Every two years, TARII awards the best U.S. doctoral dissertations on Iraq. The Donny George Youkhana Dissertation Prize (named in 2011) recognizes the best dissertation on ancient Iraq. A second award recognizes the best dissertation on modern or medieval Iraq. The competition is open to U.S. citizens at any university worldwide and any student at a U.S. university.
TARII is pleased to announce the 2021 Dissertation Prize Winners:
MODERN/MEDIEVAL DISSERTATION PRIZE • 2021
Dr. Pelle Olsen, “Between Work and School: Leisure and Modernity in Hashemite Baghdad, 1921-1958”
Abstract
The story of Iraq’s and Baghdad’s modern history and modernity can be, and has been, told in a number of different ways. “Between Work and School: Leisure and Modernity in Hashemite Baghdad, 1921-1958” examines modern Iraqi history through the lens of urban practices and institutions of leisure in Baghdad. Dr. Olsen shows that leisure both defined and expressed key aspects of Iraqi modernity and suggest that we can begin to map some of the uncharted aspects of modern Iraqi history and modernity through the new institutions, practices, discourses, and distractions of leisure that took up increasing space and time in the life Iraqi of Iraqi subjects.
His dissertation argues that leisure time in twentieth century Iraq became one of the many frontiers upon which the individual and citizen came into contact with, confronted, challenged, and interacted with new ideas about gender, sexuality, time, and productivity. In other words, he shows that it is possible to think of leisure as one of the domains in which different and competing ideals and visions of nation and temporality manifest themselves and in which social norms and gendered identities are both enforced, practiced, contested, and transgressed upon. At the same time, my dissertation highlights the multifunctional properties of leisure spaces and pays close attention not only to the porous boundaries between leisure and labor, but also to the forms of labor and exploitation that often remain hidden in studies and understandings of leisure. As such, in addition to investigating educational and extracurricular activities as structured leisure, labor is another form of structured time examined in this dissertation. Last but not least, this dissertation argues that several of the forms and institutions of leisure that emerged during the Hashemite period were, to varying degrees, both global, transnational, and local.
This dissertation examines leisure, and attempts to control it, in a number of different forms. The first two chapters examine how Iraqi students were disciplined in leisure. More specifically, Chapters 1 and 2 explore the emergence of extracurricular activities in missionary schools as an attempt to control and fill the leisure time of students. Chapters 3-5 interrogate the increasingly public and commercial spaces of leisure, such as cafés, cinemas, and nightclubs, that were less within the bounds of official and state control. By paying attention to these institutions, practices, and discourses, along with their transregional and transnational connections, his dissertation aims toward a portrayal of modern Iraqi history that includes the multitude of everyday practices and experiences left out by traditional political histories.
Biography
Pelle Valentin Olsen is a cultural and transnational historian of the modern Middle East who focuses on practices of leisure in twentieth-century Iraq, the Middle East’s multiple connections with the rest of the world, cultural production, and cinema. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow in Global Studies at Roskilde University. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2020. His work has appeared in Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Arab Studies Journal, Journal of Palestine Studies, and Regards.
THE DONNY GEORGE YOUKHANA DISSERTATION PRIZE • 2021
Dr. Anastasia Amrhein, “Divine Matter-Energy in Mesopotamia: Visualizing the Numinous in Political Context ca. Ninth-Sixth Centuries BCE”
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the conceptions and experiences of the divine in the socio-political context of the Neo-Assyrian empire through two medium-based case studies: clay, and the figurines and plaques molded or modeled from this substance, and NA4 materials (i.e., natural and artificial stones) that were carved into cylinder and stamp seals. Informed by new materialism, the close study of objects, and the careful scrutiny of the ancient Mesopotamian textual record, this dissertation argues for the innate divinity and agency of matter as independent of human ascription. Dr. Amrhein demonstrates that the entire universe was understood by the Mesopotamians as divine matter-energy—an ambiguous, mutable, partible material force that lacked innate or consistent visual form. Various minerals were thus tangible fragments of the greater divine that extended beyond the visible lived human world. Specific technological-cum-ritual human acts, however—including the articulation of iconic visual form—could fix, quicken, focus, or direct divine matter-energy to specific ends.
Clay was a ubiquitous material utilized by all social strata—it was the very stuff of (pro)creation, and thus social geo-political identity. Distinguishing between official and vernacular figurine traditions based on archaeological context, iconography, manufacture techniques, and textual evidence (or lack thereof), she argues that the clay-based magico-medical practices originated in the folk sphere by women were appropriated—along with female labor—by male scholar-priests in the service of the king. Nonetheless, vernacular figurines constituted resistances to imperial hegemony.
Dr. Amrhein interprets early Neo-Assyrian seals of light and dark soft local stones—deeply associated with the land of Assyria—as belonging to the landed aristocracy that came to be at odds with the imperial enterprise. Coterminously with imperial restructuring, colorful, brilliant quartzes from the edges of the human world—acquired by Assyrian force—became the preferred medium for signaling one’s loyalty to the crown. Differences in carving techniques and iconographies between the two groups of seals further evince shifting conceptions of the divine as it was encountered in these portable objects that served administrative and amuletic functions.
Biography
Anastasia Amrhein is an art historian, curator, and educator, whose work focuses on the ancient Middle East. She received her PhD in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College as well as a Guest Curator at the Cincinnati Art Museum, where she is co-curating an exhibition on ancient queenship. She has also worked on curatorial projects and lectured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Penn Museum, and most recently, NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, where she co-curated the exhibition "A Wonder to Behold: Craftsmanship and the Creation of Babylon's Ishtar Gate," and co-edited the eponymous catalogue and collection of essays.
