2019 US Fellows

Alger used his TARII fellowship to complete his research necessary for two chapters of his dissertation on the production of space in Baghdad during the monarchical and early republican period (1921 - 1963). Chapter One looks at cartographic and literary representations of twentieth-century Baghdad, while Chapter Two assesses how public health and physical education initiatives shaped urban space. Some research for these two chapters has already been conducted at archives in Greece, the United Kingdom, and the United States, but materials held by the AUB Archives allowed him to broaden the scope of his comparison to include regional linkages between centers of development expertise alongside the national and international.  Too often is Iraq presented as a country shaped either by currents emanating from Great Britain and the United States or by Iraqis reacting to them. Incorporating material from the American University of Beirut will challenge this dichotomous understanding of Iraqi development history, bringing questions of regional difference into the discussion of how Baghdad developed in the twentieth century.

Al-Shaibi’s project investigates the capture and transfer of Ba’th Party archives to the United States after the 1991 and 2003 wars in Iraq. He focuses on how both before and after the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq the American Department of Defense enlisted members of the Iraqi opposition to exhume from these archives evidence of Ba’thist human rights violations. These atrocity accounts were widely disseminated to scholars and the press between 1999-2006 as a call to action against Saddam Hussein and subsequently as evidence of the justice of 2003 war in Iraq. The metadata of these archives, which scholars use to locate documents in these collections now housed at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, are an artifact of these atrocities campaigns. Al-Shaibi’s research raises important questions about how contemporary knowledge production on Ba’thist Iraq is curated by the politics of going to war with Iraq.

With his TARII fellowship, Al-Shaibi researched and published a lead article in the 2019 Summer issue of the Middle East Report (MERIP), Weaponizing Iraq’s Archives, available here.

Using a series of Syriac monastic histories written in the hills north of Mosul in the early Islamic period (ca. CE 650-1000), Haines is writing a social history about rural life and spirituality in medieval Iraq. The project would contribute to Iraq studies by exploring the religious diversity of the region in the early centuries of Islam as well as the culture in rural areas of Iraq. Grounded in two sets of Syriac Christian literature written in the hills of Tur ‘Abdin in southeastern Turkey and in the hinterland of Mosul in northern Iraq, the study examines the history of minority religious communities who still play a significant role in Iraq and the Middle East today.  

With the TARII fellowship, Haines was able to examine material evidence from northern Iraq in the early Islamic period – both objects in common use, such as pottery and dishware, of which he was able to photograph nearly two dozen examples from the 9th and 10th century, and specialized goods, especially lamps and censers, which spanned the 7th to the 13th century.  

Marsh’s project seeks to understand how long-term change in the wider environment affected land and crop use and wider social change and trends in the Nippur region from the early Ubaid (~5550 BCE) to the early Islamic period (circa 800 CE). His project focused on one region, Nippur and its immediate environs, over the longue durée, to determine how land use, plant communities and water availability, determined through sediments and phytoliths (plant cell microfossils) and other microfossils, shaped human history around and within Nippur. He dated and analyzed sediments and silica microfossil data from within and around Nippur’s ancient waterway systems to provide a detailed understanding of the relationship between the natural environment and society over the period from the Ubaid (circa 5500 BCE) to the early Islamic period (circa 800 CE). This includes the identification of crops (e.g., barley, wheat, millet, rice, date) and other plants (e.g., reeds), including rare or now extinct plants (e.g., oak) in the region. The data will be integrated with other ongoing research in southern Iraq in order to understand land-use and water availability over time. The end result will be a detailed and long-term understanding of how land use and water resources around Nippur changed over the longue durée. This is one of the first studies to use microfossils to understand the ecology and economy of a major Mesopotamian city through periods of socio-political transformations.

These fellowships are funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs through a sub-grant from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.