Near and Middle Eastern Studies
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The Early Christianization of Marriage: Sex, Procreation, and Ritual
This dissertation tells the story of how the ritualization of Christian marriage antedated the appearance of episcopal blessings at Christian wedding ceremonies in the fourth century CE. Various forms of the Christianization ... -
Marriage Across the ‘Color’ Spectrum: Making Commitment Palatable in Iran
In the twenty-first century, marriage practices in the Islamic Republic of Iran have evolved rapidly as unfulfilled expectations of intimacy in marriages have caused an increase in divorce rates, and the tendency to postpone ... -
From Crises to Ordinary Precarity: Palestinian Youth as New Practitioners of Humanitarian Governance in Amman, Jordan
Displaced in both 1948 and 1967, Palestinian refugees in the Middle East now number over 5 million and have lived in exile for decades with no sign of a permanent solution. Despite the duration of their displacement, ... -
‘Without a Purpose, Misfortune Will Befall Our Land:’ Discourses of Nation in Late Ottoman Kurdistan
In the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, Kurdish and Assyrian nationalists sought to improve their communities’ situations. This dissertation demonstrates the historical factors that shaped the discourses of these nascent ... -
Precarious Identity, Tenacious Stereotype: The Making of Romani Alterity in Late- and Post-Ottoman Turkey
This dissertation is a study of the generative power of categories and the state practices based upon them. The case of the Roma in the late Ottoman and early Republican contexts illustrates the productive role of definition ... -
Constructions of Jewish Modernity and Marginality in Izmir, 1860-1907
Izmir, an Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean port city, underwent significant changes during the wide-ranging Ottoman reform movement, Tanzimat (1839-1876). By the end of the nineteenth century, the emerging picture was a rapid ... -
Fez & Sherwani: Consumption, Self-fashioning and Ottoman Influence in South Asia, 1826-1911
This dissertation examines how novel forms of ‘South-South’ transnational connection operating through image-print and popular consumption shaped a new ideal and aesthetics of modernizing manliness across a wide global ... -
Negotiating Illegality: Bypassed Minorities’ Access to Infrastructure in Middle Eastern Democracies
What happens when democratic governments distribute infrastructure systems perceived as prerequisites for economic prosperity and modernization, such as systems providing water and electricity, to disadvantage their minority ... -
Middle East Militaries: In and Out of Politics and Economies due to External Threat Perceptions A Dynamic Regional Order Approach to Civil–military Relations: Comparative Cases of Turkey, Egypt, Israel
There are many ways for the military to intervene in politics, whether through a direct governing role or monopolizing the national security apparatus. Another much-debated means for military intervention in politics is ... -
The Legibility of Power and Culture in Ba‘thist Iraq from 1968-1991
From 1968 until 1991, the state led by the Iraqi Ba‘th Party fought a war against groups in Iraq that did not comply with state dictates. Situated in the Third World of postcolonial lineage, Iraq was in a milieu shaped by ... -
Assembling ‘Cosmopolitan’ Pera: An Infrastructural History of Late Ottoman Istanbul
In the nineteenth century, the Pera (Beyoğlu) district of Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, became an internationally recognized center of commerce, finance, culture, art, and recreation, in the context of the ... -
At the Confluence: Participatory Development, State-Society Relations, and Transboundary Water Management in the Kura River Basin
The water sector is part of a larger impetus in environmental policy towards public participation, particularly as water management practices have expanded from purely technocratic approaches to include diverse stakeholders ... -
Poetics of Empire: Literature and Political Culture at the Early Modern Ottoman Court
"Poetics of Empire: Literature and Political Culture at the Early Modern Ottoman Court" argues that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Ottoman scholars and statesmen produced a new literary language in order to express ... -
The Self and the State: Bureaucracy and the Ethics of Identity in the Twentieth Century Turkish Novel
“The Self and the State” examines the twentieth century Turkish novel and its use of bureaucracy as a critique of the modernization and secularization programs initiated by the Republic of Turkey’s first president, Mustafa ... -
Networks of Great Expectations: Palestinian Youth Activism in the Internet Age.
For more than a decade now, a growing variety of protests, mobilizations and movements have been initiated through the Internet. Particularly from 2011 and onwards, a rapid and global expansion of such movements has ... -
(Re)bordering Territory and Citizenship on the Greek-Turkish Borderland
For almost a century, the Greek-Turkish antagonism has been central to the construction of notions of national citizenship and national territory in their official historiographies, state policies and public view. In the ... -
Domestic Conquest: Land Reform and Bounded Rationality in the Middle East
This dissertation examines the rise and fall of projects for land reform - the redistribution of agricultural land from large landowners to those owning little or none - in the Middle East in the mid 20th century, focusing ... -
Ottoman Reflections on Gender, Class and Race in Victorian England: Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s Finten
Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan (1852–1937), who spent more than twenty years of his life in London and India, was the first Ottoman author who made India and the British Empire a frequently visited topic in his literary works. This ... -
Visions of Community: Literary Culture and Social Change among the Northern Kyrgyz, 1856-1924
This dissertation examines the transformations in the northern Kyrgyz society and culture between the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I explore how a deeply-held and territorially-oriented sense of collective ... -
Blue Dreams, Black Disillusions: Literary Market and Modern Authorship in the Late Ottoman Empire
Why would a successful young novelist write the story of a failed poet told from the point of view of a sympathetic narrator, and why would this failed protagonist then become a role model for the next generation of ...