2023 US Fellows

Alexander Kuehl, American University

Improvised Protection amid Imposed Illegality: Explaining Variation in the “Deportability” of Irregular Iraqi Asylum-Seeking Migrants in Germany

Millions of unauthorized (or “irregular”) migrants around the world face the constant threat of deportation. Many of these individuals were ‘made illegal’ after the host state rejected their (often valid) asylum claim. For many Iraqis unable to repatriate and in need of protection due to violence and persecution in their home country, this predicament is especially acute. Perplexingly, vulnerability to deportation – what De Genova labels as “deportability” – is not experienced equally among unauthorized migrants, even of the same national group. What explains this variation in ‘deportability’? Specifically, why do some failed asylum-seekers manage to remain in their host-territory, while other unauthorized migrants are compelled (through “voluntary” return) or forced (through deportation) to exit the respective country after receiving an order to leave? This project employs a subnational research design and cross-case explanatory analysis of three different communities within Germany that host unauthorized Iraqi migrants, or failed asylum-seekers. The qualitative research methodology draws on ethnographic observations and in-depth semi-structured interviews to test and refine a novel theory that centers on the role of the host civil society – and Iraqis themselves – in determining deportability outcomes. The dissertation promises to build a structural explanation of deportability and uncover policy-relevant findings critical to the long-term safety and integration of displaced Iraqis.

Nathaniel Moses, Harvard University

Rivers Undone: State, Subject, and Ecology in Late Ottoman Iraq

Moses’s dissertation charts the social and environmental history of the middle Tigris and Euphrates river basin in the long nineteenth century. He takes up the attempts of the late Ottoman state, European engineers, and local reformers to transform central Iraq into a nexus of commercial agricultural production via a series of connected reforms: especially the construction of hydraulic and transportation infrastructure, tribal sedentarization, and public health controls. Through archival research in Istanbul and Ankara’s Ottoman archives and Ottoman-era manuscript libraries, he plans to examine these capitalist reforms as processes mediated and interrupted by floods, drought, social contestation, and contrasting regimes of value such as those operating in the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala. The project conceptualizes both the intensity of Ottoman state formation and capital accumulation and the persistent unruliness of social and ecological life in the making of modern Iraq.

Jonathan Price, Brown University

Historical Memory and the Uses of the Past in the Neo-Assyrian Empire

In this project, Price will examine historical memory and the uses of the past in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (c. 911–609 BC) by spending two weeks conducting research in the cuneiform collection from ancient Iraq at the British Museum in London. This research is a key part of his dissertation, which focuses on how kings and their scholarly advisors sought to apply historical knowledge to contemporary situations. Viewed from this perspective, it is possible to detect different emphases between these two groups, with kings tending to treat the past as a benchmark to supersede, whereas their scholars treated it as a model for their ruler to follow. While at the museum, Price will focus his attention on nineteen clay tablets which highlight royal and scholarly interests in the past, drawn mostly from the vast Neo-Assyrian epistolary corpus along with select texts such as chronicles, royal inscriptions, and records from the famed Library of Ashurbanipal.