US Research Fellowships for 2015: Elizabeth Rauh

Elizabeth Rauh, History of Art, University of Michigan, received a TAARII US Research Fellowship for 2015 for her project Weapons of Creation: Art Practice and Production in the Contemporary Middle East.

Elizabeth Rauh

Elizabeth Rauh’s dissertation project examines how artists in the contemporary Middle East harness material violence into productive and creative art practices, which often interrogate historical art methods and materials. Rather than historicize modern art in the Arab World and Iran as derivative or “hybrid” styles and aesthetics, Rauh will explore the material and visual elements of art objects through close formal analysis to unpack the artistic processes of modernity in the region. One of her primary case studies is Iraqi artist Hanaa Malallah (b. 1958). Malallah’s monochromatic paintings (1980s–today) transform the destructive process of burning into an additive process on the canvas plane, thus revealing and reveling in the destructive aspects of art modernism and its colonial imbrications. Malallah’s art career attests to the dynamic Baghdad art scene while reflecting that art world’s dispersal due to ongoing warfare. Rauh will study Malallah’s artistic method collaboratively with the artist in London, while gathering vital information from her personal documents as well as herself as a living archive of the Iraqi art community and Institute of Fine Arts operating under Saddam Hussein and later foreign invasions. Rauh’s project will contribute to scholarship on Iraqi art history by locating art objects and practices in their specific regional contexts, while simultaneously positioning these art works as catalysts that complicate and upend discourses and interpretations of modern art on a global scale.

US Research Fellowships for 2015: Clarence Moore

Clarence Moore, Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, received a TAARII US Research Fellowship for 2015 for his project Tribal Alliance Behavior in Iraq.

Clarence Moore

Clarence Moore’s dissertation asks: under what conditions does violence against civilians reduce popular support for violent actors and their causes? In addition to asking how violence influences support for outcomes such as religious government and democracy, Moore ties political orientations to tribal alliance behavior in Iraq. He proposes that because tribal leaders resist control by outsiders and draw their authority from popular support, tribal alliance behavior is a process based on sectarian geography, coercive violence by insurgents, and civilians’ and tribal leaders’ reactions to that violence. Though academics and policy analysts agree that many Sunni Iraqi tribes had turned against militants by 2007, there is currently no explanation of why some tribes switched sides and others did not. To answer this question, Moore will complete fieldwork in Amman, Jordan. He will use semi-structured interviews and surveys conducted with Iraqi refugees to develop a typology of violence and sort regions of Iraq according to the type and scale of violence they experienced. This information will allow him to assess the relationship between location, violence, and alliance behavior.

US Research Fellowships for 2015: Alissa Walter

Alissa Walter, History, Georgetown University, received a TAARII US Research Fellowship for 2015 for her project Ba‘thist Baghdad: A History of Non-Elite City Life under Authoritarianism, Wars, and Sanctions.

Alissa Walter

Alissa Walter’s dissertation presents a history of Baghdad’s lower classes as they experienced regime changes, urbanization, authoritarian governance, wars, and sanctions in post-colonial Iraq, with a focus on the Ba‘thist period (1968–2003). Centering her study on Baghdad provides insights into how government, party, and society interacted in the center of the capital city. Drawing on archival research in England and France (and other non-TAARII funded research sites), Walter will study the transformations of neighborhood social institutions, including black markets, smuggling rings, charitable organizations, welfare systems, religious movements, and neighborhood committees during the tumultuous years of the Ba‘th regime. Her conclusions about the social transformations of Baghdad under Ba‘th Party rule will point to the long-term factors that contributed to violent societal breakdown and sectarianism post-2003. Her research project is positioned to provide valuable insights to historians to understand everyday life under the Ba‘th regime as well as to political scientists who are concerned with contemporary developments in Iraq.

