaños (Loyola U., Maryland), The French Connection: Informal Empire, Environmental Management, and Foreign Technocrats in Hamidian Iraq

Şehnaz İyibaş (Koç U., Istanbul), Irrigation in the Late Ottoman Iraq: The Hindiya Barrage 1890-1914

11:30-11:45     Break

11:45-13:15     Panel 6: Formation of Iraqi Identities and Social Classes

Discussant: Orit Bashkin (U. of Chicago)

Hala Fattah (Independent Scholar), The Invisible Iraqis: Georgian, Daghistani and Circassian Families in Early Twentieth Century Iraq

Pelle Valentin Olsen (U. of Chicago), Iraqi Jews and the Production and Consumption of Leisure

Andrew Alger (CUNY), Clinical Behavior: Institutionalized Medicine and Urban Space in Baghdad, 1917 – 1958

Zachary Sheldon (U. of Chicago), The Cosmopolitan National: Development and Crisis in the Iraqi Diaspora

13:15-14:00     Lunch

14:00-15:30     Panel 7: Beyond the Nation: Iraq in Global Perspective

Discussant: Nadje Al-Ali (Brown U.)

Esmat Elhalaby (NYU Abu Dhabi), India in Iraq/Iraq in India

Noga Efrati (Open University of Israel),, Revisiting early women’s activism in Iraq: a transnational perspective

Hilary Falb Kalisman (U. of Colorado, Boulder), Global Iraq: Gender, Education and Travel

Kate Tietzen (Kansas State U.), Iraqis in Russia: The Organizations of Iraqis Outside the Region-Moscow in the 1990s

15:30-15:45     Break

15:45-17:15     Roundtable

New Books in the Arts & Sciences:
Celebrating Recent Work by Rashid Khalidi

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
By: Rashid Khalidi

In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.

Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

About the Author:

Rashid Khalidi is the author of Palestinian Identity, Brokers of Deceit, and The Iron Cage, among others. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and many other journals. He is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York and editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Speakers:

Rosie Bsheer is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University. She has been published in journals including International Journal of Middle East Studiesand Past and Present, and has co-edited The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of An Old Order? with Bassam Haddad and Ziad Abu-Rish. She is currently writing a book provisionally titled Archive Wars: Spectacle, Speculation, and the Politics of History in Saudi Arabia.

Manan Ahmed is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. He is the author of A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and the Origins of Islam in South Asia, and the forthcoming book The Loss of Hindustan: Tarikh-i Firishta and the Work of History, among other publications. 

Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination; and, most recently, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, among other published works. 

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College and at Columbia University. She is the author of two books, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology, among other published works. Her forthcoming book is provisionally titled Soldier Trauma, The Obligations of Citizenship, and the Forever Wars.

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Visit conference website here

 

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During the nineteenth century, Bombay was India’s leading steam-shipping port and held the unique position of sending people, capital, cultural practices, and new ideas about urbanism and working-class culture across the ocean. However, since the 1960s, Bombay has become increasingly decentered and has given way to city-states such as Singapore and Hong Kong, which are organized around new capital flows such as real estate speculation and container shipping. We seek to understand this shift by examining the maritime and historical roots of contemporary urban Bombay and the endurance of these roots during the remaking of built and social formations in other Indian Ocean cities. Little is known about the endurance of these roots and exchanges that may underpin the twenty-first century Asian city because scholarship on colonial and post-colonial urbanism has largely overlooked these cities’ maritime pasts. This conference intervenes in and connects the fields of Urban and Indian Ocean Studies by studying Bombay comparatively with other Indian Ocean cities. Our conference takes the nodal centrality of Bombay as a place from which to explore the specificity, stakes, and consequences of what might be termed “Indian Ocean urbanisms.” Thus, we ask: how did Indian Ocean cities constitute each other? What ocean-wide mental and material structures allowed urban forms and practices to move between port cities, and how did they persist and change with colonial and post-colonial governance? How does this shared past continue to shape contemporary urbanism and the new Asian regional economy?

