Thanks to TAARII’s support in 2005–2006, my research during that period resulted in three peer-reviewed articles and a doctoral dissertation on the modern Chaldeans, Iraq’s largest Christian minority. As a graduate student at the University of Michigan, being a TAARII fellow helped me research and publish the articles “Tomorrow They Write their Story: Chaldeans in America and the Transforming Narrative of Identities” in Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature, edited by Layla Al Maleh (Amsterdam-New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2009), pp. 395–420; “Chaldeans in America: The Shifting Spaces of an Iraqi Minority’s Discourses” in Journal of Associated Graduates in Near Eastern Studies(JAGNES) VI/2 (Spring 2006): 43–57; and “Fighting our Own Battles: Iraqi Chaldeans and the War on Terror” in Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade, edited by Nabeel Abraham, Sally Howell, and Andrew Shryock (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), pp. 126–50.
Support from TAARII helped me conduct fieldwork among the Chaldean and Assyrian communities in Detroit, Chicago, and the transitional countries of Jordan and Syria between 2006 and 2008. The contours of the project I had initially proposed to TAARII in 2005 shifted considerably as a result of this fieldwork and so did the trajectory of my research. Rather than concluding with the single publication I had proposed, the multi-disciplinary project became my doctoral dissertation, which I defended in 2008 under the title “The Politics of Minority: Chaldeans between Iraq and America.” This support in the initial stages of my research was also instrumental in taking my career as a scholar of Iraqi culture and literature further when I became a postgraduate fellow at the Program of Europe in the Middle East/the Middle East in Europe, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany, in 2009–2010 and later as an assistant professor of Arabic at Portland State University.
Although my research agenda has evolved and expanded in recent years, one conceptual framework that links all of my work is Iraqi modernity, with a strong emphasis on ethno-religious identities. My current research centers on post-2003 literary production in Iraq. My recent publications include “Unnatural Narratives and Transgressing the Normative Discourses of Iraqi History: Translating Murtadā Gzār’s Al-Sayyid Asghar Akbar,” Journal of Arabic Literature 44 (2013): 145–70; “Beyond the Trauma of War: Iraqi Literature Today,” Words Without Borders, April 2013 (http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/beyond-the-trauma-of-war-iraqi-literature-today); “Contempt: State Literati vs. Street Literati in Modern Iraq,” Journal of Arabic Literature 43/2–3 (2012): 372–408; and “Universal Shorthand: The Post 9/11 Decade and the War on Terror,” FikrunwaFann 95 (Art and Thought 95) (June 2011): 48–51.