US Research Fellowships for 2015: John Caleb Howard

Jon Caleb Howard, Near Eastern Studies, Johns Hopkins University, received a TAARII US Research Fellowship for 2015 for his project The Mechanics of Scribal Production of Neo-Assyrian Royal Inscriptions.

John Caleb Howard

The goal of Jon Caleb Howard’s project is to reconstruct the process of scribal production of the royal inscriptions of Ashurnasirpal II in the Northwest Palace at Kalḫu. Howard intends to do this by studying variation between manuscripts of the Standard Inscription and the inscription that appears on colossi and on the throne-base, within the architectural and artistic context of the Northwest Palace. The heart of his project is the compilation of a score of these two compositions based on collation and legible photographs of the reliefs, so that variation between manuscripts may be observed, cataloged, and interpreted. Since there remain some reliefs and sculpture from the Northwest Palace that do not have published legible photographs, Howard will visit collections in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Denmark where they are on display in order to collate and photograph them.

Fellow Update: Adeed Dawisha (2006 US TAARII Fellow)

After the removal of Saddam Hussein, and the possibility of a new political order in the horizon after 2003, I thought of writing a book that would integrate the new political arrangements into the political history of Iraq since the crowning of King Faisal I in 1921.

I began my research in early 2004, and after two years I had accumulated enough data to begin writing. The summer of 2006 was ideal, and as someone who had written a number of books, I knew that the first two or three chapters were pivotal in setting the tone and rhythm of the whole writing project.

The TAARII grant allowed me to devote all of the summer of 2006 to writing. It freed me from having to teach summer school, and the end result was that by September 2006, I had completed the first three chapters of the book Iraq: A Political History from Independence to Occupation. The book was published in early 2009 by Princeton University Press, and I am happy to say it received good reviews. It was reprinted three times, and a paperback edition was published in 2011.

Would I have been able to write the book without TAARII’s help? Absolutely. But the grant undoubtedly supplied a crucial kick-start that made the whole endeavor easier and certainly shorter, and I am very grateful to TAARII for that.

Fellow Update: Jill Goldenziel (2010 US TAARII Fellow)

I am immensely grateful to have received a TAARII grant, which enabled me to complete research for my forthcoming book on refugees and U.S. foreign policy. A related article, “Regulating Human Rights: International Organizations, Flexible Standards, and International Refugee Law,” was recently published in the Chicago Journal of International Law. The article explains how international organizations can improve human rights outcomes under conditions where treaty regimes have failed. By using their authority to create more flexible standards than those contained in international human rights law, facilitating linkage of human rights practices to economic incentives, and providing valuable legal cover for state actions, international organizations may succeed in getting even rogue states to improve their human rights practices. I develop this argument in the context of the U.N. Refugee Agency’s management of the post-2003 Iraqi refugee crisis in Jordan and Syria. I also present examples of how international organizations might serve as regulators of human rights in other contexts.

Read the entire article here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2243208

You can learn more about Dr. Goldenziel here: scholar.harvard.edu/jill

Fellow Update: Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt (2011 US TAARII Fellow)

I am very grateful for the research opportunities that the TAARII fellowship provided. My Ph.D. dissertation, “The End of the Concessionary Regime: Oil and American Power in Iraq, 1958–1972” (Stanford University, 2011), would not have been possible without the generous funding provided by TAARII. The TAARII fellowship allowed me to travel to the British Petroleum archive at Warwick University in Coventry England, and then on to the American University in Beirut where I conducted research on manuscripts and memoirs of Iraqi exiles who settled in Beirut in the 1970s.

These resources were invaluable to my dissertation research as they offered insight into the processes institution building in Iraq that allowed for the complete nationalization of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) at a relatively early date (1972–75).

Since completing my dissertation, I’ve begun teaching U.S. and Middle East History at the University of California, Merced. Teaching offers its own rewards and challenges, and I’ve particularly enjoyed having the opportunity to teach the history of Iraq. Undergraduate students tend to come into the class with a great many preconceived notions about history of Iraq, many of which are problematic, and I’m honored to have the opportunity to offer a deeper and more realistic understanding of modern Iraqi history.