There is a long and well-established tradition of addressing the Atlantic World as a connected system, especially through the slave trade and its interconnections across Africa, Europe, and the New World. If studies of the Atlantic have shown enduring material and mental formations of the ocean created by the slave trade and consequent diasporas, Indian Ocean scholarship can reveal enduring social worlds created by long-standing networks of kin and capital. This is the first conference of its kind to highlight Bombay’s importance as a center of movement and commerce across the Indian Ocean and the distinctive spatial orders this produced; to analyze Bombay beyond its colonial status; and to connect emerging work on the Indian Ocean region with scholarship on the Atlantic and Pacific regions. Nine selected presentations will focus on change and continuity in Bombay’s urban life as a result of ongoing relationships with other Indian Ocean cities of Singapore, Yangon, Manama, and Dar es Salaam. The papers showcase new ways of reading Bombay’s urbanism: as shaped by shared itineraries of design aesthetics and planning policy (and the experts behind them); as a configured   organization of environmental and climate knowledge, especially the monsoons; as a site of anticolonial internationalism and alternative to Bandung; and as a built form funded by merchant families spread across the Indian Ocean network. The presentations intervene methodologically by drawing on the methods of urban history, labor history, and science and technology studies to study oceanic networks. However, what is distinctive to this enterprise is its focus on the scale of the urban, the relationship between built form, visual cultures, and social life, and the organization of economic life, which continue to shape the relationship between ocean and city. We take built form to be a materialization of capital flows and an important trace of the social lives of labor and community across the Indian Ocean. We wager that comparison across hierarchies of urban order will allow us to consider the place of Indian Ocean urbanism during this moment of resurgence across East Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.

Funded by ISERP, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the Center for Science and Society, Center for the Study of Social Difference, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the History Department.

Faculty organizer: Anupama P. Rao (Barnard History and MESAAS, Columbia), Amy Chazkel (History, Columbia)

Graduate Student organizers: Laura Yan (History, Columbia), Sohini Chattopadhyay (History, Columbia). 

During the nineteenth century, Bombay was India’s leading steam-shipping port and held the unique position of sending people, capital, cultural practices, and new ideas about urbanism and working-class culture across the ocean. However, since the 1960s, Bombay has become increasingly decentered and has given way to city-states such as Singapore and Hong Kong, which are organized around new capital flows such as real estate speculation and container shipping. We seek to understand this shift by examining the maritime and historical roots of contemporary urban Bombay and the endurance of these roots during the remaking of built and social formations in other Indian Ocean cities. Little is known about the endurance of these roots and exchanges that may underpin the twenty-first century Asian city because scholarship on colonial and post-colonial urbanism has largely overlooked these cities’ maritime pasts. This conference intervenes in and connects the fields of Urban and Indian Ocean Studies by studying Bombay comparatively with other Indian Ocean cities. Our conference takes the nodal centrality of Bombay as a place from which to explore the specificity, stakes, and consequences of what might be termed “Indian Ocean urbanisms.” Thus, we ask: how did Indian Ocean cities constitute each other? What ocean-wide mental and material structures allowed urban forms and practices to move between port cities, and how did they persist and change with colonial and post-colonial governance? How does this shared past continue to shape contemporary urbanism and the new Asian regional economy?

There is a long and well-established tradition of addressing the Atlantic World as a connected system, especially through the slave trade and its interconnections across Africa, Europe, and the New World. If studies of the Atlantic have shown enduring material and mental formations of the ocean created by the slave trade and consequent diasporas, Indian Ocean scholarship can reveal enduring social worlds created by long-standing networks of kin and capital. This is the first conference of its kind to highlight Bombay’s importance as a center of movement and commerce across the Indian Ocean and the distinctive spatial orders this produced; to analyze Bombay beyond its colonial status; and to connect emerging work on the Indian Ocean region with scholarship on the Atlantic and Pacific regions. Nine selected presentations will focus on change and continuity in Bombay’s urban life as a result of ongoing relationships with other Indian Ocean cities of Singapore, Yangon, Manama, and Dar es Salaam. The papers showcase new ways of reading Bombay’s urbanism: as shaped by shared itineraries of design aesthetics and planning policy (and the experts behind them); as a configured   organization of environmental and climate knowledge, especially the monsoons; as a site of anticolonial internationalism and alternative to Bandung; and as a built form funded by merchant families spread across the Indian Ocean network. The presentations intervene methodologically by drawing on the methods of urban history, labor history, and science and technology studies to study oceanic networks. However, what is distinctive to this enterprise is its focus on the scale of the urban, the relationship between built form, visual cultures, and social life, and the organization of economic life, which continue to shape the relationship between ocean and city. We take built form to be a materialization of capital flows and an important trace of the social lives of labor and community across the Indian Ocean. We wager that comparison across hierarchies of urban order will allow us to consider the place of Indian Ocean urbanism during this moment of resurgence across East Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.

Funded by ISERP, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the Center for Science and Society, Center for the Study of Social Difference, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the History Department.

Faculty organizer: Anupama P. Rao (Barnard History and MESAAS, Columbia), Amy Chazkel (History, Columbia)

Graduate Student organizers: Laura Yan (History, Columbia), Sohini Chattopadhyay (History, Columbia). 

Register here