Bostock, Sahar

Sahar Bostock is a historian of science, technology, and the environment in the modern Middle East, specializing in the history of Palestine/Israel. She received her PhD in History from Columbia University and is currently a Postdoctoral Associate with the Program in Agrarian Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. Her research explores how urban planning, transportation networks, and agricultural schemes shaped everyday life in the desert and mediated interactions between Ottoman and British imperial actors; Palestinian Bedouin, fellahin, and urbanites; and Zionist settlers. Her current book project, Desert Developmentalism, examines how infrastructural and agricultural initiatives—and their disintegration and destruction—transformed both material landscapes and colonial politics in Southern Palestine over the century leading to Israeli independence and Palestinian statelessness. Drawing on archival, published, and visual sources in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, and English, alongside interviews with members of Bedouin communities, her work demonstrates how shifting ideas about deserts and desert-dwellers interacted with material infrastructure to reshape the environment, its people, and its imagined futures. Sahar’s doctoral research was supported by the Social Science Research Council and Zeit Stiftung Bucerius.

Sahar’s previous research investigated Palestinian radio listening practices under the British Mandate, as well as listeners’ discourse on the Palestine Broadcasting Service (1936-1948). Her article “Radio Listenership in Palestinian Society: Reshaping Cultural Practices and Political Debate under the British Mandate, 1930–1948” was published in Contemporary Levant. Before moving to the United States, Sahar worked as an Arabic instructor, developed digital materials for teaching Arabic and Hebrew, and promoted the study of spoken Arabic in schools, universities, and private institutions in Israel.