I’ve also been working on publishing my research. My article, “Embracing Regime Change: US Foreign Policy and the 1963 Coup in Iraq” was recently accepted for publication by the editors of Diplomatic History and will be forthcoming in 2014. The article expands on research that I began while working on my dissertation, but includes many additional sources that I came across while a TAARII fellow. My article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the 1963 coup and the question of U.S. involvement. Those interested in this subject might want to also consult several pieces of recent scholarship including: Weldon Matthews, “The Kennedy Administration, Counterinsurgency, and Iraq’s First Ba‘thist Regime,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43, no. 4 (2011): 635–53; Johan Franzén, Red Star over Iraq: Iraqi Communism Before Saddam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Eric Jacobsen, “A Coincidence of Interests: Kennedy, U.S. Assistance, and the 1963 Iraqi Ba’th Regime,” Diplomatic History 37:5 (May 2013): 1029–59. I am also currently revising my dissertation for publication by incorporating new sources, reorganizing the chapter presentation, and situating the analysis of U.S.-Iraqi relations in the 1958–1972 period within a broader historical context.

I would be very happy to talk with interested scholars about my research, the TARRII fellowship, or recent developments in the field. I can be reached at bwolfe-hunnicutt@ucmerced.edu.

Fellow Update: Dina Khoury (2007 & 2008 US TAARII Fellow)

TAARII funded two research trips to Jordan (2007) and Syria (2009) to conduct interviews with Iraqi veterans of the Iran-Iraq and the First Gulf wars. These interviews formed part of the research for my book, Iraq in Wartime, Soldiering, Martyrdom and Remembrance (Cambridge University Press, 2013). In Amman, TAARII’s Senior Research Fellow, Lucine Taminian, was very helpful in providing contacts and facilitating my research. TAARII runs the Iraqi Oral History Project, which aims at collecting the testimonies of Iraqis who have lived through the momentous events of the twentieth century. Lucine plays an important part in that project and she was ready with advice as to what to expect. The interviews I conducted were crucial for the argument I made in the book and in giving me an understanding of the centrality of the Iraq-Iran War in shaping the sensibility of a whole generation in Iraq. It also allowed me to understand the impact of violence on the lives of Iraqis in a manner that would have been difficult to comprehend had I not had a chance to conduct these interviews. Please check this link for more on the book and a sample interview: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/10106/new-texts-out-now_dina-rizk-khoury-iraq-in-wartime

Fellow Update: Amy Gansell (2012 US TAARII Fellow)

On March 6, 2013, Amy Gansell gave a lecture entitled, “Concepts of Feminine Beauty and Adornment in Ancient Mesopotamia Illuminated through Near Eastern Cultural Practices of the Twentieth-century to the Present,” for the Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute. Professor Gansell was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Pratt’s History of Art and Design department. Her talk showed images of her project on queenly adornment. A video of her lecture is available here.

Fellow Update: Hilary Falb (2012 US TAARII Fellow)

Hilary Falb has just published an article on education in Iraq and Palestine in Volume 3, No 2, 2013 of the Kufa Review. It is a special issue on education in Iraq sponsored by the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. Click here to view the issue.

“Pedagogical Paradox: Education and Internalization in the Mandates for Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq)”

Abstract: Education in the Middle East during the interwar period offers a window into international educational trends as well as the nuanced ways colonial educational policies and local endeavors
shaped which pedagogical methods, tactics, subjects and standards became accepted on a global scale. Schooling in the Mandate for Palestine and in the Kingdom of Iraq during the late
1930s demonstrates two different ways in which educational policies become international. On the one hand, policies can be “de-nationalized” or separated from the nation which originated these methods. Those who experience this education believe it to be universally valid. On the other hand, countries developing their own systems of public education may pick and choose policies from several international sources and then combine them, creating a uniquely national system of education.