The 2019 TARII Dissertation Award

TARII is pleased to announce the winners of the 2019 Dissertation Award for research in medieval or modern Iraq!

After considerable review by an award committee and confirmation by the TARII Board, we are honored to recognize two scholars for their pivotal research in medieval or modern Iraq. You can find abstracts of their dissertations on the recipients page here.

يسر معهد تاري اعلان اسماء الفائزين بجائزة 2019، وهما دكتورة اليسا والتر والدكتور فيصل حسين اللذان فازا مناصفة بجائزة العراق الحديث او العصور الوسطى.

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Dr. Faisal Husain, “The Tigris-Euphrates Basin Under Early Modern Ottoman Rule, c. 1534-1830”

Dr. Husain is currently a residential fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study while working to revise his dissertation into a book manuscript.

Dr. Alissa Walter, “The Ba’th Party in Baghdad: State-Society Relations through Wars, Sanctions, and Authoritarian Rule, 1950-2003”

Dr. Walter is also revising her dissertation for publication including a new chapter entitled "Concrete Blast Walls and Neighborhood Councils: State-Society Relations in Baghdad after Saddam Hussein," which will focus on state-society relations from 2003-2010. She has plans to do additional fieldwork in Iraq and Jordan this summer to inform this new chapter.

A portion of her dissertation findings have been published:

The article "Sex Crimes and Punishments in Baghdad" appeared in POMEPS 35, Religion, Violence, and the State in Iraq (2019).

"Petitioning Saddam: Voices from the Iraqi Archives" appeared as a chapter in an edited volume entitled Truth, Silence, and Violence in Emerging States: Histories of the Unspoken, edited by Aidan Russell (Routledge 2018)

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TARII would like to thank everyone for the amazing nominations submitted for this year’s prize. We are consistently encouraged and supportive of all of the great research being done in and on Iraq.

TAARII Awards Best Dissertation on Medieval/Modern Iraq

TAARII is pleased to announce the recipient of its bi-annual awards for the best U.S. doctoral dissertations on Iraq.

TAARII’s prize for the best dissertation on modern or medieval Iraq was awarded to Dr. Hilary Falb Kalisman, of the University of California, Berkeley, for her dissertation entitled: “Schooling the State: Educators in Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan, c. 1890–c. 1960.”

In her dissertation, Kalisman sheds light on the life trajectories of educators, in particular their relationship to the state and society, and their roles in the social, intellectual, and political life of 1890–1960. In recent years, more studies have emerged that are truly comparative and interested in connections and encounters. Kalisman’s thesis is a great example of this as she investigates education in three British mandate countries and how these educators navigated the British colonial network as they developed into a mobile and self-conscious class. This dissertation shifts our understanding of education and nationalism by exploring how these educators were shaped by regional connections. Additionally, Kalisman examines the continuities of the Ottoman and British education and school policies. She dismantles the binaries of the British vs. Ottoman and modernity vs. tradition by focusing on the persistence of the Ottoman legacy into the Mandate period. Finally, Kalisman’s study is an important contribution to the history of education in these countries, providing a rich historical narrative of the development of education in the region, the relationship between education and political culture, and the position of educators within the state and society during the late 19th century and the early 20th century, as well as the impact of mass education and standardization in the 1940s and 1950s.

TAARII will hold its next dissertation award competition in 2017 for dissertations defended during the 2015–2016 and 2016–2017 academic years. Submissions are invited from any discipline for the study of any time period. The competitions are open to U.S. citizens at any university worldwide and any student at a U.S. university. The amount of each award is $1,500.

TAARII Awards Best Dissertation on Ancient Iraq

TAARII is pleased to announce the recipient of its bi-annual awards for the best U.S. doctoral dissertations on Iraq.

The Donny George Youkhana Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation on ancient Iraq was awarded to Dr. Kiersten Ashley Neumann of the University of California, Berkeley, for her dissertation entitled: “Resurrected and Reevaluated: The Neo-Assyrian Temple as a Ritualized and Ritualizing Built Environment.”

Neumann’s lengthy dissertation is a deep investigation into the ritual aspects of the Neo-Assyrian temple, and follows a new wave of highly theoretical approaches to the built environment and materiality in the politico-religious aspects of the Mesopotamian record. Her work is interdisciplinary, expertly combining art historical, anthropological, philological, and archaeological approaches, thereby engaging with all available source material to provide a thorough presentation of the construction and use of Assyrian temples. Neumann successfully brings these buildings to life as places that, with their shiny, glazed, painted, and metallic surfaces, strange carved creatures, and exotic smells were indeed wondrous ritualized spaces for their intended audience to experience.

TAARII will hold its next dissertation award competition in 2017 for dissertations defended during the 2015–2016 and 2016–2017 academic years. Submissions are invited from any discipline for the study of any time period. The competitions are open to U.S. citizens at any university worldwide and any student at a U.S. university. The amount of each award is $1,500.